The danger of this position was, and is, that it undermines the universality of the universe of discourse that is the essence of all history as a scholarly and intellectual discipline, a Wissenschaft in both the German and the narrower English sense.13 It also undermines what both the ancients and the moderns had in common, namely the belief that historians’ investigations, by means of generally accepted rules of logic and evidence, distinguish between fact and fiction, between what can be established and what cannot, what is the case and what we would like to be so. But this has become increasingly dangerous. Political pressures on history, by old and new states and regimes, identity groups, and forces long concealed under the frozen ice-cap of the Cold War, are greater than ever before in my lifetime, and modern media society has given the past unprecedented prominence and marketing potential. More history than ever is today being revised or invented by people who do not want the real past, but only a past that suits their purpose. Today is the great age of historical mythology. The defence of history by its professionals is today more urgent in politics than ever. We are needed.
We also have much to do. While the actual affairs of humanity are now conducted mainly by the criteria of problem-solving technologists, to which it is almost irrelevant, history has become more central to our understanding of the world than ever before. Quietly, amid the arguments about the objective existence of the past, historical change has become a central component of the natural sciences, from cosmogony to revived Darwinism. Indeed, through molecular and evolutionary biology, palaeontology and archaeology human history itself is being transformed. It has been reinserted into the framework of global, indeed of cosmic, evolution. DNA has revolutionized it. Thus we now know how extraordinarily young homo sapiens is as a species. We left Africa 100,000 years ago. The whole of what is usually described as ‘history’ since the invention of agriculture and cities consists of hardly more than 400 human generations or 10,000 years, a blink of the eye in geological time. Given the dramatic acceleration of the pace of humanity’s control over nature in this brief period, especially in the last ten or twenty generations, the whole of history so far can be seen to be something like an explosion of our species, a sort of bio-social supernova, into an unknown future. Let us hope it is not a catastrophic one. In the meanwhile, and for the first time, we have an adequate framework for a genuinely global history, and one restored to its proper central place, neither within the humanities nor the natural and mathematical sciences, nor separated from them, but essential to both. I wish I were young enough to take part in writing it.
Still, it was good to be a historian even in my generation. Above all, it was enjoyable. In a conversation on his intellectual development my friend, the late Pierre Bourdieu, once said:
I see intellectual life as something closer to the artist’s life than to the routine of the academy…Of all the forms of intellectual work, the trade of sociologist is without doubt the one the practice of which has given me happiness, in every sense of the word.14
Substitute ‘historian’ for sociologist, and I say amen to that.
18
In the Global Village
How can the autobiographer who has been a lifelong academic and author write about his professional life? What happens in writing occurs essentially in solitude on screens or pieces of paper. When writers are engaged in any other action, they are not writing, though they may be accumulating material for it. This is true even of the literary activity of men (or women) of action, such as Julius Caesar. There is plenty to be said about conquering Gaul, and, as secondary schoolboys used to know, Caesar said it very well, but there is little to be said about the process of writing On the Gallic War except, presumably, that the great Julius dictated it to some slave secretary in the intervals of doing more important things.
Again, academics spend most of their working time on the routines of teaching, research, meetings and examining. These are unadventurous and lacking in unpredictability by the standards of more highprofile living. They spend much of their leisure time in the society of other academics, a species which, however interesting as individuals, is not thrilling company en masse. Half a century ago it could be plausibly argued that an assembly of historians, such as could be seen at the annual meetings of their societies, was even less distinguishable from an assembly of insurance company executives than collections of other university teachers, but since the generation of 1968 has entered the academy, this may no longer be so.
As for students, en masse they are certainly more interesting for anyone who likes being a teacher, but mainly by virtue of their youth and all the things that go with it, such as enthusiasm, passion, hope, ignorance and immaturity, rather than because much is to be expected by facing crowds of them. Admittedly, this is not strictly true of the two institutions in which I spent most of my teaching career, Birkbeck College in the University of London and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research (now New School University) in New York. Both, being somewhat anomalous parts of academia, have singular student bodies. Birkbeck, the successor of the London Mechanics’ Institution of 1825, remains an evening college, teaching those who earn their living during the day. One of the reasons why I spent my entire British career there, was the pleasure of teaching extraordinarily motivated men and women, usually older and hence more mature than the normal post-school student. They faced their teachers weekly with the acid test of the profession: how to keep a bunch of people interested in what is being said to them between eight and nine p.m., knowing that they have come to college after a full day’s work, swallowed a quick meal in the cafeteria, sat through one or two earlier lectures, and face maybe an hour’s journey home after I get through. Birkbeck was a good school, not least of learning how to communicate.
The peculiarity of the New School’s Graduate Faculty was its combination of heterodoxy and internationalism. The New School for Social Research itself had been founded after the Great War by educational and ideological and politically radical reformers rebelling against what they regarded as the tyranny of examinations. It found first-class people, of whom there was no shortage in New York City, to teach anything for which there was a demand, from classical philosophy to yoga. The Graduate Faculty had been set up in 1933 to provide for the academic refugees from Hitler’s Germany, followed by those from the rest of occupied Europe. It is on record as the first academic institution to give lectures on jazz and almost certainly the first to give a seminar on structuralism (by Claude Levi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson), both during the Second World War. Its reputation for heterodoxy and radicalism attracted unusual students from the USA, and even more interesting and able ones from western and Latin American countries. In the 1980s it developed a relationship with the countries about to shake off their communist regimes. The Poles, Russians, Bulgarians and Chinese joined the Brazilians, Spaniards and Turks in our classes. I once counted twenty nationalities in my own. Since they knew more about their own countries and special fields than I did, I learned at least as much from them as they did from me. There was almost certainly no more varied and stimulating a body of students anywhere.
Communication is the essence both of teaching and of writing. Fortunate the author who likes both, for it rescues him or her from the desert island on which we usually sit, writing messages for unknown recipients in unknown destinations to be launched across the oceans in bottles shaped like books. But the teacher–author speaks directly to the potential readers. Lecturing was probably still the major form of teaching in my academic generation, and in many ways lecturers relate to any room full of students as actors relate to the faces before them in the theatre except that their house lights don’t go out. We are both performers, they are what we perform for. There is nothing like lecturing to tell us when we are losing the attention of the audience. Nevertheless, the lecturer’s task is harder, for he or she expects the audience to carry away a load of specific information and ideas which they should remember and digest, and not only
the emotional satisfaction of the occasion. Even a good lecturer communicates only what radiates from any other performer with stage presence, namely the projection of a personality, a temperament, an image, a mind at work – and, with a bit of luck, he or she may strike a corresponding spark in the imagination of some people out there. It is through class discussion that we establish whether we have actually communicated what we wanted to. That is one reason why, during my whole career as a university teacher, I preferred general to specialist courses. Indeed, my books on general historical subjects either grew out of student lectures or, after more specialized origins, were tested in student lectures.
The satisfaction of a teacher’s job comes essentially from relations with individuals, but these form only a small part of the very large body of men and women with notebooks in lecture theatres, the vast pile of examination scripts or term papers that fill a university teacher’s working life in the course of his or her career. And even they are part of a pretty unchanging routine. Experienced from inside, a research seminar may be unforgettable, but seen from the outside it merely looks like – and I am thinking of my own at the Institute of Historical Research in London in the 1970s and 1980 – a couple of dozen people in the late afternoon, surrounded by books, sitting along a table discussing a paper read by one of them or an outside visitor, and then going a couple of hundred yards to a pub for a drink or two. Considered as a potential movie, it is not even art-house material.
In memory the academic autobiographer’s years stretch back like the wagons on those endless freight-trains, observed from some hill as they carry containers across the American landscape. Seen in retrospect, the succession of trucks is less interesting than the changing territory through which they pass. In my case they have passed through cities and campuses in three continents – four, if the Americas count as two – though before retirement mostly on relatively brief visits, except for a semester as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1967) and a half-year’s teaching and research in Latin America (1971), both with my family. However, a peripatetic life with small children is not ideal for academics, and eventually their schooling made it impossible. I never tested the anti-communism of the US authorities by accepting a permanent appointment in their country. If I was tempted by visiting spells at one or another of the great North American universities, Marlene’s veto stood in the way: small-town academic life was not for her. Only one such place broke her resistance, the Getty Center – then still at Santa Monica – the nearest thing to paradise for scholars, where we spent some time in 1989. However, Los Angeles can hardly be regarded as the sticks. I too had been immunized against the campus life by my own brief experience in the summer quarter at Stanford, then as now a superb university, one of the half-dozen finest in the world, but embedded in Palo Alto, sensationally boring as a community for living in. For many years afterwards I could not even bring myself to revisit this nowhere space of empty streets in which cars visited each others’ owners in beautiful homes.
The ideal arrangement for both of us was a stable metropolitan base varied by the increasingly available academic trips abroad, which the revolution in air transport made easy from the 1960s. They have taken us from Finland to Naples, from Canada to Peru, from Japan to Brazil. Our times have added the roving professor to the other profession which likes to recall the pleasures, embarrassments and absurdities of a life of changing places, but which still remains essentially the same, namely the foreign correspondent. I have had the luck to teach and live for most of my professional life in or near the centre of the two major cultural cities of the late twentieth-century world: within a stone’s throw of the British Museum in one, in a Greenwich Village office above Bradley’s, the quintessential jazz location of Manhattan, in the other. (Alas, Bradley’s folded in 1996 and New York has not been the same for me since.)
Nevertheless, careers and freight-trains do not roll across the land at an absolutely steady rate. The war had delayed the start of my own career, and the Cold War had slowed it down considerably. It continued in the doldrums, but by the middle 1960s, when other offers in Britain and abroad began to come in, this was so eccentric as to be widely regarded as scandalous. 1 Still, I had begun to publish books only in my forties, and by the time I could actually call myself ‘Professor’ in Britain, I was in my middle fifties, a time of life when most professionals have got as far as they, and the world, expects them to get in their career. At that stage for most of us the promise is in the past, and so is such achievement as it has produced. Professionally speaking, people in this position are left to face half a lifetime of endless tomorrows no better than today, apart from the gowns and ribbons – professional and maybe public honours – which (at least in the humanities) usually signify that the honorand’s future will add nothing to his or her past, except the slow decline of age. World war and Cold War saved me from all this. By an unexpected twist of fortune, they prolonged the period of youth and promise into middle age. At the same time remarriage and children gave a new start to my private life.
In fact, only the war had genuinely delayed my career – but probably no more than that of most men in my age group. (In Britain it had actually advanced the prospects of women graduates.) The Cold War of the 1950s blocked jobs and publishers’ contracts, but ‘on the street’, as the fin-de-siècle phrase has it, that is to say among the working historians, my reputation was serious from the start, certainly in the unofficial world of the younger historians. I was clearly a rising star in the rather narrower community of the Marxist ones.
Pride and intellectual vanity made me worry whether my reputation was carried only by the sympathies of the left, or rested only on the relative scarcity of Marxists to fill the niche which, since the Second World War, even conventional history reserved for this version of a recognized ‘opposition’. It is not that I minded then or mind now being identified as ‘Hobsbawm the Marxist historian’, the label which I still carry round my neck to this day, like the decanters circulating after dinner in combination rooms to prevent dons from confusing their port with their sherry. Young historians need to have their attention drawn to the materialist interpretation of history as much, perhaps even more, today, when even left-wing academic fashions dismiss it as in the days when it was being damned as totalitarian propaganda. After all, I have been trying to persuade people for over half a century that there is more to Marxist history than they have hitherto thought, and if the association of one historian’s name with it helps to do so, so much the better. What troubled my vanity was rather the fear of a mere ghetto reputation, such as that from which figures prominent inside another characteristic twentieth-century cultural ghetto, the Roman Catholic community in Britain, have so often found it difficult, even impossible, to escape. G. K. Chesterton, the dimensions of whose talent have been concealed from non-Catholics by the very closeness of his association with the Church, is a good example. (No British writer would dream of thinking about him like Italo Calvino who once said it was one of his ambitions to become ‘the Chesterton of the Communists’.) Getting good reviews from friendly critics was not the problem. The test of success was to get them from the neutral and hostile ones.
From about 1960 on it became increasingly evident that I was getting beyond a ghetto reputation. My first book, Primitive Rebels (1959), was well received in the USA, both among the historians and the social scientists. Within a few years it had been translated into German, French and Italian. My second book, The Age of Revolution 1789– 1848 (1962), aimed at a broader public, was a success. At least it impressed an established literary agent, the bulky, white-haired and moustached bon vivant David Higham, enough to ask me whether I wanted to join his stable and to offer me periodic lunches at his window table in the Etoile restaurant in Charlotte Street. As I write this both the Etoile (with much the same menu) and the table are still there, under the supervision of another protector of agents and authors, Elena, whose reputation as the queen mother of lite
rary restaurants had been acquired earlier in Soho, and I am still under the wing of old Higham’s successor in the firm still named after him, my friend Bruce Hunter. History may move at the speed of a missile, but some continuities remain. Since The Age of Revolution was part of an international co-production series organized by George Weidenfeld, it would have been translated very quickly anyway, whatever its merits. Nevertheless the seven translations and foreign editions that appeared in the 1960s were helpful, and the book was well received everywhere. I later discovered that a notoriously poor Spanish translation in 1964 was welcomed by the rapidly growing anti-Franco movement in the Spanish universities, since, unlike most Marxist publications, it was legally available.
I published a good deal in the 1960s: a collection of earlier pieces on the history of labour (Labouring Men, 1964), a text on British economic history since the eighteenth century (Industry and Empire , 1968), a small study of the myth and reality of the world’s Robin Hoods, written in Wales as the Russians put an end to the Prague Spring ( Bandits, 1969), and in the same year, jointly with my friend George Rudé, a rather larger research monograph on the English farm-labourers’ rising of 1830 (Captain Swing, 1969). By 1971 when I finally got the official professorial title in the University of London, I was already entering the zone of academies (at least in the USA) and honorary degrees (at least in Sweden).
So by the 1970s I was an academically, if not politically, respectable and recognized figure. That decade reinforced this situation. My membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain was by then seen as little more than the personal peculiarity of a well-known historian, one of that new species the jet-plane academic. Only America refused to forget about Hobsbawm the subversive, for, until the abrogation of the Smith Act in the late 1980s, I remained ineligible for a visa to enter the USA and required a ‘waiver’ of this ineligibility every time I went there, which was more or less every year. I was a founder and active member of the editorial board of one of the most prestigious English-language historical journals, a member of the councils and committees of learned historical societies. Seminars and graduate courses in London, doctoral students, national and international, kept the new professor busy. The invitations to lectures and appointments elsewhere continued and multiplied. In my last year at Birkbeck I was simultaneously attached to establishments in London, Paris (at the Collège de France and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) and the USA (as ‘Professor-at-large’ of Cornell University). It was all the more enjoyable, even if slightly absurd, since this take-off in my professional fortunes was something I had neither looked for nor expected. One way or another, we had a splendid, if occasionally surrealist, time in the 1970s, not least (with a young family) in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru and (without family) in Japan. It is not every academic wife who finds herself travelling thirty miles with small children and recorders on a chicken-filled bus in the Peruvian central Sierra to a joint music lesson with the children of a British anthropologist, while her husband, very very slowly – for the buildings are above 4,000 metres – inspects the records of a recently nationalized hacienda shortly to go to the country’s newly established Agrarian Archive.
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 37
