Perhaps this explains why, though producing learned articles, I wrote fewer academic books in this decade – effectively only The Age of Capital (1974), which made me aware that, without having meant to, I was engaged in writing a wildly ambitious general history of the nineteenth century. Actually much of the most intensive work I did during that decade, planning and writing for an equally ambitious History of Marxism, which was published by Einaudi in Turin in 1978–82, never reached the public entirely in languages other than Italian, since the public interest in these matters dropped precipitately at the end of the 1970s. However, in the 1980s my production speeded up again, largely thanks to the wonderful conditions available in New York and Los Angeles. I published a new collection of papers on labour history (Worlds of Labour, in the USA Workers) in 1984, the third volume on the nineteenth century in 1987 (The Age of Empire 1875– 1914), and two books based on invited lectures, Nations and Nationalism Since the 1780s (what other subject was there to lecture on in Belfast in 1985?) and Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution, both in 1990. I also co-edited and contributed to a volume based on a Past & Present conference I had organized a few years earlier, and which proved to be unusually influential: The Invention of Tradition (1983). My image as I went into my eighth decade was that of an eccentric elderly grandee of the historical profession, who happened to insist that he was a Marxist, but who continued in full production.
Indeed, the history of the twentieth century I wrote in the happy conditions of the New School (where I had been teaching for a semester a year since 1984), The Age of Extremes 1914–1991 (1994), was my most successful book, both in sales and critical reception. It was well received across the entire ideological spectrum of the globe – with the single exception of France – winning prizes in Canada as well as Taiwan, being translated both into Hebrew and Arabic, into Taiwan and Mainland Mandarin, into Croatian and Serbian editions of what my generation still thinks of as the Serbo-Croat language, and into both Albanian and Macedonian. By the second year of the new century it had been or was about to be published in thirty-seven languages.
And yet, in a field as steeped in politics, its own and the world’s, as the writing of history, it would be quite unrealistic to separate the two. Much as someone in my position resented being placed into a Marxist ghetto, my reputation as a historian (and certainly in the 1960s and 1970s my sales) undoubtedly benefited from my reputation as a Marxist. Paradoxically, it was in the world of ‘really existing socialism’ that my books were not published, outside Hungary and Slovenia. The local theologians did not know what to do about a historian who could not be published as an unbeliever (‘not of course, a marxist, but worth consulting in certain respects’), nor as a Marxist, since the only ‘marxist interpretation’ they recognized was a restatement of the officially recognized orthodoxy.
In the West, and even more in what was then called the Third World, the 1960s were a good time for my kind of history, or more exactly, for the alliance of historical modernizers whose fortunes I have discussed in the last chapter. Consider the three-volume Economic Historyof Britain which Penguin Books commissioned at that time, on the advice of Jack (later Sir John) Plumb, perhaps no longer the young radical of 1930s Cambridge, but not without memories of that era: the authors were M. M. Postan, Christopher Hill and myself. Marxists, no longer in the ghetto unless they wanted to be, were, for the time being, part of the historical mainstream. At the same time a new politico-intellectual left was emerging in the universities and schools of Europe and the USA, which actively sought out people with radical credentials. That is why E. P. Thompson’s marvellous Making of the English Working Class triumphed in the middle sixties, lifting its author, deservedly but to everyone’s surprise, to international fame practically overnight. For a while older teachers complained that the students read virtually no other book. I had neither Edward’s genius and charisma nor his sales, but I also wrote on the subjects, and with the sentiments, which attracted radicalized young student readers.
Nowhere were scholarship and politics more closely linked than in the so-called Third World, where, of course, Marxism, being anti-imperialist, was not just the label for a small academic minority, but the prevailing ideology among the younger intellectuals. Brazil may serve as an example. Even during the military regime (1964–85) which had forced out of public life virtually everyone known to have associations with the left who was not in jail or driven into emigration, people like me were consulted on the staffing of a new university. And, indeed, invited to lecture, as I was in 1975 at a vaguely defined conference on ‘History and Society’ at the new university about which I had been consulted, whose student body – perhaps not surprisingly – was passionately hostile to the regime. This was no accident. The press, which devoted quite disproportionate space to a provincial academic occasion, though otherwise approximate (the Estado de São Paulo described me as ‘Irish by birth’), went out of its way to stress my ‘marxist formation’. In fact, as I was told by friendly journalists, by the middle seventies the regime was beginning to relax a little, and the entire Campinas conference was part of an operation to test how much liberalization it was willing to tolerate. What more effective test than to announce the invitation of a known Marxist, and one whose non-academic ideas were likely to be loudly applauded by the students – as indeed they were2 – and to give plenty of publicity to the occasion? This was a characteristic example of the admirable Brazilian combination of civic courage and intelligence, never accepting the dictatorship, never ceasing to press just beyond the limits of its tolerance. True the Brazilian generals were not quite so murderous as some others in Latin America but the regime was bloodstained enough, and the risks of jail and torture were real. As it happens, the opposition had calculated right: the regime was ready to cede.
It is perhaps no surprise that I may have subsequently benefited as a writer from my minimal and unconscious part in the struggle against the Brazilian military dictatorship. And indeed from the extraordinary fact, not commonly noticed by western liberals, that between 1960 and the mid-1980s, what the USA called ‘the free world’ passed through the most widespread phase of non-democratic government since the fall of fascism, typically in the form of military regimes. Intellectuals, and certainly students, were heavily in opposition to these, though sometimes silenced by sheer terror, whether in Greece, Spain, Turkey, among the usual suspects in Latin America, or in countries such as South Korea. Making available and reading oppositional literature was the obvious first step towards political democratization, as soon as these regimes gave even the slightest ground. Since the universities were the places where the non-business elite of these countries was educated – outside the USA the triumph of business schools and MBAs was still in the future – in those decades a very high proportion of those destined to go into politics, public service, academic life, journalism and the other media were made familiar with the names that stood for left-wing social and historical thought. Since the number of contemporaries with this reputation was small, our names became quite well known in reading circles, even though the actual circulation of our writings, legal or pirated, was modest. Naturally after democratization it could become much larger, though nowhere else quite as large as in Brazil, where more copies of the first edition of my history of the twentieth century were to be sold than in any other single country; though much of this was due to the help of a quite exceptional publisher, Luis Sczwarcz.
In this way the professional career of one author during and after the rise, slackening and fall of governments of the hard-line right in the west may throw light on the wider intellectual history of the ‘free world’ in the second half of the twentieth century, that is to say on the rise of the new generations of educated elites since the 1960s, brought up in the spirit of rebellion, even when they were soon to be ‘co-opted’ by (as the phrase then went), or co-opt themselves into the ‘Establishment’. That is not to overestimate the significance of
reading these authors. Some were merely badges of temporary political or ideological fashion. For instance, in the years of the great student revolts of the late sixties the writings of the political philosopher Herbert Marcuse were displayed in every university bookshop of the western world – at least I saw them on the East and West coasts of the USA, in Paris, Stockholm, Mexico City and Buenos Aires. (Marcuse himself, a tanned outdoor type who might have been a retired ski instructor, did not look the part when I met him in the house of friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time.) Yet within a few years his writings had returned to the underworld in which aspiring Ph.D. candidates desperately seek thesis subjects.
Whether the authors who thus became political badges in a country were aware of what was happening to their names was largely irrelevant. There are countries in which I did not even know I had readers until I discovered, as on visiting South Korea in 1987, that five of my titles were in print in (pirated) local translations. But for an Iranian friend at the New School, I would not know at all that one Ali-Akbar Mehdian, not otherwise known, had translated and published The Age of Revolution in Tehran in the spring of 1995 adding ‘Europe’ to 1789–1848, ‘probably to be able to get permission for publication’. In Brazil and to a lesser extent in Argentina, countries I knew and where I had friends, I had a shrewd idea of how such names could become familiar, though, until much later, not of the extent of this potential readership.
This takes a Marxist autobiographer into the welcome territory of technology and culture, namely the explosion of photocopiers that accompanied the enormous expansion of higher education in the West since the 1960s. This gave the new masses of teachers and students access, mostly unpaid, to fiendishly expensive imported academic texts otherwise far beyond their modest budgets and the sparse resources of their libraries. It was the Buenos Aires office of my admirable Spanish publisher, Gonzalo Ponton of Critica, which consequently guessed that there was scope for a special local edition of my work, and I discovered the extent of my youthful readership, or at least of those who had a positive reaction to my name, on a 1998 visit to Buenos Aires to promote it. Conversely, it was the systematic absence of such devices in the communist world that long limited its dissident literature to what could be laboriously typed and copied with carbon paper, or learned by heart.
No doubt there are authors – I am plainly not among them – who may trace the intellectual dimensions of the decline and collapse of communism and its consequences in a similar manner, through the fortunes of their works. It is obviously far harder to do so for two reasons. Before the fall of these regimes dissident or even heterodox literature was barely allowed above ground. There is no way to measure the impact of writings which were inaccessible in print to most readers, though this does not mean that such works might not become known in other ways. Since the end of communism the publication of serious writing about history and politics has depended on the subsidies of well-wishers such as the admirable George Soros. This tells the author little about his or her intended, potential or actual readers. Thanks to Soros, whose foundations and other benefactions have almost singlehandedly kept intellectual and scientific activities in the ex-USSR and much of Eastern Europe from being swept away by the forest fire of the so-called ‘free market’, at least two of my books, The Age of Extremes and Nations and Nationalism, have been published in a variety of the lesser East European languages, whose tiny public could never possibly have justified the enormous costs of translation. Moreover, one of them (Nations and Nationalism) is a critique of the very ethno-linguistic nationalism on which the small successor states are based, so that it is extremely unlikely that there was much pent-up demand for such critiques in the relevant bookshops of Tirana, Pristina and Skopje. However, since the world still lives in the shadow of the tower of Babel, how could I tell?
Nevertheless I have probably coped better with the Babel problem than most of my English-speaking colleagues, not least because my professional life has not only been peripatetic but multilingual. Historians, of course, need languages more than any scholars other than linguists and students of comparative literature, as very little except purely local history can be seriously studied entirely in a single language, even within most single states. Thanks to the advantage of a bilingual upbringing, a certain gift for picking up languages by talking rather than formal instruction, and the ancestral Jewish experience of moving from place to place among strangers, I have conducted my teaching, and to a modest extent my writing and radio or TV work, in various, not always well-mastered, languages. This has given my professional career a more cosmopolitan tinge than is common, not to mention a more recognized presence in countries whose radio and TV journalists can rely on a few words in their public’s language spoken into their outstretched microphone, or even a public lecture or TV conversation. Over the years the departmental office in Birkbeck grew accustomed to the multiple accents of foreigners asking for Professor Hobsbawm’s room, the non-Anglo-Saxon sounds round my table in the cafeteria, and the gradual adjustment of Peruvian, Mexican, Uruguayan, Bengali or Middle Eastern research students to London life. Not all these students were bona fide academics. In the past forty years English has become so much the universal idiom of global communication, and knowledge of French, the other international language, has declined so fast, that scholars like myself have lost much of their earlier function as interpreters and intellectual brokers. Yet that role remained important in Europe, at least during the lifetime of the generation of great monoglot French intellectuals who (with the rarest exceptions such as the brilliant and unhappy Raymond Aron) could neither speak nor understand English. I acted as translator for the great historian Ernest Labrousse at the early postwar conferences of the Economic History Society. (He warned me firmly against having anything to do with white Bordeaux, unworthy, he thought, of any self-respecting French drinker.) Except in French, I could not have established any relationship with Fernand Braudel. Even in the mid-1960s, when the next, less monoglot, generation reached maturity, it was far from fluent, as France’s premier historian, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, will confirm, if he recalls his first visit to London. Scholars from Eastern Europe once relied on French; in the 1990s their pupils at the New School had no difficulty in writing their term papers in English. And yet, even today the global village in which academics live must continue to rely on multilinguality, as any western intellectual can verify if he or she finds him or herself guideless on a street in Nanjing, Nagoya or Seoul – that is to say functionally deaf, dumb and illiterate. Someone there has to speak at least two languages.
Nevertheless, the global village is real, and since the limits of time and space have been virtually eliminated, the academic profession, having once again become what it was in the European Middle Ages, namely one of wandering, or rather nowadays airborne, scholars, lives in it. I suppose I have now lived in it for something like forty years. It is at this point that the line between professional career and private life becomes hazy, or disappears altogether. In memory the dinners for some visitor from abroad in the seasons of academic migration (as after the end of the summer term) merge with the memories of the Christmas dinners where the family was usually joined by friends, local or foreign, temporarily unattached or hostile to the seasonal spirit: Francis and Larissa Haskell, Arnaldo Momigliano, Yolanda Sonabend. Not that professors have friends only among other academics, though in the nature of things many of their friends are. Indeed one reason why Marlene and I have chosen to live in metropolitan milieus is that no university community is big enough in London or New York to dominate social life there. On the other hand, whether among academics, media people or in business, the global village is a place not so much of lives as of encounters. Each of its inhabitants has roots and most have permanence – either ‘here’ (wherever this may be, London, Cambridge, Manhattan) or elsewhere. Often, and this is new, they have multiple roots or at least multiple attachments, domestic or professional – my seasonal commute from London to Manha
ttan, the professional couples whose working weeks are separated by continents and oceans, united only at weekends or even more rarely.
The global village is the set of points of encounter of these entities in constant Brownian movement across the contemporary globe, expected, as in conferences and symposia, or casual and unexpected, at work or on holiday. It is the question ‘What are you doing here?’ which has punctuated my life in Santiago de Chile, Seoul and Mysore. But this is only one kind of encounter in the global village. Impermanence, isolation, unforeseen contingency in rental car, bar and hotel room with CNN are its dimensions. Even the highly organized circuits of what might be called business or professional tourism – the academic symposia in beautiful places, the Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como, the Fondazione Cini in the waters of Venice, the luxury business get-togethers within reach of beach and golf – are not the real locus of the global village. It really takes shape in the local network of human communications which fits together indigenous families, peripatetics and foreigners, arrivals, projects and departures. In short, it operates primarily through global circuits of domestic hospitality. For that is the basic pattern of life of most married academics, as of other settled professionals. The men and women who come into our houses are not ‘family’ but they are as familiar as if they were, whether they happen to come from New Delhi or Florence or whether they do so in Helsinki or Manhattan. They are part of our small everyday world. Very likely we have heard about them, they about us, even when friends bring us together for the first time, which will generally not be the last. We have the same points of reference and share the same news and gossip. We may well arrive with them from somewhere else to establish a new, permanent or semi-permanent existence in a new environment, as happened to us in my early years in the New School in the 1980s. We live among them, they among us, as neighbours.
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 38
