Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life
Page 53
5. E. J. Hobsbawm, Rebeldes Primitivos (Barcelona, 1968), p. 226.
6. E. J. Hobsbawm, ’Guerillas in Latin America’ in J. Saville and R. Miliband (eds), The Socialist Register, 1970, pp. 51–63; E. J. Hobsbawm ’Guerillas’ in Colin Harding and Christopher Roper (eds), Latin American Review of Books I (London, 1973), pp. 79–88.
7. See my ’What’s New in Peru’ and ’Peru: The Peculiar ’Revolution”’ in New York Review of Books, 21 May 1970 and 16 December 1971.
8. E. J. Hobsbawm, ’Chile: Year One’ in New York Review of Books, 23 September 1971.
9. International Herald Tribune and Pew Center Poll of ’opinion leaders’, International Herald Tribune, 20 december 2001, p. 6.
22. From FDR to Bush
1. This was close enough to the truth, but not literally correct. I am pretty sure that some of the teachers in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York, where I was later to teach, continued to advertise their Marxism.
2. P. A. Baran and E. J. Hobsbawm, ’The Stages of Economic Growth’ in KYKLOS, vol XIV, 1961, Fasc. 2, pp. 234–42.
3. See F. Ianni and E. Reuss-Ianni, A Family Business: Kinships and Social Control in Organised Crime (New York, 1972).
4. E. J. Hobsbawm, ’The Economics of the Gangster’ in The Quaterly Review , No. 604, April 1955, pp. 243–56.
5. Quoted in S. Chapple and R. Garofalo, Rock’n Roll is Here to Pay: The History and Politiks of the Music Industry (Chicago, 1977), p. 251.
6. Studs Terkel, Division Street America (New York, 1967).
7. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Intervista sul Nuovo Secolo a Cura di Antonio Polito (Bari, 1999), p. 165.
23. Coda
1. See my summary of the world situation published in The Age of Extremes eight years earlier (paperback edition), chapter XIX, ’Towards the Millenium’ especially pp. 558–62.
1 How preposterous it was is indicated by the example of the Italian communist leader Palmiro Togliatti who in 1933 had to undertake ‘self-criticism’ for having observed that, at least in Mussolini’s Italy, it was not possible to say that social democracy was ‘the main danger’.
2 At the time of writing the general opinion among historians is still that it was a young Dutch leftist making a spectacular protest in the hope of galvanizing the workers into action, and not a put-up job by the Nazis.
3 ‘The lines between the pro- and anti-fascist forces ran through each society.
Never has there been a period when patriotism, in the sense of automatic loyalty to a citizen’s national government, counted for less. When the Second World War ended, the governments of at least ten old European countries were headed by men who at its beginning (or, in the case of Spain, at the start of the Civil War) had been rebels, political exiles or, at the very least, who had regarded their own governments as immoral and illegitimate.’ Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (London, paperback, 1995), p. 144.
4 And the LSE needed less explanation. Founded by the great Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, devoted exclusively to the political and social sciences, led by the later architect of the British social security system, William Beveridge, with a faculty whose most prominent and charismatic teachers were nationally known socialists – Harold Laski, R. H. Tawney – it stood on some kind of left almost ex officio . That is what attracted foreigners from inside and outside the empire. If that was not what necessarily attracted its British students, overwhelmingly an elite of first-generation scholarship-winning boys and girls from London families on the borderline between working and lower middle classes, it was likely to influence them once they had arrived.
5 It may be worth mentioning in passing that none of my books was ever translated into Russian or any other Soviet language during the communist period, but then, the only ‘real socialist’ languages any of them were translated into before the fall of the Berlin Wall were Hungarian – fairly consistently – and Slovenian. However, my book on jazz was translated into Czech.
6 So was Professor Sven Ulric Palme of Stockholm University, who proposed me for my first honorary degree, crowned by a real laurel wreath, which our cleaning lady in Clapham later threw in the dustbin. (Swedish academia takes itself sufficiently seriously not to see anything out-of-the-way in a collection of middle-aged scholars in dark suits and laurel wreaths conversing, with glasses of champagne, as in a modern-dress production of Julius Caesar.)
7 ‘Trade unionism, with all its limitations, is never able to overlook the masses, because it organizes millions of them all the time, and has to mobilize them quite a lot of the time. But capturing the Labour Party for the left can be done in the short run without reference to the masses. It could, in theory, be achieved pretty well entirely by … a few tens of thousands of committed socialists and left Labour people by means of meetings, the drafting of resolutions and votes. The illusion of the early 1980s is that organization can replace politics,’ in Martin Jacques and Francis Mulhern (eds), The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London, 1981), p. 173.
8 I may have been the first to bring the term into the electoral debate.
9 The politics of this Burgundian town, immortalized in an interwar novel of that name by Gabriel Chevalier, turned on the proposed location of a public urinal – another characteristic feature of life in the Third Republic – disputed between right and left.
10 Topaze was inevitably in my mind, and made it difficult to keep a straight face when, many years later, the French government awarded me the ‘Palmes Academiques’.
11 However, for a few years before the rise of American and Australian tennis in the 1930s, France played a prominent role on the international tennis scene, through the ‘Four Musketeers’ – Cochet, Lacoste, Brugnon and Borotra – and one of the rare prominent sportswomen of the time, Suzanne Lenglen.
12 ‘Alors, vous avez bien connu mes prisons.’ The anecdote was told me by the publisher himself.
13 The first units formally recruited and organized for international volunteers, by the Italian Giustizia e Libertà group, date to the end of August; the Comintern’s International Brigades were set up rather later. Most of the original foreign units were composed of foreigners who were in Barcelona for a ‘People’s Olympiad’ at the moment of the generals’ insurrection. John Cornford (see chapter 8), who must have arrived in Barcelona at about the time I reached the frontier, decided to enlist ‘quite impulsively’ (Peter Stansky and William Abraham, Journey to the Frontier, London, 1966, p. 328) about a week later.
14 The name of Francesco Rosi’s 1976 film, based on a novel by the superb Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia.
Copyright © 2002 by Eric Hobsbawm
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in
Great Britain by Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London, in 2002.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
A portion of this book previously appeared in the
Chronicle of Higher Education.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hobsbawm, E. J. (Eric J.), 1917–
Interesting times : a twentieth-century life / Eric Hobsbawm.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-0-307-42641-3
1. Hobsbawm, E. J. (Eric J.), 1917– 2. Historians—Great Britain—
Biography. 3. History Modern—20th century. 4. Twentieth century.
I. Title.
D15.H63 A.82’092—dc21 [B] 2002192691
www.pantheonbooks.com
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v1.0
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Preface
1 - Overture
2 - A Child
in Vienna
3 - Hard Times
4 - Berlin: Weimar Dies
5 - Berlin: Brown and Red
6 - On the Island
I
II
III
IV
V
7 - Cambridge
8 - Against Fascism and War
9 - Being Communist
I
II
10 - War
I
II
III
11 - Cold War
I
II
III
III
12 - Stalin and After
I
II
III
IV
13 - Watershed
14 - Under Cnicht
15 - The Sixties
I
II
16 - A Watcher in Politics
I
II
III
17 - Among the Historians
18 - In the Global Village
19 - Marseillaise
20 - From Franco to Berlusconi
I
II
III
21 - Third World
I
II
III
IV
22 - From FDR to Bush
I
II
III
23 - Coda
I
II
III
Notes
Copyright Page
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