Eric Hobsbawm

Writer

  • Born: June 9, 1917
  • Birthplace: Alexandria, Egypt
  • Died: October 1, 2012

Biography

Eric Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt, on June 9, 1917, the son of an English Jewish father and an Austrian Jewish mother. After spending his childhood in Vienna, he became an orphan at the age of fourteen, and he then lived with his uncle and aunt in Berlin. Attracted to socialism, Hobsbawm wrote that his interest in history began with a reading of the Communist Manifesto. Shortly after Hitler became chancellor in 1933, the family prudently moved to London. Hobsbawm specialized in history at King’s College at Cambridge, where he received a Ph.D. in 1936. During World War II, he was drafted and served as a member of the education corps.

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In 1947, Hobsbawm was appointed a lecturer of history at London University’s Birkbeck College. In 1962, he married Muriel Seaman, a writer, and the couple had two children, Andy and Julia. In 1970, he was promoted to professor, and he became a fellow of the British Academy in 1978. After retirement from London University, he taught at the New School in New York and was then a visiting professor at Stanford, Cornell, MIT, and the Collège de France.

Hobsbawm published more than twenty books, including an epic four-volume history of the modern world: The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (1962), The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (1975), The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (1987), and The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (1994). Hobsbawm believed that the historian’s work included explanation of the past to the general public with an emphasis on its links to current affairs. Although writing from a Marxist perspective, his use of theory was never dogmatic or overly intrusive, and he always maintained an empirical approach to historical reality. Reoccurring themes in his works included the conditions of working people, the successes and failures of revolutions, and the nefarious effects of nationalism.

From 1946 to 1956, he was a member of the historians’ group of the Communist Party of Great Britain. In 1952, he was co-founder of the influential journal in social history Past and Present, known for emphasizing “history from below.” Throughout the Cold War, Hobsbawm remained loyal to the Communist Party, even though he consistently advocated respect for individual freedoms and strongly criticized many Soviet policies, including the interventions in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, he gained a new respect for the role of historical contingency and openly acknowledged the limitations of the Marxist paradigm. Yet, he still wrote that the asking Marxist questions was the best way to approach the story of humanity. In his autobiography, Interesting Times (2002), he attempted to explain the reasons for his lifelong commitment to the cause of Marxist socialism.

For many years, Hobsbawm was Britain’s best-known Marxist historian. His historical works appealed to a large readership and did much to advance the field of social history. His autobiography is highly acclaimed as one of the most fascinating personal accounts of the twentieth century. Tony Judt, one of his critics, called him a “cultural folk hero” and wrote: “Hobsbawm doesn’t just know more than other historians, he writes better, too.”