Literature, Politics and History

Abstract

On his recent demise, Eric Hobsbawm was widely celebrated as a, if not the, leading historian of his generation. He was also, and saw himself unashamedly as, a committed Marxist and political activist. Hobsbawm was perhaps at the height of his political influence in the 1980s through his acute analyses of the changing topography of class and political power in Britain detailed in the pages of Marxism Today. This was once and probably the only time, that a periodical with the word ‘Marx’ in its title was required reading for leaders in the Labour Party and for the wider political classes of both left and right. As most of the obituaries at the time of his death made clear, Hobsbawm was also unusual, at least among the British intelligentsia, in not having renounced the Communist Party after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites. As Hobsbawm made clear, not least in his own autobiography, he could not denounce his own past (or that of others). Born in the year of revolution, 1917, in one of the strategic bastions of the British Empire, his life could well serve as a metaphor for the rise and fall of the revolutionary politics and cultures that leapt on to the historical stage in that year.

Can humanity live without the ideals of freedom and justice, or without those who devote their lives to them? Or perhaps even without the memory of those who did so in the twentieth century?

(Eric Hobsbawm, 2002)

Literature is an attempt to influence the viewpoint of one’s contemporaries by recording experience.

(George Orwell, 1946/1970)