Industry | 2009.03.15
Tristam Hunt: Fury of the philistines
What makes the Mail dump buckets of bile on one of Britain\'s most venerated historians?
Few people send the Daily Mail into greater paroxysms of rage than Eric Hobsbawm. And all this week it has been frothing at the mouth following the Guardian\'s revelation that the communist historian has been denied access to his MI5 files. "Why do we honour those who loathe Britain?" the Mail demanded. More than a decade after the Queen made Hobsbawm a Companion of Honour, the right cannot bring itself to admit that he remains one of the towering intellects of postwar Britain.
But first things first: Hobsbawm does not hate Britain. Indeed, as an author he places himself within a peculiarly English tradition committed to writing history for the general public. Similarly, as a Jew who fled Berlin in the 1930s, Hobsbawm has long appreciated the relaxed, mongrel makeup of the United Kingdom with its historic avoidance of blood-and-soil nationalism.
Yet what the Mail\'s pundits really want to "get" Hobsbawm on is his communism. Through a litany of dubious quotations and illogical leaps, Hobsbawm is painted as the defender par excellence of Soviet totalitarianism: Stalin\'s man in the UK who thought Uncle Joe was right to murder millions.
But any of his recent pronouncements show the redundancy of such charges. In my Observer interview with Hobsbawm in 2002 he denied any such admiration for Stalin and, with regard to the Soviet Union, was adamant that he was not interested in defending "the record of something which is indefensible". He went so far as to agree with his late friend Isaiah Berlin that the USSR revealed the troubling dangers of any attempt at Enlightenment perfectibility, as it produced "very bad results".
However, the fact that he won\'t apologise for his membership of the Communist party - an affiliation forged in anti-fascist street battles in Weimar Germany and sustained through an authentic conviction about the injustices of the capitalist state - is cause enough for the buckets of bile.
All of which is interesting, but misses the point. For the reason Hobsbawm is worthy of respect is that he is one of our greatest historians. At an academic level, he proved a vital force in the postwar years in upending the parochialism of the British historical profession and opening the subject up to the radical, sometimes Marxist currents of thinking in mainland Europe. Hobsbawm helped shunt history on from the dry, narrow terrain of "past politics" by approaching the past from the bottom up, seeking to analyse as well as narrate, and embracing the insights of social science.
He has addressed the big, global questions and has done so in an accessible style. His trilogy on the "long 19th century" still provides among the most rewarding accounts of the French revolution, the industrial revolution, and the function of empire. It was an achievement only matched by The Age of Extremes, his chronicle of the "short 20th century", which recounted the human costs of the ideological struggle between fascism and communism. But Hobsbawm has also pioneered research into the origins of banditry and protest, the social history of jazz, geopolitics and the invention of national tradition (a plague he thinks has made "the defence of history by its professionals more urgent in politics than ever").
It is this productivity, catholic intellectualism and populist verve that have earned him his gongs and doctorates. Internationally, he is admired as a scholar and polemicist. But not, it seems, to the angry philistines of the Mail who can\'t move beyond their revulsion at Hobsbawm\'s combination of royal approbation, professional success and ideological conviction. Perhaps they should read one of his books.
• Tristram Hunt\'s biography of Friedrich Engels is published on 1 May
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]14/daily-mail-press-publishing
