Contra Mundum

• Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm
  Joseph, 627 pp, £20.00, October 1994, ISBN 0 7181 3307 2

A powerful and unsettling book, Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes brings to a close the series of historical studies he began in 1962 with The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, and followed in 1975 and 1987 respectively with The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 and The Age of Empire, 1875-1914. It is difficult to imagine that anyone other than Hobsbawm could have approached – much less achieved – the consistently high level of these volumes: taken together, they represent one of the summits of historical writing in the postwar period. Hobsbawm is cool where others are hot and noisy; he is ironic and dispassionate where others would have been either angry or heedless; he is discriminatingly observant and subtle where on the same ground other historians would have resorted to clichés or to totalistic system. Perhaps the most compelling thing about Hobsbawm’s achievement in these four books is the poise he maintains throughout. Neither too innocent nor too knowing and cynical, he restores one’s faith in the idea of rational investigation; and in a prose that is as supple and sure as the gait of a brilliant middle-distance runner, he traces the emergence, consolidation, triumph and eclipse of modernity itself – in particular, the amazing persistence of capitalism (its apologists, practitioners, theoreticians and opponents) within it.

The four books also record the growth of a world consciousness, both in Hobsbawm himself and in the history he writes. In the 1780s, for example, the inhabited world was known to Europeans only patchily; by the time he gets to the rise of empire a century later, Hobsbawm’s subject is Europe’s discovery of the rest of the world. Yet the growth of the historian’s mind, so to speak, never reduces itself to tiresome self-contemplation. On the contrary, Hobsbawm’s solutions to the problems of his own epistemology become part of his quest for knowledge. This emergent global consciousness is at its most memorable in the opening of The Age of Empire, where he records the peregrinations of his mother and father – one from Vienna, the other from Britain, both originally from Eastern Europe – and their arrival in Alexandria, which while prosperous, cosmopolitan and recently occupied by Britain, ‘also, of course, contained the Arabs’. His parents met and married there; Alexandria became Eric’s birthplace. This accident of his birth suggests to Hobsbawm that Europe alone can no longer be his subject, any more than his audience can only be academic colleagues. He writes ‘for all who wish to understand the world and who believe history is important for this purpose’, but he does not minimise the fact that as he approaches the present he must deal with that ‘fuzzy’ period he calls ‘the twilight zone between history and memory; between the past as a generalised record open to relatively dispassionate inspection and the past as a remembered part of, or background to, one’s own life’.

There is considerable overlap between history and memory in Age of Extremes. The period at hand is now Hobsbawm’s own lifetime. Although he says that this composite of the public and the private can be understood as the ‘Short 20th Century’ in world-historical terms, the result is necessarily an account that rests on ‘curiously uneven foundations’. The historian is now less a guide than a ‘participant observer’, one who does not, indeed cannot, fully command the historiography of our century. Yet Hobsbawm’s disarming admissions of fallibility – he speaks candidly of his ignorance, avowedly controversial views, ‘casual and patchy’ knowledge – do not at all disable Age of Extremes, which, as many reviewers have already noted, is a redoubtable work, full of its author’s characteristic combination of grandeur and irony, as well as of his wide-ranging scope and insight.

What gives it special appeal is that Hobsbawm himself appears intermittently, a bit player in his own epic. We see him as a 15-year-old with his sister on a winter afternoon in Berlin on the day that Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. Next he is a partisan in the Spanish Civil War. He is present in Moscow in 1957, ‘shocked’ to see that the embalmed Stalin was ‘so tiny and yet so all-powerful’. He is part of ‘the attentive and unquestioning multitudes’ who listen to Fidel Castro for hours on end. He is a deathbed witness to Oskar Lange’s final days, as the celebrated socialist economist confesses that he cannot find an answer to the question: ‘Was there an alternative to the indiscriminate, brutal, basically unplanned rush forward of the first Five-Year-Plan?’ At exactly the time that Crick and Watson were doing their breakthrough work on DNA’s structure, Hobsbawm was a Cambridge fellow, ‘simply unaware’ of the importance of what the two men were up to – and in any case ‘they saw no point in telling us’ about it.