Vol. 17 No. 5 · 9 March 1995
pages 22-23 | 3785 words
Contra Mundum
Edward Said
- 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.
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Letters
Vol. 17 No. 10 · 25 May 1995
From Gianfranco Corsini
Maybe Edward Said should make up his mind as to whether The Age of Extremes (LRB, 9 March) represents ‘one of the summits of historical writing in the post-war period’ or is only the by-product of ‘an earlier, manifestly positivist moment in historiographic practice’. Since positivism has a very bad reputation (I believe wrongly) among Modernists, Post-Modernists and Post-Marxists, this hardly strikes me as a compliment. Especially when this final statement follows two columns of suggestions on what Hobsbawm has missed, or should have taken into account.
Must we assume, then, that the distinguished British historian is somehow politically incorrect? In his Introduction Eric Hobsbawm reminds us that people of his – and my – generation, who lived and acted through most of the ‘short century’, talk and think ‘like men and women of a particular time and place, involved, in various ways, in its history as actors in its dramas’. He acknowledges that it is difficult to speak to ‘readers who belong to another era … for whom even the Vietnam War is prehistory’.
Of course Edward Said does not belong to this last ‘era’: he stands in the middle. Could it be, though, that he might have been affected by at least some of those ‘religious or ideological confrontations’ of his times ‘which build barricades in the way of the historian’? He tells us that Hobsbawm has made a major effort, considering his personal history, to stay away from the ‘interpretative quarrels’ of his times, so restoring our ‘faith in the idea of rational investigation’. But the ‘aesthetic is relatively autonomous’, and is not ‘a superstructural phenomenon’. Is there ‘aesthetic correctness’ too, then?
I would suggest, to the contrary, that Chapters 6 and 11 of The Age of Extremes give us the most compelling and up-to-date view of the main characteristic of the cultural revolution of our century, which has been the ‘common desire’ to come to terms with reality, making it the ‘century of the common people … dominated by the arts produced by and for them’.
Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci would probably agree. And Sir Leslie Stephen would join them. In his last lectures of 1904 on the 18th century he had already suggested that so-called élite literature might be considered only as ‘a kind of by-product of the whole social activity’, and that its ‘characteristics’ correspond to those of a ‘very small minority of the nation’. According to Stephen, ‘the most important changes’ in the arts of the 18th century were already ‘closely connected with the social changes’ which had ‘entirely altered the limits of the reading class’. Now that the reading class has become an ‘audience’ is this any less true?
Gianfranco Corsini
Rome
