Grand historical narratives have been
repeatedly abused by those true believers who convince themselves that a few
million lives are a small price to pay to get to the End of History a little
quicker.
When a man dies at a ripe old age, the
sins of his youth are normally forgiven him, assuming there is anyone around
who remembers them. Or, at the very least, these sins are not loudly trumpeted
forth nor dwelled on at painful length in his obituaries.
The death of Eric Hobsbawm at the age of
95 has proven an exception to this rule. The very day after Hobsbawm’s death
was announced, the formidable English polymath A. N. Wilson wrote a stunningly
savage attack on the man who was often regarded as the preeminent British
Marxist historian of our time. “Hobsbawm,” A. N. Wilson writes, “will sink
without trace. His books will not be read in the future. They are little better
than [Communist] propaganda, and, in spite of the slavish language in the
obituaries, are badly written.” This departure from the normal etiquette in
dealing with the demise of a much lauded public intellectual deserves a bit of
explanation.
A. N. Wilson is a Tory—a conservative, in
other words—and it might seem only natural that a conservative would disagree
with the reading of history offered by a Marxist like Hobsbawm. Yet ideological
differences did not keep other conservative historians from offering their
praise at Hobsbawm’s bier. In a postmortem piece in The Guardian, Niall
Ferguson, whose conservative credentials are beyond reproach, claimed Hobsbawm
as a personal friend and argued that, despite his Marxist politics, Hobsbawm
was nevertheless “a truly great historian,” whose chief works will continue to
be “the best introduction to modern world history in the English language.”
Why these two diametrically opposite takes
from two distinguished conservative thinkers? The answer, I think, can be put
in a single word: Stalinism.
For A. N. Wilson, Hobsbawm was
preeminently the man who “excused Stalin’s genocide.” Indeed, in his article,
Wilson raises the fascinating question of whether Hobsbawm became a Soviet
agent while at Cambridge in the 1930s, along with his friends Anthony Blunt and
Guy Burgess. If so, then Hobsbawm was not just a bad historian, but, according
to Wilson, a traitor as well. (Keep in mind that A. N. Wilson, among his many
talents, is also a novelist, with a novelist’s lively imagination.)
Admirers of Hobsbawm would certainly
pooh-pooh the idea that their hero ever became an actual Soviet spy, yet it
would be impossible for them to pretend that Hobsbawm in his younger days was
anything other than a fervent champion of the Worker’s Paradise known as the Soviet
Union. Yet this fact hardly made Hobsbawm unique. Many well-intentioned
American and English intellectuals also championed Stalin’s Russia during the
worldwide depression that wrecked the economies of the capitalist West, but
which left the isolated Union of Soviet Socialist Republics relatively
unscathed. Yet out of the ranks of these Soviet sympathizers of the thirties
there emerged a number of disenchanted intellectuals, many of whom would go on
to become the sharpest and most trenchant critics of the Soviet Union. For
example, Arthur Koestler, whose most famous book, Darkness at Noon, remains one
of the most powerful attacks on horrors of Stalinism, joined the Communist
Party of Germany in 1931, roughly the same time that Eric Hobsbawm, who was then
15 and living in Berlin, joined it as well.
The political sins of youth? In Koestler’s
case, definitely yes. Disillusioned by the great Soviet purge trials of the
late thirties, Koestler left the Communist Party in 1938, then began writing
Darkness at Noon in an attempt to explain one of the most puzzling aspects of
the purge trials—how men who had dedicated their lives to promoting Soviet
communism could be brought to accuse themselves of being traitors to the USSR
and go loyally to their deaths, convinced that they were offering their lives
up to the inevitable triumph of Communism.
Koestler was an early example of a convert
from Stalinism, but he was hardly alone. Other leftists would renounce their
Communist allegiance over the infamous Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, which paved
the way for the conquest and division of Poland by both the Third Reich and the
USSR. But there were many Communists who remained faithful to their sacred
cause through thick and thin, including Eric Hobsbawm. Neither the Hungarian
uprising of 1956 nor the grim suppression of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks
in 1968 was a significant enough event, in Hobsbawm’s opinion, to warrant a
renunciation of his Communist Party affiliation. Indeed, it was only after the
collapse of the Soviet system in the late eighties that Hobsbawm officially
ceased to be a card-carrying Communist, and that was only by letting his
membership in the party lapse.
It is true that a few years after the fall
of the Soviet Union, Hobsbawm published a major work, The Age of Extremes: The
Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, in which he candidly acknowledged that the
Soviet experiment had cost millions of lives. About time, many of his critics
must have thought to themselves—and if Hobsbawm had left it at that, he might
well have salvaged his reputation from the charge of being the longest-living British
apologist for Stalinism. But Hobsbawm did not leave it at that. In a remarkable
interview with Michael Ignatieff on British TV in 1994, Hobsbawm made it clear
that the problem he had with the Soviet experiment was not that it cost
millions of lives, but that it failed to create the model utopia of his dreams.
If the experiment had worked, the loss of millions would have been justified.
After all, as Hobsbawm coyly argued, don’t we all agree that the defeat of
fascism in the Second World War justified the deaths of millions?
Oddly enough, this astonishing statement
is a product of what Hobsbawm’s admirers see as his strongest point, namely,
his interest in grand historical narrative—offering a sweeping, big-picture
view of events. In an age in which historians tend to specialize in narrow and
detailed analysis of isolated tracts of history, and even thin slices of it at
that, it is refreshing to see a historian who is brave enough to take the whole
destiny of man as his theme. This, after all, is one of the more creditable
legacies of the Marxist tradition, the search for an overriding pattern that
gives meaning and purpose to the dismaying vicissitudes of seemingly haphazard
events. But there is a catch to this style of grand theorizing—it allows, indeed
it positively encourages, the grand theorist to permit the ends to justify even
the vilest and most atrocious means, including the massacre of innocent
millions.
Yet even this position might make some
wicked sense if the grand theorist really and truly believed that the end in
view was the end of all human misery and suffering. This was the position taken
by Karl Marx himself. Marx never doubted that history had a purpose, namely,
the inevitable victory of communism, which, according to Marx, would bring the
End of History—or, more precisely, an end to the nightmare of history, with its
bloody wars and revolutions. The global triumph of Marxist communism would
usher in the reign of perpetual peace that the German philosopher Immanuel Kant
had hopefully prophesized in the heyday of the European Enlightenment.
For Marx and his early followers, such a
lofty and noble end could justify a great deal of violence and bloodshed. But
suppose they had been permitted a glimpse into the future and had seen for
themselves that the violence and bloodshed would lead absolutely nowhere and
that the great social experiment undertaken in Marx’s name would result in
genocide and ultimately in catastrophic collapse and ruin. What would they have
said then?
Obviously we have no way of knowing the
answer to that question, but we do know that Eric Hobsbawm was permitted that
glimpse into the future denied to Marx, and we know what his answer was. Ah, if
only it had worked…
What makes this answer so disturbing is
that with the collapse of the USSR, Hobsbawm abandoned all hopes of an end to
history—ironically at the very same moment that many Western intellectuals
became converts to a new End of History scenario. Following the lead of Francis
Fukuyama in recasting Marx’s grand dialectic, these intellectuals believed that
the final stage of history was near at hand, culminating not in a global
embrace of communism, but rather in the worldwide triumph of liberal
democracies buoyed up by free market economies.
Needless to say, Hobsbawm had no use for
this particular End of History. Fukuyama, he wrote, was the new Dr. Pangloss,
the pedant in Voltaire’s Candide who is forever assuring his pupils that they
lived in the best of all possible worlds. History, Hobsbawm argued, was not
culminating anytime soon—a lesson that we have learned to our cost in the post
9/11 epoch. In fact, during his last years, Hobsbawm made it clear that he no
longer had any idea where history might be taking us next.
Some epochs may be better than others,
but, if so, this is simply a bit of serendipity, and certainly not proof of the
inevitable improvement of the human lot.
This position, which might be called
historical agnosticism, will seem quite sensible to most of us—do any of us
really know where we are currently heading?—but it is certainly not Marxism,
and Hobsbawm was surely aware of this fact. Indeed, I think it can be argued
that after the fall of the USSR, Hobsbawm’s claim that he was a Marxist rested
solely on a sentimental attachment to the delusions of his youth, and he
sometimes came close to admitting as much. But a serious thinker cannot allow
his youthful enthusiasm to cloud his mature judgment. Having come to realize
that Marx’s End of History was an illusion, Hobsbawm should have openly
confessed that Marxism, as a philosophy of history, was bankrupt. It is not
simply that Hobsbawm was wrong—a serious thinker can be forgiven that—but that
he was intellectually incoherent, claiming to be a Marxist while simultaneously
abandoning the cardinal doctrines of Marxism. This fatal incoherence was
pointed out as early as 1994 by one of Hobsbawm’s most perceptive critics, the
brilliant American historian Eugene Genovese, who died at the age of 82, only a
few days before Hobsbawm. What made Genovese’s critique so powerful was that
he, like Hobsbawm, had begun his life as a Marxist radical, but, unlike
Hobsbawm, Genovese had the fortitude of character to accept the lessons of
history, instead of evading them. Indeed, Genovese’s intellectual honesty
forced him not only to renounce Marxism, but to abandon progressivism
altogether, a move that ended in his full conversion both to conservatism and
to the Roman Catholic Church—a fact that might explain why his death was not
greeted by the same outpouring of adoration from the liberal media as the death
of Eric Hobsbawm.
Unlike A. N. Wilson or Niall Ferguson, who
were always conservative, Genovese’s own Marxist past permitted him to grasp
“the internal contradiction” in Hobsbawm’s post-Soviet thinking. In his 1995
review of The Age of Extremes for The New Republic, Genovese wrote that “Hobsbawm
never mentions Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian social thinker of the early decades
of this century who was a pioneer in economic theory and its application to
social change; but Hobsbawm’s book conjures up nothing so much as Pareto’s
‘circulation of elites.’”
This is a damning indictment from one
Marxist to another, as Genovese surely knew. Within Marxist circles, the name
Pareto has always been anathema, and for good reason. If Pareto is right, then
the Marxists are wrong. More generally speaking, Pareto’s theory of the
“circulation of elites,” if true, gives a deathblow to all hopes of an End to
History, both those of Marx and those of Fukuyama—indeed, a deathblow to
progressivism of every sort. Put as bluntly as possible, Pareto argued that
history is an endless cycle in which one small group, aka an elite, obtains
mastery and control over the rest of society. But the elite group that is
currently on the top of the heap will inevitably be challenged by a new elite.
Over time, the old elite will lose its grip on power, often simply because it
has forgotten how to retain the power that its ancestors knew well how to seize
for themselves and their heirs. At this point, the rising elite replaces and
often liquidates the old elite, and in its turn rules the roost to the
exclusion of everyone else. The same cycle, however, is bound to occur again
and again, over and over, without any hope of an End of History.
Pareto, in short, is not proposing mere
historical agnosticism, but outright historical pessimism. Things will change,
but they will not progress. Some epochs may be better than others, but, if so,
this is simply a bit of serendipity, and certainly not proof of the inevitable
improvement of the human lot.
The historical pessimist, unlike the
historical triumphalist, will never deceive himself or others into believing
that by killing a few million human beings today, they are preparing for the
future happiness of billions.
If Hobsbawm had become a closet follower
of Pareto by 1994, as Genovese suggests, then he should have had the courage to
come out of his closet, to admit his disillusionment with Marxism, as Arthur
Koestler had done over a half-century earlier, and to recognize the folly
behind the myth of inevitable human progress, as any true historical pessimist
must do. True, this would have required Hobsbawm to have grown out of the
enthusiasms of his youth—or his sins, if you will—but then he was given far
more time to change his mind than is allotted to most mortals. It is a great
pity he never took the opportunity to do so.
Needless to say, Pareto’s style of
historical pessimism is not to everyone’s taste. Yet it does have one great
redeeming virtue. Grand historical narratives, proposing to show how mankind
must inevitably reach the promised land, have been repeatedly abused by those
true believers who find it all too easy to convince themselves that a few
million lives are a small price to pay in order to get to the End of History a
little quicker than otherwise. The historical pessimist, unlike the historical
triumphalist, will never deceive himself or others into believing that by
killing a few million human beings today, they are preparing for the future
happiness of billions. Refusing the lure of utopia, the pessimists can focus on
making the present world not perfect, but just a little better than it would be
without their efforts.
Perhaps the most important legacy of Eric
Hobsbawm is that his long life demonstrates how even men of great intelligence
and vast erudition can deceive themselves into believing that crimes of the
most unimaginable horror are a small price to pay for the fulfillment of their
no doubt deeply humanitarian dreams.
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