The Centuries of Eric Hobsbawm II: THURSDAY HISTORIOGRAPHY
Eric Hobsbawm’s Marxist teleology made him both the greatest narrator of the 1776-1875 not-so-long nineteenth century and a spectacularly poor guide to the 1875-2010 genuinely long twentieth. His political-moral-ideological commitments powered The Age of Revolution and The Age of Capital, making them brilliant. But they became a crippling Procrustean Bed once the Belle Époque, Modern Economic Growth, mass prosperity, nationalist insanity, and stalled socialism made their entrance onto the stage of history.
Last week I read this piece: half Enzo Traverso, and half Emile Chabal, whose forthcoming Hobsbawm biography Traverso is reviewing.
Eric J. Hobsbawm… published critically acclaimed memoirs, and today—fourteen years after his death—is the subject of two biographies, the latest of which… by Emile Chabal…. Richard J. Evans knew Hobsbawm… and his book… stands as… official biography…. Evans carefully reconstituted a historian’s life and wrote with empathy, not without an apologetic touch. Chabal’s… acknowledged distance is beneficial… his gaze more analytical… a fascinating critical portrait. Hobsbawm is… the greatest historian of the twentieth century… if [that] means that he was the most important scholar to have written on the history of the past century…
Chabal, Emile. 2026 (August 18). The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
But in spite of not having read it, I talked about it, Chabel, Traverso—and Hobsbawm—all very favorably last week:
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