Dear All,

I'm sure many of you will have seen the various commentaries on Eric
Hobsbawm that have appeared in the media since his death on Monday. I'm
also sure that, like me, many of you admire his work enormously.
Consequently, as someone who studied with Eric for a year in the 1970s, I
thought you might appreciate hearing some of my memories of him and
observations on his work.

As a prelude to the Amnesty International lectures he gave at Oxford in the
mid 1990s, The Guardian published a profile of Eric Hobsbawm. It began: 'In
the mid 1930s all of Cambridge was talking about an undergraduate who knew
everything about everything'. Hyperbole, certainly, but Eric combined both
the widest intellectual range with complete mastery of empirical detail, to
a far greater extent than anyone I've ever known or, indeed, heard about.
For instance, I remember a supervision with him one day in his office at
Birkbeck. On his coffee table was a copy of the German edition of
Habermas's 'Theory of Communicative Action'. At that time I was working
my way through the Frankfurt School oeuvre and had read a couple of
chapters of Habermas's book in translation. Noticing my interest in the
book, Eric began to talk about it and, in the process, provided an
extraordinary summary and critical engagement with the theory. Eric was
far, far more than a 'mere' historian!

Together with Braudel, he arguably founded global history. He was able to
work in five or six European languages and while his primary expertise was
Europe-wide, he was an astute commentator on historical and contemporary
developments in Latin America, North America, South Asia and Africa. Only
on East Asia did his otherwise magisterial command sometimes fail him.

While his initial work was in labour history, by the early 1960s he had
helped open-up the new fields of peasant and millenarian studies (such as
in his books, 'Primitive Rebels' and 'Bandits'). Together with the others
of the British 'big four' - Edward Thompson, Christopher Hill and Rodney
Hilton - Eric helped forge a paradigm shift in historiography. Breaking
with the empiricist 'top down/great man' historiographical traditions of
the likes of von Ranke and Namier, they founded the journal, 'Past and
Present', to help drive forward a Marxian theorised social history.

With the publication of his four volume study of 'The Age of
Revolution/Capital/Empire/Extremes', Eric established himself not merely as
the greatest British historian, or the world's greatest Marxist historian,
but as the world's greatest historian - period. Together with Edward
Thompson, he was also the most 'sociological' historian of his generation,
not merely because of his concern to develop theorised histories, but
because of the way his writing style evolved in his later work. In 'Age of
Extremes', for instance, he adopted a Millsian (C. Wright that is)
approach, weaving together history and biography (his own in this case).
The fact that in his histories of the 20th century, he was actually 'there'
when some of the great events and turning points of European history
happened, meant that he was often able, in almost 'throwaway' remarks, to
grasp the future significance of those events. Thus in his autobiography,
'Interesting Times', he remarks, for instance, on the emergence in Vienna
in the late 1920s of a right wing offshoot from Zionism whose hero was
Mussolini and organisational tactics, adaptations from Italian fascism.
Eric points out that it was this version of Zionism that eventually became
the core of Israel's Likud Party!

Eric Hobsbawm was an intellectual giant the like of which we'll almost
certainly never see again. His loss, though inevitable (given his age),
will sorely damage radical, committed social science at a time when the
world, once again, may be teetering on the brink of environmental and
geo-political catastrophe.


Jeff


Jeffrey Henderson
Professor of International Development
Director, Centre for East Asian Studies
University of Bristol

Recent book: East Asian Transformation (Routledge 2011)
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415547925/
(http://www.amazon.co.uk/East-Asian-Transformation-Political-Governance/dp/
041554792X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1308905036&sr=1-1)

Centre for East Asian Studies
School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies
University of Bristol
11 Priory Road,
Bristol BS8 1TU

Tel: (44)(0)117-928-8380
Email: [log in to unmask]