At the start of the 21st century, Eric Hobsbawm could claim to be the most famous and most widely read historian in the world. His books were bestsellers, read by millions. His death in 2012 was front-page news in countries as far apart as India and Brazil. In his sunset years this unrepentant Marxist had been showered with degrees and prizes: Fellow of the British Academy, honorary fellow of his Cambridge college and Companion of Honour, invested as such in a ceremony conducted at Buckingham Palace. When Hobsbawm knelt on a footstool to allow the Queen to drape the ribbon bearing the medal around his neck, a small piece of plaster fell from the ceiling to the floor, seemingly in protest. His acceptance of this honorific was too much for one of his former comrades. “That’s Eric off the Christmas card list.”
Hobsbawm’s life has already been chronicled in a magisterial authorised biography by Richard J Evans, published in 2019, seven years after its subject’s death; it now receives a somewhat different account in The Age of Hobsbawm by Emile Chabal, professor of contemporary history at Edinburgh. Chabal had planned to write a history of French Marxism, but came to believe that he could dramatise the story of the European and perhaps the global left in the life of a single individual.
Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria in 1917, a year sacred to communists as that of the Bolshevik Revolution. He spent his boyhood in Vienna with his Jewish parents, his father British – of Polish ancestry – and his mother Austrian. Orphaned at the age of 14, he was sent to live with his uncle and aunt in Berlin, where he experienced a city in ferment, as a political struggle between left and right was being fought on the streets. The young Eric was caught up in the excitement of the dying days of the Weimar Republic. He joined the Socialist School Students’ League, a communist-front organisation, the start of what Hobsbawm would call his “lifetime of commitment”. In his memoirs he recalled “the Columbus-like moment of adolescence when passion and intelligence discover the world for the first time, and the very experience of living is unforgettable”.
He became intoxicated by Marxism: “a totalising ideology”, a solution to every problem, a system which explained everything. The young Hobsbawm “loved to discuss, contradict, criticise and hold forth”, Chabal tells us, and Marxism provided unlimited opportunities for all of this. At 17, Hobsbawm confided to his diary that he wanted to “dive into” Marxism, “like into the sea, and sink into it”; he wanted to “love it”, he wrote, “both sensually and spiritually, as one loves a woman” – though of course his experience of women was then limited (he was still a virgin). By the time Hobsbawm wrote these lines he was in London; his uncle Sidney had decided that the family should relocate to Britain. In later life it was assumed that Hobsbawm had been a refugee who had “escaped” Nazi Germany, though he had in fact been born British, and had been known at his Berlin school as “the English boy”.
The young Hobsbawm was an omnivorous reader and precociously clever. He won a scholarship to read history at King’s College, Cambridge, where word soon got around about this impressive young man, the subject of a profile in Granta: “There’s a freshman at King’s who knows everything.” He joined the Communist Party, and in his final term as an undergraduate, the Apostles, a secret society of the cleverest students. Asked for his favourite book, he joked: “I haven’t written it yet.” He took a starred first and seemed set for a brilliant future.
But it was obvious that war was imminent, and early in 1940 Hobsbawm was called up by the Royal Engineers. Shortly before the unit was transferred to Singapore – soon to be overrun by Japan – he was, luckily for him, transferred to the army’s Educational Corps and spent the remainder of the war lecturing his fellow soldiers. He became known as a left-wing proselytiser, attracting the attention of MI5.
After the war Hobsbawm was offered a research fellowship at King’s, and returned to Cambridge. This was the beginning of a rather curious career as a professional historian. His PhD thesis, on the early Fabians, was considered unworthy of publication, and the first book he was commissioned to write, on “The Rise of the Wage Worker”, was rejected as too doctrinaire. Rather than continue as a conventional academic, Hobsbawm took a post at Birkbeck College in London, teaching adults in the evening – as he had done during the war. His first real book, Primitive Rebels (1959), was not published until he was in his forties. Focusing on marginalised groups excluded from political and economic power, Hobsbawm attempted to explain an apparent anomaly in Marxist theory, in the process introducing English-speaking readers to the ideas of the Italian philosopher-politician Antonio Gramsci. By this time Hobsbawm had earned a public reputation as a Marxist polemicist, not least in the pages of the New Statesman, where in the mid-1950s he conducted a long-running war of words with the more conservatively minded historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, defending the continuing relevance of Karl Marx as a historian. (He was also the magazine’s jazz critic.)
Hobsbawm was making himself felt: he was a leading figure in the Communist Party Historians’ Group, and one of the founders of the influential Marxisant journal Past & Present (subtitle: “A Journal of Scientific History”). But his career really took off when he was commissioned to write a textbook for a series published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789-1848 (1962) was the first in a trilogy of books published over the next 25 years about the period which Hobsbawm termed “the long 19th century”, between the French Revolution and the outbreak of the First World War. None of these books required the original research usually expected of a historian, nor were they written for academic readers. In preparing lectures, first in the army and then at Birkbeck, Hobsbawm had learned to write clearly, without jargon, and to hold the attention of unacademic audiences with skilful use of anecdotal detail. The result was much more readable form of “total history” than its only real competitor, the stodgy compilations of The New Cambridge Modern History.
Hobsbawm’s trilogy was enormously successful, translated into an ever growing list of languages (22 at the last count), turning Hobsbawm himself into an international celebrity. It concluded with a fourth volume, rather different in character, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (1994). In Brazil it sold more than a quarter of a million copies.
Ironically, Hobsbawm achieved worldwide esteem as a historian at the very moment his underlying philosophy seemed to have been discredited by the collapse of Soviet communism. For Marxists, this was no ordinary defeat, because they had believed that history itself was on their side; Marxism taught that class struggle would lead inevitably to the triumph of the proletariat and to a classless society. For Marxist intellectuals, the failure of the Soviet experiment in which they had invested so much faith created a crisis of belief: not so for Hobsbawm. He had no time for the New Left (“yuppie politics”), nor for identity politics, which he termed “not serious”; he remained Old Left to the last, faithful to the doctrine preached by Lenin and intolerant of any deviations.
As an undergraduate, Hobsbawm had travelled to France and French North Africa, and he would travel extensively throughout his life. He found no contradiction in travelling first class if paid to do so, nor in biting the hand that fed him. In 1968, at a conference in Cuba, he denounced the nefarious activities of the CIA and foundations such as Ford and Rockefeller; that same year he accepted funding from the Ford Foundation to travel to Argentina and had previously been sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation on a tour of South America. Party membership provided Hobsbawm with a global network of communist contacts, meaning that he could always be assured of a friendly face wherever he went. More than those of most historians, his publications reflected the places he had seen and the people he had met. He sought, and found, a global audience. He formed a habit of making very broad historical generalisations based on a short visit, sometimes only a few hours. He called this “fieldwork”. Of course, a view based on a brief visit was likely to be superficial, and there was a tendency to confirm what he wanted to see rather than what was actually happening. Instead of denouncing the military dictatorship in Peru, for example, he praised the generals for improving the lot of the people.
Chabal’s biography emulates its subject, in the clarity of its prose and its avoidance of jargon. But in his opening pages Chabal explains that his is “an intellectual biography”. What does he mean? Any competent biographer would place an intellectual in his or her intellectual milieu, as Chabal does well. Chabal seems to use the term to mean a biography that explores the life of Hobsbawm’s ideas at the expense of his personal life, as if these were unrelated. There is little here about Hobsbawm’s childhood, his relationships or his family. The result is that when Chabal refers to “Hobsbawm’s complex and complexed attitude to sex”, the uninformed reader has no idea what he is talking about. This is a shame, because when he does speculate about Hobsbawm’s psychology, Chabal can be acute, suggesting, for example, that for Hobsbawm “writing constituted a form of therapy”, and that in The Age of Extremes Hobsbawm was grieving for the failure of communism: “He processed the trauma of defeat by trying to explain how it happened.” Chabal appears to have begun work on his biography almost 15 years ago, and his attempt to distance his own book from Evans’s may explain the thematic rather than conventionally chronological structure, though this leads to some jarring repetition.
Hobsbawm was an intellectual in the French sense, a historian with a deep hinterland who grappled with ideas on a global scale. Yet he was unable to process the failure of the cause to which he had dedicated his life. He would remain in the Communist Party of Great Britain until its dissolution in 1991, seemingly unperturbed by Stalin’s purges, the Gulag, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In a piece entitled “The Last Romantic”, assessing Hobsbawm’s career in 2003, the historian Tony Judt wrote that he had “somehow slept through the terror and shame of our age”.
Though Hobsbawm seems to have been a likeable individual, there was a coldness at his core. In 1994, asked by Michael Ignatieff in an interview on the BBC’s The Late Show if the deaths of 15 to 20 million people would have been worthwhile if it had brought about “a radiant tomorrow”, Hobsbawm answered: “Yes.”
The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian
Emile Chabal
Harvard University Press, 480pp, £26.95
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[Further reading: M John Harrison’s catastrophic memory]
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This article appears in the 20 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special
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Subscribe here to commentHiw was he different to any committed adherent of egg breaking today for tomorrow’s omelette religions? An intellectual opium smoker to paraphrase his prophet.
It cannot surprise anyone that Marxism failed as it denies the capacity of people to progress from their current situation. It is part of our nature to want to live a comfortable life and pass that situation on to our children. When I was a student of economics in 1961 nearly half the class of 30 of us professed to be Marxists. None of them progressed past the second year exams. People also ask why religion failed, or appears to be failing. The answer is the same. As people become more educated the logic of an eternal being who created us just fails to be believable.
Religion is now making a comeback in the West, especially among young educated people, the secular alternatives all having definitively failed.
And alternative explanations to God for our existence, being complete duds.
Communism failed because it failed to improve human nature.
All political movements fail for the same reason.
As it is within human nature that the world’s problems are situated. Or rather problem – egotism, which people often take to worse extremes than any other animal, humans being the only animals capable of choosing moral evil over good.
The evil of the world can’t be blamed on society, politics or economics, those being mere human creations.
And blaming certain groups for that evil – as the Left is always eager to do – is scapegoating.
And self-righteous humbug, the Left being every bit as evil as the rest of humanity.
Ah ! So this is a leftist echo chamber !
A truly dangerous individual – hypocritical, sinister and absolutely without shame. His comment on The Late Show truly exemplifies the evil at the heart of Marxist-Leninism.