Eric Hobsbawm is remembered as a polyglot of a kind that's vanished

Below is an excerpt from Jonathan Freedland's review of the posthumously published collection of essays, Fractured Times, by Eric Hobsbawm.

... On display is a kind of intellect now so rare as to be endangered, if not extinct. He was not the last polyglot scholar, of course; there remain others who can read and lecture comfortably in several European languages. But how many refer casually to the work of “Otto Weininger, Karl Kraus, Möbius, Lombroso, Strindberg,” taking for granted the reader’s familiarity with Hermann Bahr, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the second Viennese avant-garde?

Few of today’s intellectuals would risk a sentence like this one: “The links between Jugend and culture, or more specifically between it and die Moderne, are too obvious to require comment.” They would fear being inaccessible, if not outrageously elitist. Yet it’s clear Hobsbawm believes there is a body of knowledge that is the common inheritance, the patrimony, of all educated citizens — and that should be assumed. It’s in this, as much as through any argument he spells out, that the author shows how much has changed — and reveals himself as an emissary from a vanished world.

None of this is to suggest that Hobsbawm is a stuffy presence on the page. On the contrary, his prose is regularly enlivened with choice facts — “The first American productions of Ibsen were in Yiddish” — and elegant metaphor: “Operatic production, like Shakespearean play production, consists of attempts to freshen up eminent graves by putting different sets of flowers on them.”

What’s more, his range of reference is dazzlingly wide. Even in his 90s, he was able to comment on heavy metal, rave culture, football, Disneyland, social media, the movie “Man on Wire” and the Occupy movement against the “1 percent.” He makes some playfully unlikely connections. Noting that the decade after 1965 saw a decline in vocations for the Roman Catholic priesthood, he adds, “Indeed, 1965 was the year in which the French fashion industry for the first time produced more trousers than skirts.”

Unexpectedly, perhaps, for a Marxist, he is, in Isaiah Berlin’s well-worn formulation, more of a fox than a hedgehog, a knower of many things rather than the advocate of a single big idea. Indeed, Hobsbawm’s Marxism is lightly worn and anything but dogmatic. True, he remains a theoretical materialist, regularly tying developments in culture to changing economic circumstances, but those looking for Communist polemic will need to look elsewhere. In an essay on manifestoes, he describes the “Workers of the World Unite” slogan as “well past its sell-by date.” Elsewhere he calls the Enlightenment, not Communism, “the most admirable of all human movements.”

Yet Hobsbawm remains controversial. After his death, London’s Daily Mail ran a piece under the heading “He hated Britain and excused Stalin’s genocide. But was . . . Eric Hobsbawm a traitor too?” Earlier, and more respectably, Tony Judt had written that his fellow left-leaning historian “refuses to stare evil in the face and call it by its name; he never engages the moral as well as the political heritage of Stalin and his works.” Plausibly, Judt wondered if Hobsbawm’s failure to denounce Stalinism was an act of loyalty to his “adolescent self,” the boy who had witnessed the ascent of Hitler and remembered the Communists as the Nazis’ most strident opponents. The Reds had stood against the brownshirts and so Hobsbawm would forever stand with them. There is nothing in this collection to suggest that Judt got that wrong....

Read entire article at NYT Book Review