Biography of Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm was one of the leading Marxist historians of the twentieth century and one of the best-known historians in the English-speaking world.

Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1917 and spent his childhood in Vienna and Berlin. Following the death of his parents and Hitler’s rise to power, he moved to London in 1933. He continued his studies at St Marylebone’s Grammar School in London, before gaining a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge where he matriculated in 1936. He graduated in 1939. During the Second World War, he was based in England and served principally in the Army Educational Corps.

After the war, Hobsbawm returned at Cambridge for his doctoral research (1945-9) and was subsequently elected to a fellowship at King’s. In 1947, he was given a lectureship at Birkbeck College, University of London. He remained at Birkbeck for his entire career until his retirement in 1982, after which he held a yearly one-semester visiting position at the New School of Social Research in New York from 1984 until 1997. He was elected president of Birkbeck in 2002.

Hobsbawm made his name as a member of the Communist Party Historians Group in the late 1940s and early 1950s. During this period, he worked on different aspects of British labour and economic history and made influential interventions in various historiographical debates on the “standard of living” and the “transition” from feudalism to capitalism. He was also employed as a critic for the New Statesman magazine, writing a series of articles and reviews about jazz and popular music under the pseudonym Francis Newton.

From the late 1950s until the 1980s, he devoted a good deal of his research to the question of “primitive” rebellion, banditry, peasant political movements, and the structure of agrarian societies, both inside and outside Europe. His interest in these topics was sparked by his travels to Italy and Spain in the 1950s, then to Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. This led to the publication of various sets of essays, the most influential of which was Primitive Rebels (1959).

Hobsbawm is perhaps best-known for his trilogy of introductory textbooks about the “long 19th century” — The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 (1962), The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (1975) and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (1987) — and his overview of the 20th century, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (1994). These books sold hundreds of thousands of copies and were translated into many languages. In countries such as Brazil, they made him a household name.

In his later years, Hobsbawm published on an extraordinary range of topics, including nations and nationalism, “invented traditions”, globalisation, and terrorism. He also became a prominent public intellectual who was embroiled in a series of debates about the future of the left in the UK and elsewhere in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2003, Hobsbawm received the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900 “for his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of 20th century Europe and for his ability to combine in-depth historical research with great literary talent.” Shortly before he died, he republished some of his essays on Marx and Marxism in response to a renewed interest in Marxist ideas following the financial crisis of 2008.

Hobsbawm was a life-long Communist. He identified with the communist movement during his teenage years in Berlin, but only formally joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1936, upon arrival at Cambridge. He remained a party member until the CPGB was dissolved in 1991. After the crisis of 1956, he became increasingly detached from British communism, but he developed a strong association with the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) until it, too, fell apart in 1991. Although his communist leanings were clearly visible in many of his writings, he was neither dogmatic nor beholden to specific Marxist interpretations of history. However, he was unrepentant about his communist views, and his political commitment profoundly shaped both his social and intellectual life.

Hobsbawm died in 2012 at the age of 95.

― Emile Chabal (2020)

For more detailed biographical information, see Eric Hobsbawm’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2016) and his British Academy obituary (2015). Additional critical perspectives on Hobsbawm’s life and work can be found in this bibliography in the section entitled ‘Appraising Hobsbawm’.

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