Eric Hobsbawm’s Lament for the Twentieth Century

When it was released in 1994, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes was a global bestseller, translated into many languages. It was a sensation in Brazil, for example, where Hobsbawm was known as a friend to peasants and future presidents alike (and where nearly one million copies of his books have sold). Readers responded to Hobsbawm’s effort to write contemporary history that explained their own times, as the book described the years from 1914 to 1991. The Age of Extremes also completed a tetralogy that Hobsbawm had begun in the 1970s. The Age of Revolution (1789–1848), The Age of Capital (1848–1875), and The Age of Empire (1875–1914) covered what Hobsbawm described as the “long nineteenth century,” which begins with the French Revolution but was defined by the rise of industrial capitalism, the consolidation of the nation-state, and the global dominance of Europe. The Age of Extremes describes what came next: the “short twentieth century” to follow the long nineteenth. 

In the 77 years of the “short twentieth century,” enormous changes occurred. The world population more than tripled. Global economic production expanded even faster: It was almost 10 times greater in 1991 than it was in 1920. People were, on average, healthier and better educated. Empires fell: The world was no longer Eurocentric. Economically, the world was more than ever a single unit, more “globalized.” And old patterns of social relationships were swept away with new forms of living. Capitalism was, Hobsbawm argued, echoing Marx, “a permanent and continuous revolutionizing force.”

But Hobsbawm was no end-of-history liberal, eager to celebrate the death of the Soviet Union and the permanent victory of liberal capitalism. The years covered by Hobsbawm’s “short twentieth century” coincided with the existence of the Soviet Union, a project that Hobsbawm believed in for much of his adult life; he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1930s and had only half-heartedly let his membership lapse in 1991. He was too honest a historian to deny that ultimately the Soviet Union had not produced an appealing alternative to capitalism. But he was too attached to his political hopes not to feel that this was something to be lamented, rather than celebrated. “The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I have abandoned, nay, rejected it, but it has not been obliterated.” In the long nineteenth century, he thought, there had been almost “unbroken material, intellectual and moral progress.” The twentieth century had instead been marked by regression.

Thirty years later, does The Age of Extremes hold up? Many of its good qualities remain. Hobsbawm remains a brilliant writer and communicator. It is impressively wide-ranging, covering the arts and sciences along with politics and economics. Its Marxism both helps and hinders the text. At times, he strains to explain things that don’t need explaining, and he seems uneasy with social changes that another historian might see as demonstrations of moral progress. But if a classic is a work that remains worth reading both for what it is and for what it tells us about the time it was created, Hobsbawm’s text deserves that status. It rewards the reader not because a historian would write the same book today but precisely because they would not. 

The Age of Extremes begins with catastrophe: the years from 1914 to 1945, saddled by a global Depression and bookended by two wars whose destructiveness showed the dark side of humanity’s material and scientific advancement. Hobsbawm renders events compactly. “Millions of men faced each other,” he writes of World War I, “across the sandbagged parapets of the trenches under which they lived like, and with, rats and lice.” Hobsbawm is also brilliant in connecting political developments to those in other domains, making small points of data into powerful observations. To mark the changes in science, he notes that the total number of German and British chemists in 1910 was 8,000. By the 1980s the number of people employed in scientific research surpassed five million. 

Hobsbawm, who had a side career as a jazz critic, is similarly adept at connecting changes in the arts to historical shifts. This is where his Marxism is most powerful, as Marxists are taught to think about the subterranean power lines that run from economics through politics, society, and culture. He begins his discussion of modernism in the arts—cubism in painting, atonality in music—with the observation: “Why brilliant fashion-designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, is one of the most obscure questions in history; and, for the historian of culture, one of the most central.” The avant-garde, in his view, both reflects and sometimes prefigures the breakdown of European civilization.

Most crucial of all—to Hobsbawm’s understanding of the century—was an unintended consequence of World War I: the Russian Revolution. Hobsbawm finds much to praise. First, it created a model for transforming a backward agrarian society into a modern industrial one (something that partially explained its appeal to leaders of “Third World” countries later hoping to do the same). Lenin, observes Hobsbawm, did not shy away from use of the term “backward” to describe the Soviet Union, and Hobsbawm has no problem with the term either, for he expects progress from the world. But Lenin’s organizational model, the disciplined party under central control, would eventually come to rule over a third of the world’s population. It was inefficient and frequently cruel. But it was, in its own way, effective, and Hobsbawm credits it with making victory over fascism possible in World War II.

When The Age of Extremes was released, the Canadian liberal Michael Ignatieff asked Hobsbawm whether, if he had known the number of people dying in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, it would have made a difference to his commitment to being a Communist. “That is a sort of academic question to which an answer is simply not possible,” Hobsbawm began. “If I were to give you a retrospective answer, which is not the answer of a historian, I would have said probably not.” Ignatieff pressed for an explanation. “Because in a period in which … mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing,” Hobsbawm said. Ignatieff paraphrases: “Had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15-20 million people might have been justified?” And Hobsbawm simply answered: “Yes.”

Though many found this answer appalling, it has the virtue of honesty without self-pity. To understand The Age of Extremes it is essential to grasp that Hobsbawm came to accept many critiques of communism but still resisted membership in the community of embittered (and frequently reactionary) ex-Communists. This identity does mean that he sometimes finds things surprising that others take for granted, and vice versa. The second third of the book concerns what the French called “les treinte glorieuses,” the 30 glorious years after the end of World War II. In the rich world, living standards rose dramatically. Goods that would once have been luxuries became accessible commodities for a wide range of people, with concomitant changes in the arts democratized by cheap broadcast and mechanical production. Some might see this as the recovery of productive capacity in a market economy, made more inclusive in part because of the solidarity brought about by war. Hobsbawm, instead, strains to explain why capitalism is suddenly working better than he expects that it should.

He even reaches for the notion of the cyclical “Kondratiev wave” of discovery within capitalism used by some Marxists. He may as well be saying that capitalism’s fortunes improved because Saturn was in retrograde. Plausibly enough, he credits a marriage of “economic liberalism and social democracy” but overreaches in attributing the idea of economic planning to the influence of the Soviet Union. It makes sense, given his worldview, that Hobsbawm would underestimate the resilience of market economics, and later he admits that their absence was part of the problem in the Soviet Union. But even if his reasoning is off, he does reach the right conclusion: namely, that the twentieth-century’s great economic innovation was the expansion of the mixed economy, with a commitment to welfare and social security across the life cycle. 

In a certain way, his arguments about the Soviet Union itself are among the most interesting, because here he cannot rely on Marxist critiques of capitalism to explain the outcomes. Instead he often draws on his own emotional experiences to explain what, to many, will feel impossible to explain. Without ignoring the role of terror to rule the Soviet Union, Hobsbawm reminds us that “communist militants outside the ‘socialist’ countries … wept genuine tears as they learned of [Stalin]’s death in 1953.” Hobsbawm probably insists too much that Stalin may have wished for “totalitarian” control but never achieved it (for that is true of all regimes that might be given the label). But it is insightful to recall that the regime’s public propaganda was most often ignored by its citizens. “Only the intellectuals were forced to take them seriously,” he argues, but the fact that the system needed intellectuals and gave them special privileges created some space outside of state control that would eventually emerge to challenge the system.        

Hobsbawm calls the final third of the book “The Landslide.” Beginning in the 1970s, the engines of the capitalist and socialist systems began to sputter. The Socialist bloc was hindered by the inflexibility and paranoia of its political and economic system. But in Europe and the United States, welfare capitalism strained to maintain itself too. It is perhaps not surprising that these pages, closest in proximity to the time of their writing, are the ones that an author would be most likely to handle differently today. Though the book has two chapters on the “Third World,” Hobsbawm is locked into a fairly Eurocentric main narrative because of the book’s three predecessors. More than 500 pages pass, for example, before there is any sustained treatment of China. Hobsbawm is more interested in Third World revolutionaries than in changing patterns of migration, or the movement for racial equality. “Women” as a category of analysis are attended to primarily in a section on the “cultural revolutions” brought about by new ways of work. It is hard not to reach the conclusion that he would have been inclined to take some of the twentieth century’s moral advances in civil rights more seriously if they had come wrapped in the packaging of a different economic system.

The life and death of the Soviet Union was the defining political fact of Hobsbawm’s life. Even as he writes that a “revival, or a rebirth of this pattern of socialism is neither possible, desirable, nor—even assuming conditions were to favor it—necessary,” he still believes that it was the fundamental feature of the short twentieth century. An organized alternative to capitalism existed, even if it proved not a superior one. Hobsbawm is surely being cheeky when he says that the collapse of the Soviet Union validated Marx, when he wrote that “the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing productive relationships.” But the end to history that Marx imagined did not come. Thirty years later, few imagine that it will.

That this was a tragedy rather than a triumph shapes the mood of The Age of Extremes and probably explains part of what made it a bestseller in the mid-1990s. It was a kind of counterprogramming to liberal triumphalism. And with the blessings of liberal institutions so unevenly granted around the globe, it is no wonder that he found enthusiastic readers in many countries and languages. There are moments in The Age of Extremes when Hobsbawm still seems to grip too tightly to the ropes of sand holding his belief system together. Still, this is part of what makes his book valuable. The twentieth century contained millions of people who thought the way he did. And if they made both moral and analytical errors, they were also skeptical that liberalism would know what to do with its victory. When Francis Fukuyama wrote of the “end of history,” he too warned that the future might be “a very sad time,” in which people struggled for meaning in a world without ideological contestation. On this, he and Hobsbawm probably would have agreed. 

“It may well be,” Hobsbawm writes with self-awareness in The Age of Extremes, “that the debate which confronted capitalism and socialism as mutually exclusive and polar opposites will be seen by future generations as a relic of the twentieth-century ideological Cold Wars of Religion … as irrelevant to the third millennium as the debate between Catholics and various reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on what constituted true Christianity proved to be in the eighteenth and nineteenth.” Probably so: Already it seems to me unlikely that the Soviet Union would be treated as the crucial feature of the twentieth century. But historians need records like The Age of Extremes so that we can remember what the world felt like to someone who belonged to a time that is no longer our own, with neither condescension nor nostalgia.