4/28/13 10:04 PMHobsbawm's last words - The Japan Times

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Hobsbawm’s last words

FRACTURED TIMES: Culture and Society in the 20th Century, by EricHobsbawm. Little, Brown, 2013, 336 pp., £25 (hardcover)

When you call a thinker a “conservative communist,” you sound as if youare making a weak joke. To understand the late Eric Hobsbawm’s peculiargenius, however, you must see him as just that, and accept there is nocontradiction.

Hobsbawm stayed loyal to the Soviet disaster to the very end. But long be-fore the Berlin Wall fell, he told the British left that socialism was dead andput his formidable authority behind the movement that led eventually toTony Blair. In theory, he believed in the overthrow of the British state. Inpractice, he accepted that most refined of honors, the Order of the Compan-ions of Honour, from no lesser personage than Her Majesty the Queen.

“Fractured Times” shows this revolutionary traditionalist at his best. It is anaccount of the collapse of the high bourgeois culture of the 19th century, andan examination of the ruins it left behind in the 20th century. He loved themboth, but understood why they could not last. All the certainties of the 19thcentury turned out to be lies. Instead of progress there were total wars andgenocides that mocked liberal optimism. Instead of a rational science, therewas quantum physics, which no one, not least quantum physicists, couldunderstand. The scientist J.B.S. Haldane, a comrade of Hobsbawm on theMarxist left, who is celebrated in these pages, suspected in 1927 that the uni-verse would turn out to be not only “queerer than we suppose, but queererthan we can suppose” — his suspicion has been vindicated.

Above all, mass consumer culture and democracy have undermined old elitetastes and certainties.

Hobsbawm can never see them coming back. No historian was better at de-ploying a killer fact to make an argument stick in your mind. As he makes

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his case that classical music is now a museum art form, he says “of the 60 op-eras performed by the Vienna State Opera in 1996-97 only one was writtenby a composer born in the 20th century.”

As that statistic implies, the “revolt against tradition” by what we can loose-ly call the modern movement, even if it is now very old, failed. The artisancrafts of classical music, fine art, sculpture, jazz and, Hobsbawm believed,maybe rock ‘n’ roll, too, are for aging audiences in the wired 21st century.

None of Hobsbawm’s excuse-making for communism, that other revoltagainst all traditions, appears here. Instead, there is a moving reflection onthe life of Karl Kraus, the Viennese writer who saw the horrors of the 20thcentury before anyone else, and satirized the dying Habsburg empire withbrilliant cruelty. You can satirize and protest in half-free societies like FranzJoseph’s Austria or Leonid Brezhnev’s Russia, says Hobsbawm. But Kraussaid of Hitler “on the subject of national socialism nothing occurs to me,”and the same satirical silence falls over Stalin’s Soviet Union. “To this day,”Stalin’s old supporter accepts, “no one makes fun of it, not even inretrospect.”

Yet regret at the passing of his certainties still lingers. Writing the introduc-tion just before he died, Hobsbawm says he was, “looking forward withmore troubled perplexity than I recall in a long lifetime, guideless andmapless, to an unrecognizable future.”

Really? The world is more troubled now than during the battles between dic-tators of the 1930s and 1940s? Or during the “mutually assured destruction”of the cold war? I do not think that this is just the pessimism that comes withage.

American economist Brad de Long was the first to notice that for as long asthe Soviet Union survived, Hobsbawm believed that humanity was pro-gressing in some form, as a Marxist should. Once it was gone, despair en-gulfed his writing. This rings true. My grandfather was Hobsbawm’s mentor

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in the British Communist party. He died before the Soviet Union did, but Inoticed that his friends gave up once it had gone.

There is another problem. “Fractured Times” is not a fully worked book buta collection of essays from the 1960s on. I wish Hobsbawm had found thetime to reconsider some of his judgments before he died. He repeats hisbeautifully nonchalant line, “Why brilliant fashion designers, a notoriouslynonanalytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things tocome better than professional predictors, remains one of the most obscurequestions in history.”

That was once true. While the old 19th-century order carried on as if nothingcould change, artists, including fashion designers, somehow anticipated thechaos that was coming in their work. Can they still do that?

One of the many staggering features of the great crisis of our lifetime washow few artists and writers were interested in the roaring, rapacious finan-cial sector that was hurtling toward disaster in front of their eyes. So compre-hensive was their indifference that the BBC, after the crash, had to revive“Little Dorrit,” Charles Dickens’ story of a banking crisis from 1855, whilethe National Theatre had to make do with Sir David Hare wandering thestage trying to explain what had gone wrong.

That I would love to know what Hobsbawm thought about the silence of theartists is one of the many, many reasons why his death last year was such aloss to British culture and, for he was always an internationalist, to theworld’s culture, too.

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