The Great Persuader
Paul Laity on Eric Hobsbawm, "the world's best-known historian."
As a scholar who not only has been a formidable presence in the historical profession since the 1940s, but can say that he "remembers vividly" the cold winter night Hitler took power in Berlin, Hobsbawm feels qualified to stand back from the contemporary scene and see it "in a broader context and in a longer perspective". And his standing has never been higher, thanks to his two previous books: the bestselling account of the "short 20th century", The Age of Extremes (1994), which has been called his masterpiece; and his memoir, Interesting Times (2002), the writing in which surpasses the already exacting standards of a renowned stylist. Hobsbawm's range and power of analysis are unquestioned. He speaks numerous languages, has travelled everywhere and is equally at home assessing football's Bosman ruling as he is explaining stock market crashes. Even the Spectator, a magazine assuredly hostile to his unrepentant communism, calls him our "greatest living historian".
He is pleased to have reached 90: soon it won't be that unusual, he points out, but for now it has a certain "scarcity value". Hobsbawm wants to help us see beyond "current passions and sales pitches" - be prepared, however: he has no truck with liberal pieties. "More nonsense and meaningless blather is talked in western public discourse today about democracy than about almost any other word or political concept," he insists. "Fundamentalist Islam isn't a danger, if only because it can't win any wars." Young, "fundamentalist bomb-throwers", he says, are nothing compared to the IRA. He dismisses the idea that the UN has any independent authority, and has no time for humanitarian interventions: "the default position of any state is to pursue its interests".
Hobsbawm assesses current dilemmas with a coolness and detachment that his political opponents have been quick to identify as an unfeeling, mandarin Marxism. Touchy-feely is not his style; he follows, he says, the traditions of Enlightenment rationalism and is frustrated with recent "hysterias" and the "totally unstructured feeling that 'something must be done'". His aim, he writes, is to assist the young "to face the darkening prospects of the 21st century . . . with the requisite pessimism".
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