The other night I was just teased by my supervisor that I was discussing Hobsbawm with some friends in a farm north of Denmark during the wee hours. Sad, a great loss indeed, but Hobsbawm's ideas and contributions live on.
A moment of silence for you....
Here was Professor Eric Hobsbawm at 94, turning 95, still sharp and lucid:
In his last book, How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011, Professor Hobsbawm wrote what even capitalist and pro-capitalist political forces have now realized in this time of global crisis:
" Once again it is evident that even between major crises, ‘the market’ has no answer to the major problem confronting the twenty-first century: that unlimited and increasingly high-tech economic growth in the pursuit of unsustainable profit produces global wealth, but at the cost of an increasingly dispensable factor of production, human labour, and, one might add, of the globe’s natural resources. Economic and political liberalism, singly or in combination, cannot provide the solution to the problems of the twenty-first century. Once again the time has come to take Marx seriously. "
One of the most unforgettable conferences that I attended was the 2009 Historical Materialism Conference where I presented a paper on the global capitalist crisis in Professor Hobsbawm's Birkbeck College at the University of London. I did not see him there but it is wonderful to think that it was in that College where the great historian had his initial struggles to be an academic—rising from being a lecturer to become its President—and where some of the most important works on world history was written: the long 19th century (The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789-1848; The Age of Capital: 1848-1875; The Age of Empire: 1875-1914) and the short 20th century (The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991).
Two of my favourite classic British historians have now left us — E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm — ideas and analyses of both have contributed to my thesis. I would have wanted to be a historian myself; I believe socio-political and economic analyses would have been easier for me. I feel that our current generation of students are too young to remember history. Unfortunately, many teachers are also either uninitiated or totally disinterested about the importance of history in understanding the present in light of the past for the benefit of the future.
Long live, Professor Hobsbawm, and the history he has written!
Some classic video clips here of E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm:
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