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Eric Hobsbawm

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Dr Eric John Blair Hobsbawm CH (born June 9, 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt) is a British Marxist historian and author. Hobsbawm was a long-standing member of the now defunct Communist Party of Great Britain and the associated Communist Party Historians Group. He is president of Birkbeck, University of London.

One of Hobsbawm's interests is the development of traditions. His work is a study of their construction in the context of the nation state. He argues that many traditions are invented by national elites to justify the existence and importance of their respective nation states.


Contents

Life

Hobsbawm (a clerical error altered Eric's name [1]) was born in 1917 as child of Leopold Percy Hobsbaum and Nelly Grün, both Jewish, in Alexandria, Egypt, and he grew up in Vienna and Berlin. Although they lived in German-speaking countries, his parents continued to speak to him and his two-year younger sister Nancy in English.

His father died in 1929, and he started working as a male au pair and English tutor.

He became an orphan at age 14 when his mother died, and he and Nancy were adopted by his maternal aunt Gretl and paternal uncle Sidney, who married and had a son, also named Eric. They moved to London in 1933.

Hobsbawm married twice, first to Muriel Seaman in 1943 (divorced in 1951) and the second time to Marlene Schwarz. He has two children with Marlene, Julia Hobsbawm and Andy Hobsbawm, and a son Joshua from a previous relationship.

He became a Companion of Honour in 1998.

Politics

He joined the Socialist Schoolboys in 1931 and the Communist party in 1936. He was member of the Communist Party Historians Group from 1946 to 1956.

In 1956, he spoke out against the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

He worked with the magazine Marxism Today during the 1980s and supported Neil Kinnock's modernization of the British Labour Party.

Academic life

He was educated at Prinz-Heinrich-Gymnasium Berlin, St Marylebone Grammar School (now defunct) and King's College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in history on the Fabian Society. He was part of the elite intellectual secret society of the Cambridge Apostles.

During World War II, he served in the Royal Engineers and the Royal Army Educational Corps.

In 1947, he became a lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, University of London.

He was a visiting professor at Stanford in the 1960s.

In 1970, he was appointed professor and in 1978 he was made a Fellow of the British Academy.

He retired in 1982 but stayed as visiting professor some months a year at The New School for Social Research in Manhattan until 1997. He is currently professor emeritus of The New School for Social Research's political science department.

He speaks English, German, French, Spanish and Italian, and reads Dutch, Portuguese and Catalan.

Works

Hobsbawm has written extensively on many subjects as one of Britain's most prominent historians. As a Marxist historiographer he has focused on analysis of the 'dual revolution' (the political French revolution and the industrial British revolution). He sees their effect as a driving force behind the predominant trend towards liberal capitalism today. Another recurring theme in his work have been social bandits, a phenomenon that Hobsbawm has tried to place within the confines of relevant societal and historical context thus countering the traditional view of it being a spontaneous and unpredictable form of primitive rebellion. Outside of academic historical writing, Hobsbawm has written (under the pseudonym Francis Newton – taken from the name of Billie Holiday's Communist trumpet player) for the New Statesman as a jazz critic and has numerous essays published in various intellectual journals, dealing with anything from barbarity in the modern age to the troubles of labour movements and the conflict between anarchism and communism.

His most recent publication was the autobiography, Interesting Times.

Controversy

Hobsbawm has attracted criticism for his support for Communism. According to Robert Conquest, in an interview with Canadian cultural critic Michael Ignatieff on British television in 1994, he responded to the question of whether 20 million deaths would have been justified if the proposed Communist utopia had been created as a consequence by saying "yes" [2].

But, in his own 1994 book, The Age of Extremes he wrote that the deaths were beyond justification (page 393, ISBN 0-349-10671-1):

"Still, whatever assumptions are made, the number of direct and indirect victims must be measured in eight rather than seven digits.In these circumstances it does not much matter whether we opt for a 'conservative` estimate nearer to ten than to twenty millions or a larger figure: none can be anything but shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification."

Publication list

He has written (among other things) the following books:


References

Persondata
NAME Hobsbawm, Eric John Blair
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Newton, Francis (pen name as jazz critic)
SHORT DESCRIPTION British historian; Marxist historiographer; history professor; studied French Revolution and Industrial Revolution; Communist Party of Great Britain theorist
DATE OF BIRTH June 9, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Alexandria, Egypt
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

Categories


1917 births | Living people | Alumni of King's College, Cambridge | Communist Party of Great Britain members | British historians | Jewish historians | British Jews | Academics of Birkbeck, University of London | People associated with Birkbeck, University of London | Fellows of the British Academy | Companions of Honour | Marxist historians

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