patrick iber

As part of The New Republic’s “Does it hold up?” series, I’ve taken a look back at Eric Hobsbawm’s The Ages of Extremes. It was one of the first history books that I read when I began to consider a career in history (as it was recommended to me by my mentor, Mark Mancall). Furthermore, its first reviewer for TNR was Eugene Genovese. So it is quite something to have advanced sufficiently in my career to be able to render judgment on a text as accomplished as this one.

I try to situate the book in its moment of publication in the 1990s, as a kind of counterprogramming to the “end of history” discourse.

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. 

Read the whole thing at TNR.