some stories about Eric Hobsbawm

[James Heartfield]

In message <p05001910b6258e68b3b2@[140.254.114.155]>, Yoshie Furuhashi
<furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> writes
>Your story tempts me to posit an 
>unholy Hegelian dialectic of "Popular Front Nationalism" and "New 
>Labour Cosmopolitanism."  In both the thesis & the antithesis in this 
>dialectic, imperialism tends to disappear from our sight.


As I remember it Gregor Maclennan's article on the CP Historians Group
was making the point that people's history recuperated patriotism in a
popular form, citing Hill's article 'The Norman Yoke' in which he
celebrates the strand of radicalism that sees the ruling class as
essentially foreign and unpatriotic.

Maclennan was a structuralist, one of those that Thompson effectively
demolished in his Poverty of Theory (?). But waspish as Maclennan's
criticisms are, he has a point. The long march of labour was a refracted
version of the Whig history that saw Britain's past as a progressive
march towards democratic political institutions. 
-- 
James Heartfield