>Since Hobsbawm has been mentioned respectfully several times
>on the mailing list, I undertook reading The Age of Extremes.
>I would like to know more about Hobsbawm. Can somebody on
>the list sketch his bio for me?
"Eric John Hobsbawm was born in the summer of 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt. His mother was Austrian and his father English (the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant to the East End of London). Not long after he was born, Hobsbawm's family moved to Vienna (1919) and later to Berlin (1931), where he lived until Hitler came to power (1933). They then settled in England. Hobsbawm attended St Marylebone Grammar School (London) and went on to King's College, Cambridge, to read history. He has written that that he considered himself a Marxist even as a schoolboy and that his pursuit of historical studies was because he answered exam questions in 'unexpected ways', and thus did well at it. At Cambridge he found himself among other Marxist students - from whom, he says, he learned more than from most professors - and was an active member of the Communist Party. His studies were interrupted by the War, during which he served in the education corps, returning afterwards to Cambridge to complete his degree.
In 1947 Hobsbawm was appointed a lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, University of London, becoming a Reader in 1959, and Professor of Economic and Social History in 1970 (a position he held until his retirement in 1982). From 1949 to 1955, he was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He is currently a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York.
While Hobsbawm has clearly been one of the _British_ Marxist historians, the importance of his central European background should not be ignored. In an essay titled 'Intellectuals and Class Stuggle', in which he discusses the making of the young French revolutionaries of May 1968 in Paris in historical and comparative perspective, Hobsbawm also comments on his own 'social biography'.
He states that he sees himself a survivor of the now all but exstinguished 'Jewish middle class culture of central Europe after the first world war.' The demise of the pre-war social order, the Soviet Revolution, and the resurgent hatred of Jews left 'nothing but catastrophe and problematic survival. We lived on borrowed time and knew it. To make long-term plans seemed senseless...' He notes that 'we knew about the October Revolution... It proved that capitalism could and indeed must end, whether we liked it or not.' The experience of the war and the Russian Revolution, the Depression, political unrest and the rise of facism - these, Hobsbawm writes, 'were the times in which I became political'. [...]"
Harvey J. Kaye: The British Marxist Historians. An Introductory Analysis. 1984, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 132-133 (Chapter 5: Eric Hobsbawm on Workers, Peasants, and World History, p. 131-166).
-- HK