Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [1]
Again, this book is not written in the now very saleable confessional mode, partly because the only justification for such an ego-trip is genius – I am neither a St Augustine nor a Rousseau – partly because no living autobiographer could tell the private truth about matters involving other living people without unjustifiably hurting the feelings of some of them. I have no good reason for doing so. That field belongs to posthumous biography and not to autobiography. In any case, however curious we are about these matters, historians are not gossip columnists. The military merits of generals are not to be judged by what they do, or fail to do, in bed. All attempts to derive Keynes’s or Schumpeter’s economics from their rather full but different sex lives are doomed. Besides, I suspect that readers with a taste for biographies that lift bedclothes would find my own life disappointing.
Nor is it written as an apologia for the author’s life. If you do not want to understand the twentieth century, read the autobiographies of the self-justifiers, the counsels for their own defence, and of their obverse, the repentant sinners. All of these are post-mortem inquests in which the corpse pretends to be the coroner. The autobiography of an intellectual is necessarily also about his ideas, attitudes and actions, but it should not be a piece of advocacy. I think this book contains answers to the questions that I have been most often asked by journalists and others interested in the somewhat unusual case of a lifelong but anomalous communist and ‘Hobsbawm the Marxist historian’, but answering them has not been my object. History may judge my politics – in fact it has substantially judged them – readers may judge my books. Historical understanding is what I am after, not agreement, approval or sympathy.
Nevertheless, there are some reasons why it may be worth reading, apart from the curiosity of human beings about other human beings. I have lived through almost all of the most extraordinary and terrible century in human history. I have lived in a few countries and seen something of several others in three continents. I may not have left an observable mark on the world in the course of this long life, although I have left a good quantity of printed marks on paper, but since I became conscious of being a historian at the age of sixteen I have watched and listened for most of it and tried to understand the history of my lifetime.
When, having written the history of the world between the late eighteenth century and 1914, I finally tried my hand at the history of what I called The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, I think it benefited from the fact that I wrote about it not only as a scholar but as what the anthropologists call a ‘participant observer’. It did so in two ways. Clearly my personal memories of events remote in time and space brought the history of the twentieth century closer to younger readers, while it reawakened their own memories in older ones. And, more even than my other books, however compelling the obligations of historical scholarship, this one was written with the passion that belongs to the age of extremes. Both kinds of readers have told me so. But beyond this there is a more profound way in which the interweaving of one person’s life and times, and the observation of both, helped to shape a historical analysis which, I hope, makes itself independent of both.
That is what an autobiography can do. In one sense this book is the flip side of The Age of Extremes: not world history illustrated by the experiences of an individual, but world history shaping that experience, or rather offering a shifting but always limited set of choices from which, to adapt Karl Marx’s phrase, ‘men make [their lives], but they do not make [them] just as they please, they do not make [them] under circumstances chosen