Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [176]
Perhaps this explains why, though producing learned articles, I wrote fewer academic books in this decade – effectively only The Age of Capital (1974), which made me aware that, without having meant to, I was engaged in writing a wildly ambitious general history of the nineteenth century. Actually much of the most intensive work I did during that decade, planning and writing for an equally ambitious History of Marxism, which was published by Einaudi in Turin in 1978–82, never reached the public entirely in languages other than Italian, since the public interest in these matters dropped precipitately at the end of the 1970s. However, in the 1980s my production speeded up again, largely thanks to the wonderful conditions available in New York and Los Angeles. I published a new collection of papers on labour history (Worlds of Labour, in the USA Workers) in 1984, the third volume on the nineteenth century in 1987 (The Age of Empire 1875– 1914), and two books based on invited lectures, Nations and Nationalism Since the 1780s (what other subject was there to lecture on in Belfast in 1985?) and Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution, both in 1990. I also co-edited and contributed to a volume based on a Past & Present conference I had organized a few years earlier, and which proved to be unusually influential: The Invention of Tradition (1983). My image as I went into my eighth decade was that of an eccentric elderly grandee of the historical profession, who happened to insist that he was a Marxist, but who continued in full production.
Indeed, the history of the twentieth century I wrote in the happy conditions of the New School (where I had been teaching for a semester a year since 1984), The Age of Extremes 1914–1991 (1994), was my most successful book, both in sales and critical reception. It was well received across the entire ideological spectrum of the globe – with the single exception of France – winning prizes in Canada as well as Taiwan, being translated both into Hebrew and Arabic, into Taiwan and Mainland Mandarin, into Croatian and Serbian editions of what my generation still thinks of as the Serbo-Croat language, and into both Albanian and Macedonian. By the second year of the new century it had been or was about to be published in thirty-seven languages.
And yet, in a field as steeped in politics, its own and the world’s, as the writing of history, it would be quite unrealistic to separate the two. Much as someone in my position resented being placed into a Marxist ghetto, my reputation as a historian (and certainly in the 1960s and 1970s my sales) undoubtedly benefited from my reputation as a Marxist. Paradoxically, it was in the world of ‘really existing socialism’ that my books were not published, outside Hungary and Slovenia. The local theologians did not know what to do about a historian who could not be published as an unbeliever (‘not of course, a marxist, but worth consulting in certain respects’), nor as a Marxist, since the only ‘marxist interpretation’ they recognized was a restatement of the officially recognized orthodoxy.
In the West, and even more in what was then called the Third World, the 1960s were a good time for my kind of history, or more exactly, for the alliance of historical modernizers whose fortunes I have discussed in the last chapter. Consider the three-volume Economic Historyof