NATIONS AND NATIONALISM SINCE 1780
Eric. J. Hobsbawm
Cambridge University Press, 1990
191 + viii pp.
In 1972 I met Eric Hobsbawm after giving a response to a paper on Marx and Marxism at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. Though a longtime member of the English Communist Party even then, Hobsbawm kept his distance form the young Marxists who attended our session. Unlike the self-described New Leftists swarming about, he was impeccably dressed in a three-piece British tweed suit. Hobsbawm took special exception to those New Leftists, including the target of my criticism, who depicted Marx inaccurately as an antiracist, feminist, Zionism, or whatever else was then in fashion. He defended Marx exclusively as a "scientific" socialist, whose socialist views led to the kind of dictatorship of the proletariat established by Lenin in the Soviet Union. Hobsbawm welcomed the ridicule that I poured on statements about Marx's sensitivity to Jews, women, and blacks. He agreed with my assertion that prejudiced though Marx may have been, his dislikes were irrelevant to any consideration of his scholarly accomplishments. Marxism's claims as a "science of history " had to be shown on the basis of its predictive accuracy. Not by portraying Marx as a modern liberal.
In conversation, Hobsbawm displayed the analytical hardness that I then associated with Eugene Genovese, Louis Althusser, and other Stalinist interpreters of Marx. I remember saying to him, only half in jest, "I'd be a Stalinist like you and Gene [Genovese] if I ever did become a leftist." At that time, I identified Hobsbawm with carefully constructed studies of the eighteenth century and of the Industrial Revolution and with his Austrian refugee family (much like my father's) that had fled form the Nazis in the late thirties, despite the political gulf between us, I admired his intellectual rigor and gentlemanly demeanor and took ethnic pride in his best writings.
Unfortunately, a defective, sentimental side has also surfaced in Hobsbawm's work, which may partly explain his unswerving attachment to Soviet hard-liners. In the autobiographical section of an anthology of his essays, Revolutionaries (1973), he lets it be known that his attrition to communism grew out of his emphatic rejection of "tribal nationalism." As a refugee from an aberrant form a German tribalism who also disdained its "Jewish blood-and-soil" variation, Hobsbawm joined the communist movement, which spoke for the entire human race through its most revolutionary representatives. In Revolutionaries we find out that unlike, say James Burnham, who became a Trotskyist entirely from intellectual conviction, Hobsbawm embraced Stalinist communism because of his repugnance for nationalists. His acceptance of the "scientific" paraphernalia came later, after he had convinced himself that Soviet communism would put an end to all nationalist enthusiasms.
In Nations and Nationalism sine 1789, the same wishful thinking as the type that drove Hobsbawm into the Stalinist camp breaks though. Having already convinced himself that Russian imperialism as practiced by the Kremlin has always been the antithesis of nationalism, he now makes another related, dubious assumption - that nationalism is on its way out. All he demonstrates is that Western nation-states are less able now than in the past to enforce loyalty to a central
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