03 Oct 2012 16:05:10
The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, led tributes to the Marxist historian and academic Eric Hobsbawm, who died on Monday , calling him "an extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics and a great friend of my family".
Hobsbawm, one of the leading historians of the 20th century and an intellectual giant of the left, died in the early hours of Monday morning at the Royal Free hospital in north London, his family said, following a long illness. He was 95.
Miliband said Hobsbawm had "brought hundreds of years of British history to hundreds of thousands of people. He brought history out of the ivory tower and into people's lives."
Hobsbawm's work was influential in the evolution of New Labour during the 1990s. Tony Blair called him "a giant of progressive politics history, someone who influenced a whole generation of political and academic leaders. He wrote history that was intellectually of the highest order but combined with a profound sense of compassion and justice. And he was a tireless agitator for a better world."
In the course of an extraordinary life and career, Hobsbawm not only wrote about but personally witnessed many of the most dramatic events of the 20th century. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1917, the year of the Russian revolution, and first joined the communist movement as a Jewish teenager in Berlin, before his family left Germany in 1933, the year that Hitler came to power. "It was impossible to remain outside politics," he said many years later. "The months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist."
Though he was bitterly pained by many of the worst excesses of the USSR, he retained his membership of the British Communist party even after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and remained a Marxist throughout his life, facts that made him a controversial figure for many.
His work as a historian was greatly admired even by those who disagreed with his politics. In a Comment is free article, his fellow historian Niall Ferguson said that despite being "poles apart politically" he and Hobsbawm had been friends. "His politics did not prevent Hobsbawm from being a truly great historian," Ferguson wrote.
Hobsbawm's magisterial four-volume history of the rise of modern capitalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, from the French Revolution to the fall of the USSR, is acknowledged as among the defining works on the period, admired both for his analysis and the quality of his prose. Ferguson said the tetralogy, from The Age of Revolution in 1962, to 1994's The Age of Extremes, "remains the best introduction to modern world history in the English language".
Roy Foster, another friend and a former colleague at Birkbeck, said: "Most historians are by nature either short-story writers or novelists; Eric was both... I once heard him say that he thought his work would endure, not only because he believed his judgements were defensible, but because he had gone to a good deal of trouble to teach himself to write well."David Miliband described Hobsbawm as "a piercing intellect and a restless radical … His humanity trumped his ideology."
Hobsbawm taught at Cambridge, Stanford and, late in life, at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, but his longest and closest association was with Birkbeck College in London, beginning with his appointment to a history lectureship in 1947 and culminating with his appointment as president in 2002.
Prof Philip Dewe, the college's vice-master, said: "I think history will recognise him as one of the greatest thinkers of the last century and into the current millennium. And he himself said that he did all his work here at Birkbeck. He will be recognised for setting a new tone in history, and for an intellect that perhaps we may not see again."
Aside from his academic and political writing, Hobsbawm was a huge fan of jazz music, and for a time in the 1950s was the jazz critic of the New Statesman, writing under the pseudonym Francis Newton. (He was moved to contact the magazine, he wrote later, having noticed that Kingsley Amis was writing on the subject for the Observer even though "he obviously knew no more and possibly less than I did".)
Peter Florence, director of the Hay festival, of which Hobsbawm was president, described travelling to Parati in the Brazilian Amazon a decade ago, where a bookseller told him the biggest-selling English author in Brazil, was "Erique Hobsbawm", thanks to a citation in then-President Lula's inauguration speech. The elderly historian agreed to visit, and was treated like a superstar.
said: "His generosity and openness in engaging with people who didn't agree with him makes him in my experience pretty unique on the left."
He said Hobsbawm's position on the Soviet Union had been more complex than many of his critics acknowledged. "I remember him being very articulate about the mistakes that he made. The entrenched position that people assume that he tooks seems to me not to be accurate. He lived through the most extraordinary century, and was much closer to it than many academic historians, but at the same time just far enough away to stay fairly balanced."
Asked why Hobsbawm's books had retained such appeal to successive generations of festivalgoers, Florence said: "He just writes better than anybody else."
Fritz Lustig, father of the broadcaster Robin Lustig, was at school with Hobsbawm in Berlin, where the future historian – whose father, Leopold, had been born in London – was known as "der Englaender". They later served in the war together, and remained in touch afterwards.
"Throughout I have been extremely touched by his loyalty and interest in somebody who after all could not match his historian and other academic friends," Lustig said. "He was one of only two people still alive who were connected with my birthplace of Berlin, and the first 20 years of my life, and I am very sad that I shall not be able to reminisce with him any more."
Hobsbawm's daughter, Julia, said her father had just finished working on an edited collection of his writings, which would be published in March. In July Hobsbawn and his wife, Marlene, held a party to celebrate his 95th and her 80th birthdays, and their 50th wedding anniversary.
He is survived by Marlene, his sons Joss and Andy, daughter Julia, and by seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
