A Life In History

A LIFE IN HISTORY This is the text of the inaugural lecture in the ‘Rewriting the Past’ conference, held in July 2002 in conjunction with the Institute of Historical Research in London to celebrate Past and Present’s fiftieth anniversary. Eric Hobsbawm is one of the founder members of the journal, and was assistant editor for its very first issue in February 1952; he has seen Past and Present through all fifty years, and is now vice-president of the Past and Present Society. Although life has lengthened substantially in the past halfcentury, any person of eighty-five is still a statistical rarity. My age-group represents less than 1 per cent of the world population. By virtue of age he or she is also a historical source. I suppose that is why I have been asked to reflect on the changes in historiography in the seventy years since I first encountered the subject in the Berlin of 1932, and the fifty-five years since I began to practise it as a university teacher and writer. This is what I understand by the otherwise rather vacuous title of the lecture proposed to me. My first contacts with a professional historian as a schoolboy were unpromising. He was a small, round man who dashed round the classroom of a Berlin Gymnasium pointing a ruler as he asked pupils for the dates of the German emperors. I learned them by heart but have naturally forgotten all of them since. The joke was that this exercise must have bored our teacher as much as us, for, as I now know, he was by far the most distinguished scholar in the school, author of a monograph on the mystery cults of Eleusis and Samothrace, a recognized classical archaeologist and papyrus expert and a contributor to Pauly–Wissowa. Like us he was a victim of ‘1066 and All That’, the curse of interwar secondary school teaching. It almost turned me off history for good. Fortunately I discovered the Communist Manifesto in the school library. A little later, in England, I was lucky enough to have a schoolmaster who thought I was good at the subject and told me to read Lord Acton for the Cambridge scholarship. This

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helped me to get a scholarship, but confirmed my scepticism about conventional Oxbridge history. Nevertheless, I decided to read history at Cambridge, partly because nothing else was available (except for economics the social sciences were non-existent there), and partly because it was obvious that there was a lot more to history as taught at universities than what grammar school history had prepared me for. With a few exceptions, of which G. M. Trevelyan was the most eminent, established historians between the wars did not write for schools, let alone for the broad public. On the contrary, they distrusted those who did. Actually — at least in Cambridge — most of them, having lost the self-confidence of the Victorians, wrote rather sparingly, even when preparing the monographs which were the foundation of a scholar’s reputation. How could one live up to the ideal of a history both unchangeably true, based on a totally exhaustive study of archive sources, definitive, and immune to the criticisms of equally erudite, and often equally costive, colleagues? Necks stuck out were there to be chopped off. One of the major advances since the war, at least in the UK, is the remarkable reduction of this gap between school history and university history, and even more, between academic history and history written by academics for the general public. Nevertheless, with few exceptions the Cambridge history faculty was a discouraging spectacle: self-satisfied, insular, culturally provincial, deeply prejudiced against theories, explanations and ideas, and even against too much professionalism — suspicious of anything that came too close to the present. Let me remind you that, with the exception of the economic historians, and the radicals and socialists with their interest in the working classes — but they were largely outside academia — almost all university historians kept away even from the Victorian period and its politicians until well after the second war, leaving the biographies of its statesmen to relatives and journalists, and general assessments to gentlemanly amateurs like G. M. Young. Only diplomatic history was a sufficiently important nineteenth- and even twentieth-century field to attract bona fide academic historians of standing. For most of the hundreds who read history, this did not much matter. They did not expect to become historians, although, as future members of the British Establishment, they were expected to benefit from memories of a peculiarly esoteric subject:

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Constitutional History. Most dons regarded their main duty as getting the young through the Tripos with a decent second-class degree. But for the relatively few who wanted to become dons themselves it did matter, because in my day what Marc Bloch called ‘the trade of the historian’ was not taught in Britain, either before or — except for some technicalities — after graduation. The only guidance I ever got on how to use libraries, even elementary reference libraries, came not from any university teacher, but from Communist Party comrades who mobilized students for vacation help in the Labour Research Department in London. Unlike undergraduate supervision, which was taken seriously, the direction of postgraduate theses was a pitiful joke. In short, we picked up the trade as best we could. Very much depended on who we encountered as undergraduates: mostly other bright undergraduates and, if we were lucky, a good supervisor. Fortunately for the young radical history students there was one teacher at Cambridge whose lectures, though given at 9 a.m., one had to attend regularly. Mounia Postan, recently arrived in Cambridge from the LSE, was a red-haired man who looked like a Neanderthal survivor and lectured in a heavy Russian accent on economic history. This was in any case the only branch of history on the Cambridge syllabus relevant to young Marxists, but the Postan lectures, with their air of intellectual revivalism, attracted anyone with a lively mind. Every one of them, intellectual-rhetorical dramas in which a historical thesis was first expounded, then utterly dismantled and finally replaced by the Postan version, was a holiday from British insularity. Who else would have told us to read the Annales, not yet famous even in their own country, and presented Marc Bloch to us, correctly, as the greatest living medievalist? (Alas, I can remember nothing of his lecture except a small pudgy man.) Passionately anti-communist as he was, he was the only man in Cambridge who knew Marx, Weber, Sombart and the rest of the great Russians and central Europeans, and took their work seriously. He knew very well that he attracted the young Marxists, and, while denouncing their belief in Russian Bolshevism, welcomed them as allies in the fight against historical conservatism. During the Cold War, when I depended on his references, he also helped to keep me out of jobs. He was not exactly my or anyone’s teacher — he formed no school and had few disciples — but he was our bridge to the wider world of history. And he was

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certainly the most surprising figure to be found in a senior history chair in Britain between the wars. Like the other pre-Hitler immigrants who left their mark on British history — Vinogradov and Namier — he came from eastern rather than central Europe. Like them he ended with a knighthood, but unlike Namier, he was a world figure in a subject dealing with problems regarded as important and relevant in Harvard, Moscow and Tokyo as well as England. On the other hand at one of our first meetings Fernand Braudel asked me: ‘I understand there is much talk in England about a historian called Namier. Can you tell me anything about him?’ In some ways the contrast between Postan’s and Namier’s subjects symbolized the major conflict that divided the historiography, and the major tendency of its development from the 1890s to the 1970s. This was the battle between history as narrative and history as analysis and synthesis, between those who thought it impossible or impermissible to generalize about human affairs in the past and those who thought it essential, between ‘objectivism’ and ‘the subjective-psychological way of seeing things’ (to quote the young Otto Hintze),1 between those who rejected any contamination of history by the social or any other sciences, or evolutionary models, and those who were open to them. The battle had opened in Germany in the late 1890s but in my student days the most prominent champions of historical modernization, apart from the Marxists, were the Annales group in France. Essentially, for both of these the way forward was through economic and social history, although this was not at all the primary interest of Febvre, and certainly not of the young British Marxists. Many, perhaps most of them, came into history with markedly literary/cultural interests. But economic and social history was the foothold the modernists had on the forbidding rock face of institutionalized conventional history. Into this battle between the old and the new history young Marxists like myself, at the start of their professional careers just before and after World War Two, now found themselves plunging enthusiastically. They joined what was still a small field, measured both in the number of its practitioners and in their output. The enormous expansion of universities, old and new, and the stratospheric rise of ‘the literature’, did not get under way until the ¨ ber individualistische und kollektivistische Geschichtsauffassung’, 1 Otto Hintze, ‘U Historische Zeitschrift, lxxviii (1897).

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1960s. Even in countries like Britain and France, or in very broad academic fields such as economic history worldwide, virtually everyone knew of, or could get to know, everyone else. Fortunately, the first international congress of historical sciences after the Second World War was held in Paris in 1950. Before the war the historical establishment had ruled supreme — for by driving the best of their social sciences into emigration fascism if anything reinforced it. However, the war had so disrupted the old structures that, for a brief moment, the rebels had actually taken charge. The congress, organized by an Annales man, Charles Moraze´, was planned on heterodox lines, essentially by the French, with some input by the Italians, and some from the Low Countries and Scandinavia, plus some very uncharacteristic Anglo-Saxons: Postan himself, the Australian historical statistician Colin Clark, and a Marxist ancient historian from Liverpool. The Germans were, of course, virtually absent, even though it was not known at the time quite how much their eminent historians had been involved in the Nazi system. The historians of the USA attended the congress in droves — when have Americans not been keen on visiting Paris? — but they had plainly not been much consulted about the planning. Apart from one report on ancient history, and a last-minute Texan disquisition on world history as frontier history, they were kept outside the main planned sections. The Soviet Union and all its dependencies were absent, with the one exception of Poland. They all turned up in full force in 1955 after Stalin’s death, at the next international congress in Rome. Times were tense in those months immediately after the outbreak of the Korean War when the (French) President of the International Committee said gloomily that ‘the congress will provide future historians of historiography with an important record of the mentality of historians after the crisis of the second world war . . . while they wait for the third’. If you want to pinpoint the birthplace of post-war historiography, I suggest it was in a section on ‘Social History’ at this congress — the first time the field made an institutional appearance. To my surprise I had found myself nominated as the official chairman of the so-called ‘Contemporary’ session. I suppose Postan must have proposed me, since nobody else could have heard of me. Here an odd collection of anomalies and marginals came together, who were soon to make their mark: Vicens Vives, a lone voice from Franco’s Barcelona looking for intellectual

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contacts, who was later to inspire the modernization of Spanish history, the Marxist Poles who came from the East with the same purpose, the brilliant French researchers with uncompleted theses like Pierre Vilar and Jean Meuvret, who were soon to be integrated into Braudel’s new rival to the Sorbonne, the future E´cole des Hautes E´tudes en Sciences Sociales. There were the historians of socialism and labour, the Marxists and their critics. There was Paul Leuillot, secretary of the Annales who spoke for Marc Bloch, Braudel and myself, about to become co-founder of Past and Present. In short, the face of the historiography of the 1950s and 1960s was becoming visible. Let me draw your attention to two crucial points. First, and somewhat unexpectedly, the Cold War did not interfere with developments in history, though it did affect the careers of historians in varying degrees. In retrospect it is surprising how little it penetrated western historiography, except, of course, on such matters as the history of twentieth-century Russia and Communism, as well as debates about the Cold War itself. It did, however, keep the politically heterodox largely outside that major innovation of the post-1945 era, scholarly research on actual contemporary history, on the basis of primary sources which now became available in the West and its empires, at least selectively. The remarkable official British History of the Second World War of the late 1940s, especially the Civil series, entrusted primarily to academic historians, is an early landmark in the modernization of historiography. I think the impact on history of the extraordinary degree to which academics were mobilized in Britain and the USA for wartime duties, has been much underestimated. But second, and equally surprising, the various platoons of historical modernizers, in spite of patent ideological, political and national differences, knew themselves to be on the same side, and fighting the same adversaries. The inspiration of the French was in no way Marxist, except for the historiography of the French Revolution, which being identified with the Sorbonne, was seen, if anything, as part of the enemy forces. (Braudel once told me regretfully that the trouble with French history in his lifetime was that its two major figures, himself and Ernest Labrousse, were ‘brothers who could not get on’.) The post-war ‘historical social science’ generation of West German modernizers under Wehler and Kocka, initially formed by the German professors who had stayed in Germany — often, as it turned out,

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uncomfortably identified with the Third Reich — tended to Max Weber rather than Marx. In the 1960s they acquired a journal and an institutional base in two or three new universities. In Britain, on the other hand, the Marxists were uniquely prominent and the journal Past and Present, which emerged from the discussions of the CP Historians’ Group, was to become in effect the modernizers’ chief medium. Yet we all recognized each other as allies. P & P acknowledged the inspiration of the Annales in the first paragraph of its first issue. The Annalist Jacques Le Goff, who described himself as ‘a reader from the beginning, an admirer, a friend, almost (if I may say so) a secret lover’, saw the two journals as allies, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler appears to consider ‘the astonishing effect of the marxist historians’ generation’ as the main factor behind ‘the global impact of English historiography since the 1960s’. The success of P & P itself proves the point: founded fifty years ago at the very worst moment of the Cold War by people known for their CP membership, and systematically blackballed for some years — not least by the Institute of Historical Research — it made its way because it attracted readers, authors and eventually editorial board members from patently non-Communist and anti-Communist historians. This raises the interesting question why, in post-1945 Britain of all places, the Marxists were so much more central to the historical modernizers’ project than elsewhere in western Europe. I wish I could answer it. I can only make three passing suggestions. First, that history, being a subject of general rather than specialist university study, was a more obvious option for intellectuals than in other countries: my Cambridge intake in 1936 contained fifty history scholars and exhibitioners, as many as in the natural sciences, though still much less than the seventy-five of classics. Second, that history as an intellectual discipline filled some of the gap left by the absence of the philosophy classes which were so characteristic of continental Gymnasia or lyce´es, and by the virtual absence from British intellectual life (outside the LSE) of the sciences of society. Had I completed my secondary education anywhere on the Continent, I very much doubt whether I would have become a professional historian. Finally, credit should be given to the British CP, a body which both encouraged academic activities such as those of its Historians’ Group as

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politically beneficial, and did not interfere with them so long as they caused no political trouble; which we did not, until 1956. At this stage history in the USA (as distinct from the US social sciences) still played a relatively minor international role. In fact, there was little real contact between it and the Old World, except in fields of traditional interest to US Europeanists, such as the French Revolution, and in the fields brought with them from Europe by the German exiles after 1933. But Europeanists were a minority, distrusted as cosmopolitan Ivy Leaguers by the great bulk of generally monoglot historians whose subject was the history of the USA, a subject which, as treated by most of them, had very little in common with what historians elsewhere were doing. Only slavery was a subject that aroused international interest, but the younger historians of this subject who were to make a mark abroad were very untypical of the profession in the fifties and sixties, since they included several young post-war members of the American Communist Party — Herb Gutman, the brilliant Gene Genovese and the endlessly ingenious Bob Fogel, now a Nobel laureate. Curiously enough this was true even of so patently global a subject as economic history, which may explain why, when an international association was founded in this field around 1960 it was basically run as an Anglo-French condominium of Braudel and Postan. Stateside historical innovations, though known, found it difficult to cross the Atlantic. This was true in the 1950s of economic history in terms of businessmen (‘entrepreneurial’ history), and in the 1960s of the much more formidable cliometrics — history as retrospective and often imaginary econometrics — and certainly of the mainly Freudian ‘psycho-history’. Not until 1975 was the quinquennial Congress of Historical Sciences held in the USA, presumably for diplomatic reasons to balance the Moscow session of 1970. On the whole, in the thirty years after 1945 the historical traditionalists were fighting a rearguard action against the advancing modernists in most western countries where history flourished freely. In 1970 a rather optimistic, not to say triumphalist, meeting was organized by the American journal Daedalus to survey the state of history. Except for the (defensive) spokesmen for political and military history, the gathering was dominated by the modernizers, British, French and American. By that time a common flag had been found for their far from homogeneous

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forces: ‘social history’. It fitted in with the political radicalization of the dramatically expanding student population of the 1960s. The term was vague, sometimes misleading, but, as I wrote at the time, noting the ‘remarkably flourishing state of the field’: ‘It is a good moment to be a social historian. Even those of us who never set out to call ourselves by this name will not want to disclaim it’. However, in one respect the situation in the early 1970s had advanced very little. Academic history in the western sense was still largely confined to the First and Second Worlds and Japan. Broadly speaking, outside these regions it did not flourish, or continued along traditional lines, except for minorities of Marxists and (as in parts of Latin America) patches of modernist Parisian influence. Moreover, most academic history was overwhelmingly Eurocentric or, in the terms preferred in the USA, concerned with ‘Western Civilization’. With rare exceptions it was not historians but geographers, anthropologists and linguists, as well as, naturally, imperial administrators, who occupied themselves with non-western affairs. Before the war extra-European history as such interested few historians except the Marxists (by reason of their anti-imperialism) and, of course, the Japanese who, as it happened, were then also strongly under Marxist influence. In Cambridge the direction of the so-called ‘colonial students’ group’ of the CP in the thirties was in the hands of a succession of historians whose subsequent contribution to the subject is not negligible: the Japanologist E. H. Norman, the universally erudite Victor Kiernan, and the brilliant, deeply original and selfdestructive Jack Gallagher. Extra-European history began to come into its own with the decolonization of the old empires and the simultaneous rise of the USA as a world power, reinforced by the sheer scale of the North American university enterprise. World history as the history of the globe emerged in the 1960s with the obvious progress of globalization. Historians from the Third World, notably a group of brilliant if controversial Indians, spun off from local Marxist debates, only began to win worldwide recognition in the 1990s. The interests of world empire, as well as the extraordinary resources of US universities, made the USA the centre of the new post-Eurocentric history and, incidentally, transformed its history textbooks and journals. However, the histories of Europe, the USA and the rest of the world remained and still remain separate,

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their publics coexisting but barely touching. Not for want of trying. In spite of half a century’s systematic efforts, I doubt whether Past and Present has published any article which historians of the USA would consider indispensable. We have probably published a handful of genuinely seminal papers on some of the other continents, but essentially — even today — the contents of the journal remain geographically skewed. History still continues to be, alas, primarily a series of niche markets for both writers and readers. In my generation only a handful of historians have tried to integrate them into a comprehensive world history. This has been mainly due to the failure, primarily for institutional and linguistic reasons, of history to emancipate itself from the framework of the nation-state. Looking back, this has been probably the major weakness of the subject in my lifetime. Nevertheless, around 1970 it seemed reasonable to suppose that the war for the modernization of historiography that had begun in the 1890s had been won. The main railway network, along which the trains of historiography would roll, had been built. Not that the modernizers, at least outside the French enemies of the ‘history of events’, necessarily proposed a hegemony of economic and social history, or even a relegation of political history, let alone the history of ideas and culture. The modernizers were not reductionists. Though they believed that history must explain and generalize, they knew it was not like the natural sciences. However, they believed that history had a comprehensive project, whether it was Braudel’s ‘total’ or ‘global history, integrating the contributions of all the sciences of man’, or — if I may quote my own definition of ‘what history in the broadest sense is about: how and why Homo sapiens got from the palaeolithic to the nuclear era’. Yet within a few years the scene had changed utterly. As Braudel himself complained about the Annales he no longer directed in the 1970s, the sense of priorities, the distinction between significance and triviality, which was essential to the old project, had gone. Just so old hands from Past and Present complained about Raphael Samuel and his History Workshop Journal (the last remote offspring of the old CP Historians’ Group), that they discovered all sorts of corners of the past interesting to enthusiasts, but showed no signs of wanting to ask questions about them. History as the exploration of an objectively recoverable past had not yet been challenged. This only came with the fashion for ‘postmodernism’, a term which

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was virtually unknown in Britain before the 1980s, and which, fortunately, has made only marginal inroads into the field of serious historical writing. Nevertheless, sometime in the early seventies the historiographical tide turned. Those who thought they had won most of the battles from the 1930s on, now found it running against them. ‘Structure’ was on the way down, ‘culture’ was on the way up. Perhaps the best way of summarizing the change is to say that young historians after 1945 might be inspired by Braudel’s Mediterranean (1949), the young historians after 1968 by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s brilliant tour de force of ‘thick description’, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock-Fight’ (1973).2 There was, in Lawrence Stone’s words, a shift away from historical models or ‘the large why questions’, from economic and social structure to culture, from recovering fact to recovering feeling, from telescope to microscope, as in Carlo Ginzburg’s enormously influential monograph on his eccentric Friulian miller. I am also struck by a certain flight from the actual past as in the flourishing and fertile field of memory studies which has shot up since about 1980. Here we are concerned not with what was, but with what people think, feel, remember or usually misremember about it. In some ways this can be seen as a development of themes we pioneered — Pierre Nora, the inspirer of the monumental Les Lieux de me´moire claimed that it was ‘an echo of the Invention of Tradition’. But we explored these things in an utterly different intellectual context. Certainly there is nothing in common between our way of writing history, and the more or less sophisticated reductions of history to mere forms of literary composition. Perhaps there was an element here of that curious distrust for rational analysis and science which has become more fashionable as the century drew to its end. Not that anybody seriously attempted a return to the history before the victories of the Braudelian-Marxist-Weberian modernizers. Geoffrey Elton’s attempt to restore a sort of traditional orthodoxy failed, even in Cambridge. Has the new turn produced better history than our generation? It has certainly multiplied the journals beyond measure. I refrain from judgement. Since the old are biased, why trust us? It is quite possible that my judgement that the French historical school 2 Clifford Geertz, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock-Fight’, in his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973).

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is no longer what it was in the 1960s is due to mere age and the ignorance it brings of what is really happening in the world. I leave it to you. Nevertheless, since the early 1970s — a watershed in other aspects of history also — the tone of historiographical discourse has changed. The reaction has not come primarily from the ideological or political right. Nor is it a specific rejection of Marxism, for it also led to the end of the plainly non-Marxian Braudelian hegemony in France, and the steep drop in the international influence of the Annales. Anyway, by the standards of the 1930s Marxism has not declined. Its questions continue to haunt those who want to understand the past and the present. If anything, I see the change in historiography as coming from the 1968 generation, from an academic left that emerged in the cultural revolution of the sixties, and thus with a different orientation from my generation. If there is an intellectual challenge, it is rooted in a change of mood, of which the British ‘History Workshop’ is a characteristic expression. Its original object was not so much historical discovery, explanation or even exposition, as inspiration, empathy and democratization. It also reflected the remarkable growth of a mass public interest in the past which has given history a surprising and welcome prominence in print, on screen and in public exhibition. ‘History Workshop’ meetings, which brought together amateurs and professionals, intellectuals and workers, and vast numbers of the young in jeans, flanked by sleeping bags and improvised cre`ches, resembled radical gospel sessions, especially when addressed with the required hwyl by star performers like Edward Thompson or the wonderful historian of Wales, Gwyn Alf Williams. It is typical that the first Women’s Liberation Conference in Britain grew out of a proposed History Workshop, inspired at the end of the 1960s by Sheila Rowbotham, the pioneer author of a book characteristically called Hidden from History. These were people for whom history was not so much a way of interpreting or even changing the world, but a means of collective self-discovery, a way of winning collective recognition. With some of them I have a lot of sympathy. Nevertheless, the risk inherent in this search for identity and roots is that it leads to in-group history — history fully accessible only to those who share the historical and life-experience of its subject, or even the physical configuration of the humans to whom it appeals. It undermines the universality of the universe

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of discourse that is the essence of history as a scholarly and intellectual discipline. It also undermines what both the ancients and the moderns had in common, namely the belief that historians’ investigations, by means of generally accepted rules of logic and evidence, distinguish between fact and fiction, between what can be established and what cannot, what is the case and what we would like to be so. But this has become increasingly dangerous. Political pressures on history — by old and new states and regimes, identity groups, and forces long concealed under the frozen ice-cap of the Cold War — are greater than ever before in my lifetime, and modern media society has given the past unprecedented prominence and marketing potential. More history than ever is today being revised or invented by people who do not want the real past, but only a past that suits their purpose. The defence of history by its professionals is today more urgent than ever, not least in politics. We are needed. At the same time we are rediscovering what we can and should do. While the daily affairs of humanity are today conducted by the criteria of problem-solving technology, to which history is almost irrelevant, history has become more central to our understanding of the world than ever before. Curiously, while arts faculties argue about the objective existence of the past, historical change has become a central component of the natural sciences, from cosmogony to a revived evolutionary Darwinism. And this has been transforming history itself, though most historians show little awareness of it: through molecular and evolutionary biology, palaeontology and archaeology. History is being reinserted into the framework of global evolution. We are now aware how extraordinarily young Homo sapiens is as a species. If the DNA calculations are right, we left Africa 100,000 years ago. The whole of what can be described as ‘history’ since the invention of agriculture and cities consists of hardly more than 10,000 years or, say, 400 generations, a blink in the eye of geological time. Given the dramatic acceleration of the pace of humanity’s control over nature during this period, especially in the last ten or twenty generations, the development of humanity so far can be seen to be something like an explosion of our species, a sort of bio-social supernova, into an unknown future. Let us hope it is not a catastrophic one. Within this brief moment of time the Darwinism of the origin of species, sociobiology and similar reductive models give way to the historians. This is our realm. And, for the first

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time, we have an adequate framework to study it as genuinely global history, and to study it by our methods — betwixt and between the humanities and the natural and mathematical sciences, belonging to neither, essential to both. Since I think the central question of history is how we got from the palaeolithic to the Internet era, I welcome this. If historiography in the twentyfirst century wants a main agenda, here it is. I wish I were young enough to take part in it. E. J. Hobsbawm