Eric Hobsbawm Age Of Revolution

[Rachelle Shriver]

Thesocial democrats abandoned utopianism in practice, but they retained much of it in theory. Thus they continued to propagate illusions, and they opened themselves to charges of bad faith from the left and the right. The communists indicted them for their abandonment of revolution, and the conservatives for their continued appeal to the utopian ideas of their deceased ideology. For this we are paying dearly. For left-liberalism and radicalism have become indistinguishable in an American left that practices reformist politics while it advances a social and cultural agenda that makes sense only on the basis of a wildly utopian worldview that few sane men would defend if forced to speak coherently.

Closer to our own day, Hobsbawm takes only a few sentences and a single, priceless footnote to expose the irrationality of radical feminist theory and, by extension, of much of the claptrap that now passes for radical social theory. But the American left, at least its radical part, has learned little or nothing from Hobsbawm, despite the ceremonial bows and the polite applause. The fault is partly his own, and it stems from his most attractive qualities. He has never had a taste for sectarian polemics and factional brawls. He prefers to articulate his positions by speaking calmly and scrupulously, giving no offense, and appealing to reason and deliberation. And so the radical left has been able to pretend not to notice what he is saying. Or worse, it may not be pretending. It may not have noticed. I cannot recall a single serious, concentrated discussion in American radical circles of the many historical and political insights that Hobsbawm has advanced in his books. He is the greatest of Marxist historians, but his influence on American Marxist historians has been marginal. Maybe nice guys do finish last.

In a flash of graveyard humor, Hobsbawm describes the twentieth century as having ended both with a bang and a whimper. He has no blueprint for the coming century. He expresses some deep anxieties, but he does not surrender to a paralyzing pessimism. Thus he fears for the environment, and briefly but convincingly he identifies the threat to it from free-market policies. But he also makes clear, as few on the left do, that much contemporary environmentalism is a form of hysteria, and betrays a bourgeois contempt for the necessary trade-off between conservationism and an economic growth vital to poorer countries, and often manipulates public opinion in the service of sectarian political and ideological ends.

Hobsbawm has often been charged, with some justification, with slighting the power and the persistence of nationalism, but his thoughtful formulations require much more careful attention than the critics normally offer. In his new book, he suggests that any solutions to the problems posed by an irreversible worldwide economic integration will have to lie in worldwide political integration. Astutely he notes that international big business could live easily with a plethora of small, weak nation-states. It would seem to follow, therefore, that only a supra-national political organization could make the economic establishment socially responsive. He may be only half-right. Under the actual conditions of world politics, the nationalist drives throughout the world, notwithstanding the risk of a descent into destructive tribalisms, may offer the only basis for resistance to the worldwide domination of big capital cut loose from social moorings.

Between 1789 and 1848 the world was transformed both by the French Revolution and also by the Industrial Revolution that originated in Britain. This 'Dual Revolution' created the modern world as we know it.

Eric Hobsbawm traces with brilliant analytical clarity the transformation brought about in every sphere of European life by the Dual Revolution - in the conduct of war and diplomacy; in new industrial areas and on the land; among peasantry, bourgeoisie and aristocracy; in methods of government and of revolution; in science, philosophy and religion; in literature and the arts. But above all he sees this as the period when industrial capitalism established the domination over the rest of the world it was to hold for a century.

Eric Hobsbawm was a Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Before retirement he taught at Birkbeck College, University of London, and after retirement at the New School for Social Research in New York. Previous books include AGE OF EXTREMES, THE AGE OF REVOLUTION and THE AGE OF EMPIRE. He died 1st October 2012

The Age of Atlantic Revolutions offers a provocative synopsis of the revolutions in the Atlantic World. While previous monographs attempting to synthesize the Atlantic developments in the revolutionary era were excessively Eurocentric or focused on the North Atlantic dynamics, Griffin tries to offer a more inclusive perspective. The author must be commended for the expansiveness of examples and arguments. By centering violence, exploitation, slavery, freedom, revolution, and hope as axles of the historical process, Griffin offers a convincing explanation to understand the similarities, differences, interconnections and contradictions of the Age of Atlantic Revolution. Nevertheless, Spanish America, and especially Brazil and Africa, do not appear as central as British, French, and Irish territories, even though the book argues that political peripheries played a critical role in shaping imperial reforms, the course of revolutions, and the emergence of new polities in the Atlantic World. As a synopsis, many events and processes of the revolutionary Atlantic were left out of the book. Specifically, one could criticize the still present centrality of northwestern European empires as the sole origin of Enlightenment ideas and the source of modern political ideas. However, much has been brought into the narrative and analysis of the revolutionary era, including the role of political peripheries in the American West, West Africa and Iberian America, with an emphasis that no author has given in an extensive narrative of the era of Atlantic revolutions. This book will generate lively academic debates among Atlanticists, Latin Americanists, Early-Americanists, Europeanists, and Africanists interested in empire and revolution. It will serve as an excellent monograph to spearhead debates in graduate seminars and an excellent introduction to the period for undergraduates. The Age of Atlantic Revolution is a refreshing monograph that does not try to offer a general synthesis; instead, it builds on the vast Atlantic historiography of the past decades on different regions of the Atlantic to provide a fresh perspective to a traditional theme.

Fabrcio Prado is an associate professor of history. He teaches courses on Colonial Latin America and the Atlantic World; he is the author of Edge of Empire: Atlantic Networks and Revolution in Bourbon Rio de la Plata (the University of California Press, 2015), among other publications.

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