Edward Said on Hobsbawm:

Contra Mundum:  Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 

• http://www.lrb.co.uk/v17/n05/edward-said/contra-mundum
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• Hobsbawm registers little awareness that a debate has been raging in Islamic, Chinese, Japanese, African, Indian and Latin American studies about authority and representation in the writing of history. This debate has often relegated not only traditional authorities but even the questions raised by them to (in my opinion) a well-deserved retirement. In his recent Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (1990) Hobsbawm expresses an impatience with non-European nationalism which is often quite justified, except that that very impatience also seems to contain a wish not to deal with the political and psychological challenges of that nationalism. I recall with some amusement his characterisation there of ‘Arabian’ anti-imperialist nationalism as ‘the natural high spirits of martial tribes’.
• Hobsbawm is therefore peculiarly ill-equipped to deal with the rise and ascendancy of ‘politicised religion’, which is surely not, as he implies, an exclusively Muslim phenomenon. The US and Israel, whose Christians and Jews respectively are in many ways ‘modern’ people, are nonetheless now commanded – or at least deeply affected – by a theologically fervent mentality. The last thing to be said about them, or the Muslims (in the understanding of whose world Hobsbawm is surprisingly banal) is that they ‘have nothing of relevance to say’ about their societies. Barring a few cranks (like the Saudi Arabian cleric who persists in preaching that the world is, and always will be, flat), the contemporary Muslim movements in places like Egypt and Gaza have generally done a better job of providing welfare, health and pedagogical services to an impoverished populace than the government. Christian and Jewish fundamentalists also answer to real needs, real anxieties, real problems, which it will not do to brush aside as irrelevant. This blindspot of Hobsbawm’s is very surprising. With Terence Ranger, he is a pioneer in the study of ‘invented tradition’, those modern formations that are part fantasy, part political exigency, part power-play. Yet even about this subject, clearly related to the new appearance of religious mass enthusiasm, he observes a mysterious silence in Age of Extremes.

The more positive aspect of Hobsbawm’s reticence is that it enables his reader to reflect on the problem of historical experience itself. Age of Extremes is a magisterial overviewof 20th-century history. I accentuate the word ‘overview’ because only rarely does Hobsbawm convey what it was (or is) like to belong, say, to an endangered or truly oppressed class, race or minority, to a community of artists, to other embattled participants in and makers (as opposed to observers) of a historical moment. Missing from the panorama Hobsbawm presents is the underlying drive or thrust of a particular era. I assume that this is because he thinks impersonal or large-scale forces are more important, but I wonder whether witnesses, militants, activists, partisans and ordinary people are somehow of less value in the construction of a full-scale history of the 20th century. I don’t know the answer to this, but I tend to trust my own hunch that the view from within, so to speak, needs some reconciling with the overview, some orchestrating and shading.

The absence of these things in turn produces a remarkably jaundiced view of the arts in the 20th century. First, Hobsbawm seems to believe that economics and politics are determining factors for literature, painting and music: certainly he has no truck with the idea (which I myself believe in) that the aesthetic is relatively autonomous, that it is not a superstructural phenomenon. Second, he has an almost caricatural view of Western Modernism, which, as far as he is concerned, has not, since 1914, produced an adequate intellectual self-justification, or anything of note, other than Dadaism and Surrealism. Proust apparently counts for nothing after 1914 and neither do Joyce, Mann, Eliot or Pound. But even if we leave imaginative writers aside – and Hobsbawm’s constricting dating system does not help his case – there is good reason to argue that in the arts and disciplines of interpretation, Modernism plays a considerable role. What is Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness or even Auerbach’s Mimesis if not Modernist? Or Adorno and Benjamin? And when it comes to trying to understand the often bewildering efflorescence of Post-Modernism, Hobsbawm is stubbornly unhelpful.

The irony here is that both Modernism and Post-Modernism represent crises of historical consciousness: the former a desperate attempt to reconstruct wholeness out of fragments, the latter a deep-seated wish to be rid of history and all its neuroses. In any case the Short 20th Century is, more strikingly and jarringly than any before it, an age of warring interpretations, of competing ideologies, methods, crises. The disciples of Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, the apologists for culture and counter-culture, for tradition, modernity and consciousness, have filled the air, and indeed space itself, with contestation, diatribe, competing viewpoints; our century has been the age of Newspeak, propaganda, media hype and advertising. One reason for this – as Gramsci, unmentioned by Hobsbawm, was perhaps the first to appreciate – is the enormous growth in the number and importance of intellectuals, or ‘mental workers’ as they are sometimes called. Well over 60 per cent of the GNP in advanced Western societies is now derived from their labour; this has led to what Hobsbawm calls in passing ‘the age of Benetton’, as much the result of advertising and marketing, as of the changed modes of production.

In other words, the 20th century saw, along with the appearance of genocide and total war, a massive transformation of intellectual and cultural terrain. Discussions of narrative moved from the status of story to the hotly debated and fought-over question of the nation and identity. Language, too, was an issue, as was its relationship to reality: its power to make or break facts, to invent whole regions of the world, to essentialise races, continents, cultures. There is therefore something unsatisfyingly unproblematic about Hobsbawm’s decision to try to give us facts, figures and trends shorn not so much of their perspective as of their disputed provenance and making.

Viewed as deliberately standing aside from the interpretative quarrels of the 20th century, Age of Extremes belongs to an earlier, manifestly positivist moment in historiographic practice; its calm, generally unexcited manner takes on an almost elegiac tone as Hobsbawm approaches his melancholy conclusion that history ‘is no help to prophecy’. But as a somewhat younger and far less cautious student of Hobsbawm’s other great work, I would still want to ask whether there aren’t greater resources of hope in history than the appalling record of our century seems to allow, and whether even the large number of lost causes strewn about does not in fact provide some occasion for a stiffening of will and a sharpening of the cold steel of energetic advocacy. The 20th century after all is a great age of resistance, and that has not completely been silenced.

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