Genovese on Hobsbawm's 'Age of Extremes':  a renegade's review & obiter dicta on an iconoclast.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/107966/eugene-genovese-eric-hobsbawm-age-of-extremes

The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991by Eric Hobsbawm

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The implications of Hobsbawm’s realism are far-reaching. He seems to think that the coming struggles will take place between right-wing and left-wing versions of what we might call, for want of a better name, social corporatism, a politically regulated and socially responsible system of private property. The left-wing version may lessen inequality, reshape social stratification and render it more humane, replace current elites with more attractive ones and redefine the principle of authority in political, economic and social life. And yet, contrary to the dreams of a grand human “liberation” that are once again inundating us, the hard-headed analysis in Hobsbawm’s book suggests that a left-wing social corporatism will not be able to do away with inequality, or stratification, or elites, or firm authority in economic, social and political life.

Hobsbawm’s heart remains with the radical left, but his formidable head demolishes its every shibboleth, and so he cannot easily defend the egalitarian and radical-democratic ideals that he still occasionally still invokes, with a noticeable decline, in conviction. Thus, despite some pulling of his punches, Hobsbawm exposes the contemporary rage for personal liberation as the cutting edge of a socially atomizing individualism that primarily serves the interests of the international conglomerates. Those conglomerates, as Samuel Francis has recently argued from the traditionalist right in Beautiful Losers: Essays on The Failure of American Conservatism, are working hard to transform everything and anything into commodities.

Hobsbawm is especially good at dissecting the effects of the rise of a youth culture that has snapped “the links between generations.” Still, I confess to sniffing a bit at his assault on Hitler and Stalin for stifling avant-gardism in the arts. No, I do not wish to defend the repressions of Hitler and Stalin; but I do wish-that Hobsbawm had considered the possibility that the avantgarde’s assault on “bourgeois” culture, on all structures of authority, nourished the nihilism from which only the Nazis benefited during the first half of the century, and from which the most dangerous elements in our political life stand to benefit during the century ahead.

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.

His grimmest thoughts recall those of’ Schumpeter a half-century ago. Schumpeter noted that during the next long wave of capitalist development the United States would be able to support millions of people on the dole, but that the economic, social and political costs might prove unacceptable. Writing toward the end of that long wave, Hobsbawm reasonably questions the ability of the economy to sustain even the economic cost of so vast a crime against humanity. That is, he raises sharply the question of just how much “welfare” the best-devised mixed economy and welfare state can afford. His nightmare is that the rich countries will find the poor countries economically “uninteresting” and decide to let them rot. And he notes that those who rot may well acquire nuclear weapons with which to express their unhappiness about rotting. And no less ominously he worries that those same advanced societies may find their own poor also uninteresting and condemn also them to rot. Hobsbawm serves up no panaceas; but he does define the problem with penetrating clarity and he does suggest that any solution, from the most humane to the least humane, will probably have to be worked out within the contours of a mixed economy in a world of irreversible economic integration and, paradoxically, of continued nation-state tensions.

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.

Hobsbawm’s sniping at America’s intervention in the Persian Gulf, and at George Bush’s clumsy assertion of a New World Order, does not prove helpful. Unlike most leftist critics, he takes a sober view of the mounting danger of nuclear, chemical and biological war in an era freed from the control of rival superpowers. But does not the responsibility for preventing the explosion of regional, continental and world wars fall upon a few powerful states, led by the United States? If so, the problems posed by the explosion of nationalism and the power of nation-states may be transformed drastically, but they are not likely to be overcome in the foreseeable future.

Eric Hobsbawm is one of the few genuinely great historians of our century. He is also the one genuinely great historian to come out of the Anglo-American Marxist left. I admit to my prejudice. He has been the strongest influence on my own work as a historian, and in 1979 1 dedicated a book on black slave revolts to “Eric Hobsbawm: Our Main Man.” I have made a great many mistakes in my life,, but reading and rereading Hobsbawm’s powerful new book I am relieved to see that I got at least that much right.

This article originally appeared in the April 17, 1995 issue of the magazine.