"On The Interesting Ideas Of Eric Hobsbawm" lecture by Prof. Madhavan Palat at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 22nd November 2012

Time : 3:00 pm

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : Seminar Room, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
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Event Details : The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to the Public Lecture ‘On The Interesting Ideas Of Eric Hobsbawm’ by Prof. Madhavan Palat, Editor, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, New Delhi.
Abstract:
Hobsbawm’s magnificent oeuvre celebrates the modern universe bounded by the two revolutionary waves of the late eighteenth and the late twentieth centuries; but it is a celebration that broods on its dark side as much as on its stupendous achievements. His grand theme is the hope held out by the Enlightenment, the revolutions that reflected it, and the counter-revolutions that negated it. As this modern world drew to its close in the 1990s, a gloomy uncertainty hangs over the world, and his musings on the post-Cold War world reflects this unease.
But why and how did this modern world of ours suddenly arise in the eighteenth century? He has chosen to remain silent. His Age series of four large volumes on the history of these two centuries is planetary in ambition; but it is essentially confined to a history of expanding Europe, save for the last volume on the twentieth century. These volumes, along with those on industrial and agricultural labour, are built around the central dynamic of Europe in the nineteenth century, of a capitalism that spawned class, nation, and empire, and in that order of importance in his account. His analyses of class relations, of political and social structure, and above all of the art, culture, and scientific achievements of the century, are riveting. He has been acclaimed as a Marxist historian; but he seems more sensitive and attentive to the experience of the bourgeois than of the proletarian. He is fascinated and absorbed by the brilliance, vulgarity, and angst of the conquering bourgeois: he merely records with sympathy and admiration the achievements of workers. Edward Thompson, on the other hand, penetrates to the interior of the worker, the labourer, and the poor, in a manner that Hobsbawm does not. But the Marxist orientation in Hobsbawm emerges through his sustained pursuit of the endemic crises of capitalism, in its politics, its economy, its social structures, and its innumerable cultural manifestations. Nothing is ever stable, not even for a decade.
The central drama in his account of the twentieth century, as may be expected, is the story of total war, revolution, counter-revolution, and cold war, and the almost unimaginable disasters that they brought in their wake; and they were accompanied once again by almost unconscionable levels of prosperity and unlimited intellectual achievement. How was capitalism saved during this century of catastrophe? First by Keynes and then by the Soviet Union. The function of the Soviet revolution ultimately seems to have been to save liberal capitalism from its fascist sibling, and then from communism itself by providing the stimulus for welfare. With that, the great objectives of the labour and socialist movements of the nineteenth century were in effect achieved in the golden years from 1945 to 1973. It may seem unusual that a Marxist historian should reduce the Soviet role in history to its rescuing European capitalism; but then Hobsbawm was an unusually independent Marxist despite his lifelong and unrepentant membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
But what accounts for barbarism on such a gigantic scale in the twentieth century? Perhaps the crises of capitalism compete in scale with the growth of the original beast itself. When so many things seemed to dissolve in the 1990s, including socialist hopes and labour movements, he registered it as a general breakdown of civilization, words that he had used for both fascism and for the First World War. As he surveyed the world after 1991, he sounded often like an aristocrat surveying the debris of the French Revolution or a grand bourgeois appalled at the ruins of civilization in 1918. His tone was distinctly conservative in the manner of the nineteenth century. But he has no comprehensive explanation for the end of this world, just he had none for it origins.
In what sense was he a Marxist as a historian? The answer is far from obvious, for no specific method of analysis or conclusions he reaches may be identified as Marxist. He was driven more by the rational Enlightenment than by any one of the many traditions that derived from it. Marxism to him was a form of critique of capitalism, not a means of overthrowing it; and in that sense he has been by far the most stimulating Marxist historian of the twentieth century and beyond. Of course, this was possible only in a country where no form of Marxism could ever have hoped to wield political power.

Speaker : Prof. Madhavan Palat is Former Senior Fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Until 2004 he was Professor of Russian and European History at the School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He was also National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla in 2010-2011. Currently he is the Editor of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, and New Delhi. His research areas are labour history, conservative ideologies and nationalities of Imperial Russia.

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