ERIC J HOBSBAWM (1917-2012)

Reections on Hobsbawm
Immanuel Wallerstein

This short reection highlights Hobsbawms inuences outside the Marxist tradition and speaks about the shared concerns and divergences with the author.

ric Hobsbawm and I rst met in the early 1970s, almost surely in Paris, where he and I were frequent visitors. I, of course, had been reading him for some time and had long been one of his many admirers. I believe that he rst came into contact with my writings through the publication in 1974 of Volume I of The Modern World-System, about which he had kind words. What brought us together intellectually were several shared appreciations. One was a view of Marxism that was no longer that of what I call the Marxism of the parties, although Eric remained a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain for most of his life and I never was a member. His concern with social actors other than the (skilled) industrial workers, such as peasants and brigands, and his interest in social movements outside the western world (and particularly in Latin America) resonated with my own views. Inuences We both had been attracted to and signicantly inuenced by the writings of Fernand Braudel. In particular Braudels emphasis on writing history within the context of the longue dure and a total history was a second common element in our writings. His insistence that one could be a strong scholar while nonetheless being an engaged public intellectual was something to which we were both committed. Of course, so were many others. But it went against the grain of mainstream historical social science for a very long time. If our position has gained strength in the last 20 years, it still faces very strong opposition. And nally and not least, we both thought it extremely important to read widely in literature written in languages
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other than English. Eric was a polyglot, at least in western languages. He was uent not only in his native German and his very well-acquired English, but also in at least French, Italian, and Spanish, all of which he could read, speak, and even write. His bibliographies stood as an example to other scholars and as an implicit reproach to those Anglophone scholars who thought (and indeed often asserted loudly) that linguistic outreach was intellectually irrelevant. Divergences Did Eric and I have our differences? Of course, we did. And some of them were important ones. His visible and loud impatience with all the post-doctrines, much of which I shared, led him to be unwilling to give any moral and political credence to the multiple indigenista movements and their doctrines that have emerged as such a strong and, for me, admirable force, especially in Latin America but not only. His views about the so-called English Industrial Revolution and the so-called anti-feudal French Revolution present a strong argument, but for me not a convincing one, about what happened in the period between 1780 and 1840 (more or less). And our views on the meaning and importance of, what I call, the world-revolution of 1968 were rather different. They had the consequence that he, in his nal years, became, I think, much too pessimistic about the future, and too little observant of what I perceive to be the positive happenings of the last 15 years. In part, this is because I have been inuenced by the writings of Ilya Prigogine about uncertainties and bifurcation, and I am not aware of any discussion by Eric of Prigogine or his ideas. For whatever our differences, I never read anything by Eric that I did not nd intelligent and rewarding. If he was awed, he would himself have said that we are all awed. The key thing to remember is that he was an intellectual giant, whose continuing contributions and intellectual generosity will be sorely missed.
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Immanuel Wallerstein (immanuel.wallerstein@ yale.edu) is a sociologist at Yale University, the United States, most well known for the World Systems Theory.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW

NOVEMBER 17, 2012