A Giant in the Field
The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian by Emile Chabal (Belknap Press, 2026)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
Ole Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth (1927) is about the Norwegians who settled in the Dakota territory. These brave men and women took on extreme conditions and engaged in titanic struggles against elemental forces. They shaped and defined a future for themselves and their descendants. Though they were men and women, they cast the shadows of giants. There are also academics who cast the shadows of giants. Eric Hobsbawm was one of them.
Generations of undergraduates have read something by Eric Hobsbawm. His tetralogy, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875, The Age of Empire: 1875-1914, and The Age of Extremes: 1914-1991, as well as The Invention of Tradition, have been formative in shaping how many people have understood modernity. These books were nearly as well read out of the classroom as in it, all around the world. He was an academic who could command an advance, because his books were expected to sell—he had a £90,000 advance in 1988 (143). There were other titles, as well as stacks of cultural criticism and public speaking engagements. By the measure of publications and book sales, as well as influence, Hobsbawm was a very significant and successful historian.
Hobsbawm was also a defiant communist, even in 1956 and even when the wall came down. Born in 1917, the year of the October Revolution, he insisted that communism still had something to offer the world and that it had contributed good to the world all the way until his death in 2012. Tom Stoppard modeled the character of Max in his play Rock’n’Roll on Hobsbawm. Max insists on the potential of communism, even at the end of the Soviet Union and even in the face of contrary information from friends in Czechoslovakia. Like Max, Hobsbawm never recanted. His ashes were buried in Highgate Cemetery, only yards away from the imposing monument to Karl Marx. He was faithful to the end.
The early chapters of The Age of Hobsbawm include some of Hobsbawm’s formative experiences. Born in Alexandria to a Jewish family, he grew up until his mid-teens in Vienna and Germany. He lost his parents at a young age and went to Berlin at 13 to live with an aunt and uncle. Though religion was not important in Hobsbawm’s life, he was permanently affected by what he saw of the Nazis in Berlin. That forged his commitment to communism. In 1933, he moved to London to attend school and began his upward academic trajectory. But The Age of Hobsbawm is not a biography about Hobsbawm’s relationships and experiences. Emile Chabal’s The Age of Hobsbawm is an intellectual biography of the historian, tracing the development of his ideas and writing.
From an early age, Hobsbawm was a precocious intellect. In his teens, he seemed to know about everything and wrote criticism for the school paper. He started to see himself as a historian at the age of sixteen. Despite his background, he assimilated quite well into British life and academic traditions during his time at St. Marylebone’s. When he went to Cambridge, he wrote for Granta and was admitted into distinguished organizations. He excelled in debate. He was the kind of student everyone thought would turn out to be somebody. He was also already a determined and committed communist.
His university peers were correct, Hobsbawm was heading somewhere. Emile Chabal was prompted to write this book because Hobsbawm became so famous and because he is a significant figure in the history of the Left. Though his early university posting was not especially glamorous, Hobsbawm was always entrepreneurial. From the beginning he wrote cultural criticism for the public on a variety of topics, including jazz. He excelled at forming friendships and networks. His travels to Spain and Italy and Latin America helped build bridges between different academic communities.
The Age of Hobsbawm is an exhaustive account of Hobsbawm’s career, intellectual development, and personal commitment to communism. This includes details like the internal workings of Past and Present in its early days and analysis of Hobsbawm’s jazz criticism, as well as critiques by others of his pop music criticism. In many cases descriptions of Hobsbawm’s travels include many names and details about specific days. Chabal has clearly drawn upon a great deal of sources. The Age of Hobsbawm will excite Hobsbawm’s fans, but it has more than the average reader will likely want.
The Age of Hobsbawm is a biography, but it is not hagiography. Chabal suggests that to “understand Hobsbawm’s unique success, we need to look beyond his own talents to the infrastructure that supported him, from the inner workings of the publishing industry to his panoply of transnational networks” (xiii). He even goes so far as to say: “If someone were to ask me what made Hobsbawm a truly exceptional intellectual, I would say that it was his knack for being at exactly the right place at the right time” (xiii). Of course, there were many other historians around, many of whom went to Cambridge or Oxford, who did not become famous, despite the alignment of their interests with their time and place. But Chabal’s book does explore some of the ways in which opportunities were very different when Hobsbawm was a young academic.
The Age of Hobsbawm illuminates the good life available to a late-twentieth-century public intellectual. Hobsbawm traveled the world, published internationally, and seemed to always have an outlet for his writing. Chabal notes the contrast with academic grant research funding then versus now. For funding from the Rockefeller Foundation: “His entire application dossier—which was mostly submitted after it had become clear that he was likely to be funded—consisted of a form with basic details about him, a two-page proposal, and a provisional itinerary” (267). Many of Hobsbawm’s research trips involved little research deeper than journalistic-style interviews and some brief library visits. He built networks of friends and enjoyed many of his travels immensely. On a trip to Peru in 1962, “Keen to squeeze in a bit of tourism, he also went up to Machu Picchu, where he claims to have read Pablo Neruda’s Canto general while admiring the surreal beauty of the abandoned city in the clouds” (271). Even if that is a bit romanticized—and despite some missed early-career opportunities due to his communism—Hobsbawm lived an academic equivalent of what is described in Graydon Carter’s When the Going Was Good (2026).
Chabal is critical of Hobsbawm’s communism, a wellspring of his later mystique. Chabal does not take on the ideology itself, but Hobsbawm’s relationship to it. As Chabal writes, Hobsbawm had “an intensely personal relationship with his chosen political ideology” (9). But his commitment was more intellectual than anything. He was not the kind of communist who would give information to the Soviet Union or do much in the way of “embodied” activism. In his youth he was very doctrinaire and capable of quick obedience to party dictates. But he did not march or make big political waves. He drifted away from party involvement over time, even though he was stubbornly resistant to identity politics and other alternatives that emerged on the Left when communism seemed to lose its appeal. Though Hobsbawm remained a staunch advocate of communism, Chabal sees him as a poor “model socialist.” He writes:
Even he knew he was far from the perfect revolutionary. He had tried hard to be a good communist until at least the 1960s, but there was precious little real party work to which he could point to make his case. He was a man of ideas, not action. His socialism involved changing people’s minds very slowly, not rallying them to an immediate cause. At a personal level, as well, he was much more at ease in the corridors of (intellectual) power than on the factory floor. He never sought out the long-term contact with ordinary people, as many anthropologists and ethnographers do. He preferred to return to dinner party conversations with other ‘Enlightenment giants’ in London, Paris, or New York City. Yet none of this stopped him from desiring a better, more socialist life—and, occasionally, projecting the image of one” (362).
Chabal’s critique may be a fair response to excessive idolization of Hobsbawm as model communist, but many academics live more in the world of ideas than action.
Chabal critically describes Hobsbawm as a “man of ideas, not action,” but Hobsbawm was living in an age of public intellectuals who were passionate about ideas. There were smart young men who went to university already somewhat iconic and emerged as figures who would define their age. Dan Hitchens has a recent essay in First Things exploring just that character arc for Roger Scruton, “The Making of Roger Scruton.” Many people in the late twentieth century believed in the power of ideas. Hobsbawm met cabdrivers who had his books and his books were translated into dozens of languages. In the world that produced Hobsbawm, Tom Stoppard could be a very successful playwright and model a character on an academic. It is hard to imagine a young playwright today who could or would model a character on a public academic, or an academic who could be modeled on. There were giants in the land, but this is not an age of giants.
Interestingly, Stoppard and Hobsbawm had more in common than believing fiercely in the power of ideas. He and Hobsbawm had somewhat parallel lives. Stoppard was born into a Jewish family in Czechoslovakia. Like Hobsbawm, he got out in time. Stoppard’s family went to Singapore, then to India. His father was killed in Singapore and Stoppard’s mother married an Englishman. Stoppard was raised in England, not really aware of his Jewish or Czech identity. He had a strong sense of English patriotism and only connected with his Czech roots much later in life. That played a role in his friendship with Václav Havel, his commitment to helping writers behind the Iron Curtain, and his play Leopoldstadt (2020). Though Stoppard had not considered his proximity to the Holocaust or his European roots until later in life, when he did, they reinforced his anti-communism.
Unlike Stoppard, Hobsbawm had memories of his youth in Austria and Germany. He linked his German experiences with his communism, but he did not openly dwell on his German heritage or his proximity to the Holocaust very often. A great contrast between Hobsbawm and the historian Tony Judt—born in England after the war to secular Jewish parents from Russia and Romania—was Hobsbawm’s unwillingness to really reckon with the Holocaust as a defining event of the twentieth century. We know relatively little about how Hobsbawm felt about it all. Hobsbawm’s opinions are widely available, but his feelings were typically kept private. What we do know is that while Hobsbawm disliked nationalism, like Stoppard, he assimilated quite well into English culture.
Whether or not he became fully English, nationalism may be key to understanding Hobsbawm’s intellectual journey. Chabal notes that Hobsbawm “published almost nothing until 1970” on nationalism but argues that “to understand how he came to nationalism as a discrete field of study is to understand how his thought changed of the course of his extraordinarily long career” (301). This kind of examination is where Chabal excels. He convincingly portrays Hobsbawm as a man capable of both change and continuity, two topics dear to any historian’s heart. Hobsbawm’s later interest in nationalism intersected with global politics. While he hoped his work could contribute to defeating it, “he found himself confronted with a renewed interest in the subject and a generalised celebration of nationalism as a form of emancipation from communist rule. The arc of history had clearly not bent in the right direction” (317). In this way, Chabal is correct that Hobsbawm had a knack for being in the right place at the right time.
Hobsbawm was a wildly successful academic who continues to influence how we think about modernity and continues to be assigned in university classrooms. Over time, as undergraduates phase out reading and as historiography turns, Hobsbawm will be less influential. But Hobsbawm will continue to be fascinating because his life recalls a line from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: “The essential thing ‘in heaven and in earth’ is, apparently (to repeat it once more), that there should be long OBEDIENCE in the same direction, there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living; for instance, virtue, art, music, dancing, reason, spirituality-- anything whatever that is transfiguring, refined, foolish, or divine.”
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. She is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023) and she is a contributing editor and associate books editor at Front Porch Republic.
