by ANDREA BONFANTI
This article aims to demonstrate that Eric Hobsbawm was a dialectical materialist. It considers what dialectical materi- alism meant for him by analysing four prominent characteristics of Hobsbawm’s Marxist study of history found in his writings between 1946 and 1956. That class-struggle analysis was the primary analyt- ical lens for Hobsbawm is the major claim that this work challenges. Hobsbawm’s thinking was guided by dialectical materialism, which was a scientific outlook based on analysis. It always accounted for unpredictable human agency and, though economic factors played the principal role in the development of history, this study rejects the claim that Hobsbawm was a mechanical determinist. Further, dialec- tical materialism aimed at fostering the socialist revolution, with its ultimate goal being to overcome struggle and reach unity.
Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) was one of the most celebrated histo-rians of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His works have been translated into dozens of languages, most notably ‘The Age of ’ volumes beginning with The Age of Revolution, and Hobsbawm’s Marxist historical method inf luenced innumerable young researchers.1 In his recent Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019), Twentieth Century Communism – Issue 1962Andrea BonfantiRichard Evans has attempted to provide an intellectual scrutiny of the Marxist historian. The work is remarkable in several ways – the breadth of archival sources it gauges is impressive – but this lengthy book leaves the reader pondering what, in effect, history meant to Hobsbawm. As Evans points out, he ‘could never accept the fundamental premises of Communism’ which Hobsbawm upheld.2 The political considera-tion seems to have spilled over into the historical field too, and Evans has applied his vision of and methodology for studying history to Hobsbawm’s approach. This, in turn, has caused his study to largely neglect what history meant to committed Marxists: that is, the fact that they used dialectical materialism to analyse it.
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