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In the mid-1930s in Berlin as a young boy, Hobsbawm talks of
Nazis and communists as parties of the young "if only
because young men are far from repelled by the politics of
action, loyalty and an extremism untainted by the low dishonest
compromises" of those who think of politics as the art of
the possible. More, "next to sex, the activity combining
bodily experience and intense emotion to the highest degree is
the participation of a mass demonstration at a time of great
personal exaltation."
Just about 18, on
the eve of entering Cambridge he summed himself up in his
private diary as "a tall, angular, dangly, ugly,
fair-haired fellow... quick on the uptake. With a considerable
if superficial stock of general knowledge and a lot of original
ideas, general and theoretical." At the university, he ran
into a couple of Indians who, not unlike him, were members of
the (Cambridge) Students Branch of the CP. Among them "the
elegant charmer" Mohan Kumaramangalam and his younger
contemporary, "the modest and selfless" Indrajit (‘Sony’)
Gupta, both of whom had later brief stints as Union Ministers.
Jazz, he recalls,
was "the key" that opened the door to "most of
what I know" about the realities of the USA and "to a
lesser extent" of what was once Czechoslovakia, Italy,
Japan, post-war Austria and not least hitherto unknown parts of
Britain.
He is far from
happy—few indeed are—about the American century that looms
large on the horizon. Forced into the straitjacket of an l8th
century Constitution reinforced by two centuries of
"Talmudic exegesis" of lawyers, the institutions of
the USA are far more "frozen into immobility" than
those of almost all other states in today’s world. More, the
net result is that the USA is "largely immune" to
great men or indeed anybody taking great decisions. In its
public life, it is a country "geared to operate with
mediocrities."
Megalomania,
Hobsbawm insists, is the "occupational disease" of
global victors —"unless controlled by fear."
"Nobody" controls the USA today. In the event, its
enormous power "can and obviously does" destabilise
the world. Uncle Sam’s empire, he is convinced, does not know
what it wants to do, or "can do," with its power, or
its limits. It merely insists that those who are not with it are
against it. In the event, he looks forward to an American world
power "whose long-term chances are poor with more fear and
less enthusiasm" than he does to the old British Empire run
by a country "whose modest size" protected it against
megalomania.
There is a lot
more to EH’s "interesting times" than the skeleton
summary statement in the preceding paragraphs which omits more
than it covers. He defines himself as an anti- specialist in a
world of specialists, a polyglot cosmopolitan, an intellectual
whose politics and academic works belong to the
non-intellectual, for much of his life, "an anomaly"
even among communists. Author of half a dozen outstanding works,
his Age of Extremes, 1914-1991 (1998) has
attracted a lot of well-deserved attention.
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DEPENDING
upon where one is and what one is doing, a denizen of the 21st
century may view the past 100 years as one of contention and
conflict, of peace and prosperity, of an unprecedented advance in
the technological revolution. Of some vague if uncertain emergence
of a new world order. Of the birth of a myriad new nations in Africa
and Asia. And some even in Europe. The century was witness to no end
of trouble and turmoil of revolution and revolt of devastating wars.
Hobsbawm’s Interesting Times is the story of all this and
more through the eyes of an extremely keen and prescient observer
who has lived through it all. Of an historian of no mean talent who
re-lives men and places with a deft touch and illuminates hundreds
of years of human thought and experience with an ease, and maturity,
few can equal.
