When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

Praise for When the Facts Change

There is indeed—and this is . . . [a] factor in explaining his writings’ enduring value—a moral center to Judt’s work, the product perhaps of a weary knowledge of the wickedness of which humanity is capable. But it travels alongside a hope for something better and an understanding of the obstacles in our way. Judt wrote of his French hero: ‘Camus was a moralist who unhesitatingly distinguished good from evil but abstained from condemning human frailty.’ That might be a fitting epitaph for Judt himself, whose wise, humane, and brave erudition this collection captures rather beautifully.

—The New York Review of Books

Profound and prescient.

—Foreign Affairs

As was often observed during his life, Judt was a man of apparent paradoxes. A secular Jew, who as a teenager had been a left-wing Zionist, he was castigated for criticizing the actions of Israel. A historian of Europe, he spent most of his career teaching in America. He was an idealist with a profound distrust of ideology and an internationalist who had a natural respect for the nation state. These contrasts do not appear as contradictions in the clear prose of his essays. On the contrary, the logic of his arguments, bolstered by a profusion of historical comparisons and moral reflections, make it hard to disagree with a word he wrote.

—The Spectator (London)

PENGUIN BOOKS

WHEN THE FACTS CHANGE

Tony Judt (1948–2010) was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, and l’École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and taught at Cambridge, Oxford, and Berkeley. He was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University and the director of the Remarque Institute, which he founded in 1995. Among other books, Judt was the author of Thinking the Twentieth Century, The Memory Chalet, Ill Fares the Land, Reappraisals, and Postwar, which was one of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2005 and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Jennifer Homans is the author of Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet. She lives in New York City.

ALSO BY TONY JUDT

Thinking the Twentieth Century (with Timothy Snyder)

The Memory Chalet

Ill Fares the Land

Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

The Politics of Retribution in Europe (edited with Jan Gross and István Deák)

The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century

Language, Nation, and State: Identity Politics in a Multilingual Age

(edited with Denis Lacorne)

A Grand Illusion?: An Essay on Europe

Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956

Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France 1930–1982

Resistance and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe 1939–1948 (editor)

Socialism in Provence 1871–1914: A Study in the Origins of the Modern French Left

La reconstruction du Parti Socialiste 1921–1926

ALSO BY JENNIFER HOMANS

Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

penguin.com

First published in the United States of America by Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015

Published in Penguin Books 2016

Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Homans

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

What Is to be Done? is published for the first time in this volume.

Israel Must Unpick Its Ethnic Myth first appeared in Financial Times.

Crimes & Misdemeanors and Freedom and Freedonia first appeared in The New Republic.

A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy, Fictions on the Ground, Israel Without Clichés, and Generations in the Balance first appeared in The New York Times.

The other selections first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Judt, Tony.

When the facts change : essays, 1995–2010 / Tony Judt ; edited and introduced by Jennifer Homans.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-698-15337-0

1. History—Philosophy. 2. Historiography—Philosophy. 3. Judt, Tony—Philosophy. 4. Judt, Tony—Political and social views. 5. History—Moral and ethical aspects. 6. Historiography—Moral and ethical aspects. 7. Historians—Professional ethics. I. Homans, Jennifer. II. Title.

D16.8.J77 2015

907.2—dc23

2014032948

Version_2

For Joe

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

—QUOTATION COMMONLY ATTRIBUTED TO JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Other men will make history. . . . All I can say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims—and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence.

—ALBERT CAMUS, The Plague

CONTENTS

Praise for When the Facts Change

About the Authors

Also by the Authors

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraphs

Introduction: In Good Faith

Part One

1989: Our Age

CHAPTER I Downhill All the Way

CHAPTER II Europe: The Grand Illusion

CHAPTER III Crimes and Misdemeanors

CHAPTER IV Why the Cold War Worked

CHAPTER V Freedom and Freedonia

Part Two

Israel, the Holocaust, and the Jews

CHAPTER VI The Road to Nowhere

CHAPTER VII Israel: The Alternative

CHAPTER VIII A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy

CHAPTER IX The Problem of Evil in Postwar Europe

CHAPTER X Fictions on the Ground

CHAPTER XI Israel Must Unpick Its Ethnic Myth

CHAPTER XII Israel Without Clichés

CHAPTER XIII What Is to Be Done?

Part Three

9/11 and the New World Order

CHAPTER XIV On The Plague

CHAPTER XV Its Own Worst Enemy

CHAPTER XVI The Way We Live Now

CHAPTER XVII Anti-Americans Abroad

CHAPTER XVIII The New World Order

CHAPTER XIX Is the UN Doomed?

CHAPTER XX What Have We Learned, if Anything?

Part Four

The Way We Live Now

CHAPTER XXI The Glory of the Rails

CHAPTER XXII Bring Back the Rails!

CHAPTER XXIII The Wrecking Ball of Innovation

CHAPTER XXIV What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?

CHAPTER XXV Generations in the Balance

Part Five

In the Long Run We Are All Dead

CHAPTER XXVI François Furet (1927–1997)

CHAPTER XXVII Amos Elon (1926–2009)

CHAPTER XXVIII Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009)

Chronological List of Tony Judt’s Published Essays and Criticism

Index

INTRODUCTION: IN GOOD FAITH

by Jennifer Homans

The only way for me to write this introduction is to separate the man from the ideas. Otherwise, I get pulled back into the man, who I loved and was married to from 1993 until his death in 2010, rather than forward into the ideas. As you read these essays, I hope that you, too, will focus on the ideas, because they are good ideas, and they were written in good faith. In good faith may have been Tony’s favorite phrase and highest standard, and he held himself to it in everything he wrote. What he meant by it, I think, was writing that is free of calculation and maneuver, intellectual or otherwise. A clean, clear, honest account.

This is a book about our age. The arc is down: from the heights of hope and possibility, with the revolutions of 1989, into the confusion, devastation, and loss of 9/11, the Iraq war, the deepening crisis in the Middle East, and—as Tony saw it—the self-defeating decline of the American republic. As the facts changed and events unfolded, Tony found himself turned increasingly and unhappily against the current, fighting with all of his intellectual might to turn the ship of ideas, however slightly, in a different direction. The story ends abruptly, with his untimely death.

This book is also, for me, a very personal book, since our age was also my age with Tony: the early essays date to the first years of our marriage and the birth of our son Daniel, and follow through our time together in Vienna, Paris, New York, the birth of Nicholas, and the growing up of our family. Our life together began, not coincidentally, with the fall of Communism in 1989: I was a graduate student at New York University, where Tony taught. In the summer of 1991, I traveled across Central Europe, and when I got back I wanted to know more. I was advised to take an independent study with Tony Judt.

I did, and our romance began, over books and conversations about European politics, war, revolution, justice, art. It wasn’t the usual dating arrangement: our second course meeting took place in a restaurant over dinner. Tony pushed the books aside, ordered wine, and told me of his time in Prague under Communism, and then in 1989, walking through silent snow-covered squares and streets deep into the night soon after the Velvet Revolution, clearly in awe at the turn of historical fate—and the feelings that were already apparent between us. We watched movies, went to art exhibitions, ate Chinese food, he even cooked (badly). Finally—the key to our courtship—he invited me on a trip to Europe: Paris, Vienna, Budapest, a hair-raising drive over the Simplon Pass in a storm (I drove—he had migraines). We took trains, and I watched him pouring over timetables, clocking departures and arrivals like a kid in a candy store: Zermatt, Brig, Florence, Venice.

It was a great romance, and it was a European romance, part of a larger romance with Europe that defined Tony’s life, and his life’s work. At times, I think he even thought of himself as European. But he wasn’t really. Sure, he spoke French, German, Italian, Hebrew, Czech, some Spanish, but he was never at home in any of these places. He was more Central European, but not exactly that either—he didn’t quite have that history, except by professional engagement and family roots (Russian, Polish, Romanian, and Lithuanian Jews). He was very English, too, by habit and upbringing (he could move effortlessly between his childhood cockney and confident Oxbridge prose), but he wasn’t really that either—too Jewish, too Central European. It’s not that he was alienated from any of these places, although in some cases he was; it was more that he was attached to bits of all of them, which is why he couldn’t let go of any of them.

So perhaps it is not surprising that although we settled in New York from the start, we spent much of our life together planning to live—or living—somewhere else. We were expert packers and often joked that we would write a book together called something like At Home in Europe: Everything You Need to Know about Schools and Real Estate. By far the best gift I ever gave to Tony was a subscription to Thomas Cooks Railway Timetable.

It was only after 2001 that he really settled. This was partly because of his health: that year he was diagnosed with a serious cancer and underwent major surgery, radiation, and other draining therapies. Partly, too, because of the WTC attack. It became increasingly difficult to travel, and the horror of the event itself, combined with his illness, had a homing effect; he wanted to be here with me and the boys. Whatever the reasons, in the years that followed he slowly became more and more, though never quite, American—ironically at the very moment when he found greatest reasons to be critical of its politics. He acquired citizenship: Quiz me, he would say to the kids in the weeks before the test, and they would gleefully take him through the paces, no matter that he had taught American politics for years at Oxford. Around 2003 I noticed a shift in his thinking, and in his writing, from them to us: "The Way We Live Now."

These were also the years of the Remarque Institute, which Tony founded in 1995 and directed until his death. It was built along the same two axes that preoccupied him in his writing: bringing together Europe and America, history and contemporary politics. At the same time, he was writing Postwar (2005), a mammoth undertaking, which tested daily his physical and intellectual strength and discipline, especially as he recovered from cancer. I remember well his exhaustion and determination as he insisted on writing the essays in this volume, too, even as he was (as he put it) in the coal mines of a major book about Europe. I worried at how hard he pushed himself, but in retrospect I see that he couldn’t help it. As he immersed himself in Postwar, he was hearing canaries in the mines of our own time: these essays, which beg us—and especially us Americans—to look back on the twentieth century as we make our way in the twenty-first, were one result.

 • • • 

SO THIS IS A COLLECTION of essays, but it is also a collection of obsessions. Tony’s obsessions. They are all here: Europe and America, Israel and the Middle East, justice, the public sphere, the state, international relations, memory and forgetting, and above all history. His caution, which reappears across these essays, that we were witnessing an economic age collapse into an era of fear* and entering a new age of insecurity* was a sign of just how depressed and worried he was at the direction politics was taking. He expected a lot and was a keen observer. You will find in these essays, I think, both a clear-eyed realist—who believed in facts, events, data—and an idealist who aimed at nothing less than the well-lived life; not just for himself, but for society.

I have presented the essays chronologically as well as thematically because chronology was one of his greatest obsessions. He was, after all, a historian, and he had little patience for postmodern fashions of textual fragmentation or narrative disruption, especially in historical writing. He wasn’t really interested in the idea that there is no single truth (wasn’t that obvious?), or the deconstruction of this or that text. The real job, he believed, was not to say what wasn’t but what was—to tell a convincing and clearly written story from the available evidence, and to do it with an eye to what is right and just. Chronology was not merely a professional or literary convention, it was a prerequisite—even, when it came to history, a moral responsibility.

A word about facts: I have never met anyone as committed to facts as Tony, something his children learned from the start: it is to Daniel, now nineteen, that we owe the title of this volume, which comes from a (probably apocryphal) quote from Keynes that was one of Tony’s favorite mantras: when the facts change, I change my mind—what do you do, sir? I learned this early on about Tony, in one of those domestic situations that does so much to illuminate a man. When we were first married we bought a house in Princeton, New Jersey (his idea)—but it was more of a house in theory than in practice. In theory, Tony wanted to live there, but in practice we were living in New York, or traveling to Europe, or on our way somewhere else. Eventually, I wanted to sell the house—it was draining us financially and frankly I had a horror of ever living there. There ensued a long and difficult discussion about what to do with the house, which turned into a debate and finally a silent and angry standoff about the emotional, historical, geographical meaning of houses and home, and why this particular one was or wasn’t right for us.

Arguing with Tony was a real challenge because he was a master at the dialectical switchback and could turn any point you made against you. Finally I created a spreadsheet that laid out the facts—a desperate strategic move on my part: finances, commuter train schedules, fares, total hours spent at Penn Station, the works. He studied it carefully and agreed on the spot to sell the house. No regrets, no remorse, no recriminations, no further discussion necessary. He was already on to the next plan. To me, it was an astounding and admirable quality. It gave him a kind of clarity of thinking—he wasn’t wedded to his ideas or, as I later discovered, to his prose. When the facts changed—when a better, more convincing argument was made—he really did change his mind and move on.

He had great inner certainty. This was not an existential attribute, it was hard earned: he read, ingested, absorbed, memorized more facts, and knew more real stuff, as he liked to put it, than anyone I have ever met. For this reason, he didn’t like social events or parties: he was shy, in a way, and preferred to stay home and read—he could get more from books, he said, away from the distracting blah blah of the chattering classes. He was almost machinelike in his recall, and he arrived at his positions quickly and decisively, sifting a given problem through his extraordinary store of knowledge and sharply analytic mind. It is not that he trusted himself absolutely—like all of us, he had emotional gaps and moments when reason and good judgment deserted him, but these were mostly in his life, not in his writing. When it came to ideas, he was not a doubter; he had a kind of pure intellectual command and ability to summon ideas and arguments without complication.

He was a great writer because he was always fine-tuning his words, craftsmanlike, to this inner pitch. He had a system for writing, and the essays in this book were all written according to the same method, even those from 2008 to 2010 when he was ill and quadriplegic. First, he read everything he could on a subject, taking copious notes by hand, on lined yellow legal pads. Then came the outline, color-coded A, B, C, D, with detailed subcategories: A1 i, A1 ii, A2 iii, etc. (more legal pads). Then he sat for hours on end, monklike, at the dining room table assigning each line in his notes, each fact, date, point, or idea, to a place in the outline. Next—and this was the killer and the key—he retranscribed all of his original notes in the order of the outline. By the time he sat down to write the essay, he had copied, recopied, and memorized most of what he needed to know. Then, door closed, eight-hour days of writing back to back until the piece was done (small breaks for marmite sandwiches and strong espresso). Finally—polishing.

When he became ill, none of this changed, it just got harder. Someone else had to be the hands, turning the pages of books, assembling materials, searching the Web, and typing. As his body failed, he retaught himself how to think and write—the most private of events—with someone else, a tribute to the flexibility of his extraordinary mind. He worked with an assistant, but he had to do most of the work by memory, in his own mind, usually at night, composing, sorting, cataloguing, rewriting his mental notes according to his outline—A, B, C, D—to be typed in the morning by me, our boys, a nurse, or his assistant.

This was not just a method, I think, it was a map of his mind. The logic, the patience, the intense concentration and careful construction of the argument, the soldierly attention to fact and detail, the confidence of his convictions—unlike most writers, he rarely deviated from his original design. The difficulty came when he bumped into things inside himself that he didn’t fully see or know: not the facts on the ground, but the facts inside—the things that were just there, like furniture in his mind. The most obvious had to do with being Jewish.

For Tony, being Jewish was a given—the oldest piece of furniture in the place. It was the only identity that he possessed unequivocally. He was not religious, never went to synagogue, never practiced anything at home; he liked to quote Isaac Deutscher (whose books were given to him by his father, Joe, when he was a boy) on the non-Jewish Jews. If he talked about being Jewish, it was about the past: Friday night dinners as a child with his Yiddish-speaking grandparents in the East End of London; his father’s (very Jewish) secular humanism (I don’t believe in race, I believe in humanity) and his mother’s determined renunciation—she stood in her living room when the Queen of England appeared on TV and didn’t want her grandchildren circumcised lest bad times come again; or his grandfather Enoch, the proverbial wandering Jew, who always had his bags packed and spent as much of his life as he could on the road.

Another fact: the hat. Some years ago, we were on our way to the bat mitzvah of a close friend’s daughter at a synagogue on New York’s Upper East Side. We were late and almost there in a taxi traveling uptown, when Tony literally panicked: he had forgotten his hat. Did it really matter, I asked, we were late already and he would miss part of the service if he went back. Couldn’t he go without it? No, really he couldn’t, and I was taken aback at the heightened and inexplicable anxiety that seemed to overtake him. He went back for the hat, which was a well-appointed but old-fashioned thing I couldn’t remember having ever seen before. When he slipped into the synagogue to rejoin me, he was astonished to find that he was the only one: the other guests were all wearing black-tie. He was indignant and a bit offended, but mostly confused—and manifestly out of place. What kind of Jews were these?

Tony had had a bar mitzvah himself (we did our duty, his father later explained), and as a passionate (later disabused) Zionist in his youth, he spoke good Hebrew and had been a translator in Israel during the 1967 war. When our boys were young we agreed that we would like them to have at least some religious education. My background was Protestant but above all atheist, so we soon dismissed the idea of Sunday school and instead found Itay—a graduate student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, who came to our apartment on Washington Square weekly to teach the boys Hebrew, biblical history, culture. There was—Tony’s decision—no bar mitzvah. To my mind, the message was clear: within the limits of their decidedly American upbringing, Tony wanted the boys to know the wheres and whys of the hat. After that, it was up to them. When they later both insisted that, in fact, they did not feel Jewish at all, the conversation quickly turned to the Holocaust. Nicholas didn’t miss a beat: I don’t have to be Jewish to understand how sad and tragic it was. Tony was surprised at their ambivalence, but not upset; they, after all, did not have his past.

What about the Holocaust? A friend who knew Tony well once commented to me that Tony had never written about the Holocaust, that he had focused his scholarship on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then jumped to the postwar era. This is true, but—and it is an overwhelming but—the war and its killing fields were central to Postwar, and to much of his other work, even if they were not his subject: the epilogue to Postwar is entitled From the House of the Dead.

Soon after the book was published, moreover, I thanked Tony for dedicating it to me but told him that I knew that deep down it was also dedicated to someone else: to Toni. He wept—and he was not a man who wept easily or often. Toni was his namesake and his father’s cousin, who had perished at Auschwitz. She was the ghost of the book, and a kind of dark presence in his mind all the time. Was it guilt, maybe? Not exactly survivor guilt—he was born in 1948—but a kind of black hole in his mind, I came to believe, weighty, incomprehensible, like evil or the devil, where this moment in history and this aspect of his Jewishness lay. It was murky and emotional, but what seemed clear to me was that Toni’s tragedy was a responsibility in Tony’s life, tied in some way to the idea of good faith.

Which brings us to Israel. In a series of articles beginning in 2002, Tony laid out his positions and reached for pragmatic solutions. The essays here give an idea, I hope, of how and why he ventured into these troubled waters. After Israel: The Alternative was published in 2003 there were ugly threats and a level of noxious and ad hominem vituperation in the press that sadly demonstrated the impossibility of an open discussion of the subject, at least in America. This and the essays that followed speak for themselves. I can only report that the rage his positions aroused, and the increasingly intractable and racist politics of Israel itself, disturbed him deeply.

After his June 2009 piece on the settlements in the New York Times, a colleague wrote to Tony: what is to be done? He wanted to answer, but he was by then ill and coping with the difficult physical complications of his rapidly progressing disease. Nonetheless, he took up the topic with a determined if grim resolve and wrote an energetic and ambitious response—with the help of an assistant, who typed tirelessly for long days, often without a moment to eat or drink, as Tony urgently dictated and revised the text. He called it What Is to Be Done? I worked on it with him more, and we discussed it at length; I did not feel it was up to his usual level and told him so. Frustrated by his physical disability, and unable to hone the argument to his satisfaction, he became discouraged and abruptly set it aside.

Reading it again now, the reasons for this are not entirely clear to me. The ideas, if flawed at moments—and only at moments—remain strong. Why did he back away, and am I wrong to publish it now? I can’t know what he would do, but I offer it here because I see in the essay—perhaps precisely because it is raw—a kind of true intellectual grit. It has Tony’s characteristic resistance to dogma, broken eggs, entrenched positions; his willingness to pick up the political thread wherever events wind it (note the return to a two-state solution) and try, with as much imagination as he can muster, to bring history, morality, pragmatism—the facts on the ground—to bear on seemingly unsolvable issues. In an impossible situation, both personal and political, he was aiming for an honest and clear account.

That same year, two of his greatest intellectual supports died: Amos Elon and Leszek Kołakowski. He wrote about each of them, even as he was planning and facing his own death, which he knew was imminent. In the long run we are all dead, he liked to quip, when he was up to it: Keynes again. Tony did not really have heroes, but he did have shades, dead people he had known or never known except in books who were all around all the time. I got to know them well. Keynes was one of them. Some of the others (there were many) were Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron, A.J.P. Taylor, Bernard Williams (a friend, but nonetheless), Alexander Pope, Philip Larkin, Jean Renoir, and Vittorio De Sica. There was also, of course, Karl Marx, and—double of course—the Marx Brothers, who appeared in ritual screenings, along with Orson Welles in The Third Man. The two he kept close by him and admired perhaps most of all were Albert Camus, whose photo sat on his desk, and George Orwell, who it always seemed to me anyway, was everywhere. These were some of the shoulders he stood on, and the men he tried to live up to, in good faith.

In his final month, he turned to another pressing subject and started an essay called The Afterlife. It begins I have never believed in God, an interesting formulation for a man of the Enlightenment, which is what he really was, since it leaves the question ever so slightly open. The facts, after all, might change when you are dead. In the meantime, he began to build an argument about legacy, memorials, and what we can leave behind, which was the only afterlife he knew anything about. What he could leave behind, of course, were memories, and his writings. He never finished the essay—it breaks off midway in notes and scattered thoughts. One of them says this:

You cannot write with a view to impact or response. That way you distort the latter and corrode the integrity of the writing itself. In that sense, it is like shooting at the moon—you have to allow that it won’t be in the same place by the time the rocket gets there. Better to know why you are sending it up in the first place and worry less about its safe landing. . . .

You cannot anticipate either the context of the motives of readers in unconstrained futures. So all you can do is write what you should, whatever that means. A very different sort of obligation.

Part One

1989: Our Age

CHAPTER I

Downhill All the Way

Among historians in the English-speaking world there is a discernible Hobsbawm generation. It consists of men and women who took up the study of the past at some point in the long nineteen-sixties, between, say, 1959 and 1975, and whose interest in the recent past was irrevocably shaped by Eric Hobsbawm’s writings, however much they now dissent from many of his conclusions. In those years he published a quite astonishing body of influential work: Primitive Rebels , which first appeared in 1959, introduced young urban students to a world of rural protest in Europe and overseas that has now become much more familiar to us, in large measure thanks to the work of scholars whose imaginations were first fired by Hobsbawm’s little book. Labouring Men, Industry and Empire, and Captain Swing (with George Rude) substantially recast the economic history of Britain and the story of the British labor movement; they brought back to scholarly attention a half-buried tradition of British radical historiography, reinvigorating research into the conditions and experiences of the artisans and workers themselves, but bringing to this engaged concern an unprecedented level of technical sophistication and a rare breadth of knowledge.

If the conclusions and interpretations of these books seem conventional today, that is only because it is difficult now to remember what their subject matter looked like before Hobsbawm made it his own. No amount of revisionist sniping or fashionable amendment can detract from the lasting impact of this body of work.

But Hobsbawm’s most enduring imprint on our historical consciousness has come through his great trilogy on the long nineteenth century, from 1789 to 1914, the first volume of which, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848, appeared in 1962. It is hard to assess the influence of that book precisely because it has become so indelibly part of our sense of the period that all subsequent work either unconsciously incorporates it or else works against it. Its overall scheme, interpreting the era as one of social upheaval dominated by the emergence and rise to influence of the bourgeoisie of northwest Europe, eventually became the conventional interpretation, now exposed to steady criticism and revision. It was followed in 1975 by The Age of Capital, 1848–1875, a masterly survey of the middle years of the last century that drew on a remarkable range of material and depth of understanding. That book remains, in my view, Hobsbawm’s single greatest work, drawing together the many mid-Victorian transformations of the world and framing them in a unified and still forceful historical narrative. In The Age of Empire, 1875–1914, which appeared twelve years later, there was an unmistakable elegiac air, as though the leading historian of the last century were somehow sorry to see it come to a close at his hands. The overall impression is of an era of protean change, where a high price was paid for the rapid accumulation of wealth and knowledge; but an era, nonetheless, that was full of promise and of optimistic visions of radiant and improving futures. The nineteenth century, as Hobsbawm reminds us in his latest book, was my period; like Marx, he is at his best as a dissector of its hidden patterns, and he left little doubt of his admiration and respect for its astonishing achievements.

 • • • 

IT COMES, therefore, as a surprise that Eric Hobsbawm should have chosen to add a fourth volume dealing with the short twentieth century.* As he admits in the preface, I avoided working on the era since 1914 for most of my career. He offers conventional grounds for this aversion: we are too close to the events to be dispassionate (in Hobsbawm’s case, born in 1917, he has lived through most of them), a full body of interpretative material is not yet at hand, and it is too soon to tell what it all means.

But it is clear that there is another reason, and one which Hobsbawm himself would certainly not disavow: the twentieth century has ended with the apparent collapse of the political and social ideals and institutions to which he has been committed for most of his life. It is hard not to see in it a dark and gloomy tale of error and disaster. Like the other members of a remarkable generation of British Communist or ex-Communist historians (Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Edward Thompson) Hobsbawm directed his professional attention to the revolutionary and radical past, and not only because the Party line made it virtually impossible to write openly about the near present. For a lifelong Communist who is also a serious scholar, the history of our century presents a number of near insuperable obstacles to interpretation, as his latest work inadvertently demonstrates.

Nonetheless, Hobsbawm has written what is in many ways an extraordinary book. Its argument is explicit and directly reflected in its tripartite structure. The first section, The Age of Catastrophe, covers the period from the outbreak of World War I to the defeat of Hitler; the second, The Golden Age, is an account of the remarkable and unprecedented era of economic growth and social transformation that began around 1950 and ended in the midseventies, provoking The Landslide, as Hobsbawm calls the third and final section of his book, which deals with the history of the last two decades. Each section has a dominant theme, against which are set the details of its history. For the decades following the assassination at Sarajevo, the author depicts a world stumbling for forty years from one calamity to another, an era of misery and horrors, a time when millions of refugees wandered helplessly across the European subcontinent and when the laws of war, so painstakingly forged over the previous centuries, were abandoned wholesale. (Of 5.5 million Russian prisoners of war in World War II, approximately 3.3 million died, one statistic among many that would have been utterly inconceivable to an earlier generation.)

Of the Golden Age following World War II, Hobsbawm notes that it was the moment when, for 80 percent of humankind, the Middle Ages finally ended, a time of dramatic social change and dislocation in Europe no less than in the colonial world over which the European powers now relinquished their control. But the explosive success of postwar Western capitalism, generating economic growth at an unprecedented rate while distributing the benefits of that growth to an ever-increasing number of people, carried within it the seeds of its own corruption and dissolution. It is not for nothing that Eric Hobsbawm has acquired a reputation for sophisticated and subtle Marxist readings of his material.

The expectations and institutions set in motion by the experience of rapid expansion and innovation have bequeathed to us a world with few recognizable landmarks or inherited practices, lacking continuity and solidarity between generations or across occupations. To take but one example, the democratization of knowledge and resources (including weapons) and their concentration in uncontrolled private hands threaten to undermine the very institutions of the capitalist world which brought them about. Without shared practices, common cultures, collective aspirations, ours is a world which [has] lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis.

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IN SHORT, Eric Hobsbawm’s history of the twentieth century is the story of the decline of a civilization, the history of a world which has both brought to full flowering the material and cultural potential of the nineteenth century and betrayed its promise. In wartime certain states have reverted to the use of chemical weapons upon unarmed civilians (their own included, in the case of Iraq); the social and environmental inequities arising from uncontrolled market forces are on the rise, while any collective sense of shared interests and inheritances is shrinking fast. In politics, the decline of the organized mass parties, class-based, ideological or both, [has] eliminated the major social engine for turning men and women into politically active citizens. In cultural matters everything is now post- something:

postindustrial, postimperial, postmodern, poststructuralist, post-Marxist, post-Gutenberg, or whatever. Like funerals, these prefixes [take] official recognition of death without implying any consensus or indeed certainty about the nature of life after death.

There is a Jeremiah-like air of impending doom about much of Hobsbawm’s account.

However, this does not detract from its strengths. Like everything else Hobsbawm has written, the age of extremes is described and analyzed in simple, clean prose, utterly free of jargon, pomposity, and pretension. Important points are made in brief, striking, often witty phrases: the political impact of World War I is captured in the observation that no old government was left standing between the borders of France and the Sea of Japan; we are reminded of Hitler’s low estimation of democracies—The only democracy he took seriously was the British, which he rightly regarded as not entirely democratic. Hobsbawm’s own rather low opinion of the New Left of the sixties is made explicit:

At the very moment when hopeful young leftists were quoting Mao Tse-tung’s strategy for the triumph of revolution by mobilizing the countless rural millions against the encircled urban strongholds of the status quo, those millions were abandoning their villages and moving into the cities themselves.¹

The reference to the peasant millions is a reminder that though unashamedly Eurocentric, Eric Hobsbawm has a unique range.² His sympathetic and firsthand knowledge of Latin America in particular enriches his account of the worldwide impact of the Depression, just as his comparison of Poland’s Solidarity with the Brazilian Workers’ Party, both of them nationwide popular labor movements that developed during the eighties in opposition to the politics of a repressive regime, is suggestive