{"id":5840,"date":"2011-01-29T06:19:03","date_gmt":"2011-01-29T10:19:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=5840"},"modified":"2011-01-28T23:19:58","modified_gmt":"2011-01-29T03:19:58","slug":"eric-hobsbawm-vindicated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/eric-hobsbawm-vindicated\/","title":{"rendered":"Eric Hobsbawm, Vindicated"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Excellent interview with the last of our great Marxist historians \u2014 Eric Hobsbawm<\/strong> \u2014 in the Guardian<\/strong><\/em> a couple days ago. Below the opening shots \u2014 you can read the whole thing here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

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Tristram Hunt: At the heart of this book, is there a sense of vindication? That even if the solutions once offered by Karl Marx might no longer be relevant, he was asking the right questions about the nature of capitalism and that the capitalism that has emerged over the last 20 years was pretty much what Marx was thinking about in the 1840s? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Eric Hobsbawm: <\/strong>Yes, there certainly is. The rediscovery of Marx in this period of capitalist crisis is because he predicted far more of the modern world than anyone else in 1848. That is, I think, what has drawn the attention of a number of new observers to his work \u2013 paradoxically, first among business people and business commentators rather than the left. I remember noticing this just around the time of the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Communist Manifesto<\/em>, when not very many plans were being made for celebrating it on the left. I discovered to my amazement that the editors of the [in-flight] magazine of United Airlines said they wanted to have something about the Manifesto<\/em>. Then, a bit later on, I was having lunch with [financier] George Soros, who asked: \u201cWhat do you think of Marx?\u201d Even though we don\u2019t agree on very much, he said to me: \u201cThere\u2019s definitely something to this man.\u201d<\/p>\n

TH Do you get the sense that what people such as Soros partly liked about Marx was the way he describes so brilliantly the energy, iconoclasm and potential of capitalism? That that\u2019s the part that attracted the CEOs flying United Airlines?<\/strong><\/p>\n

EH <\/strong>I think that it is globalisation<\/a>, the fact that he predicted globalisation, as one might say a universal globalisation, including the globalisation of tastes and all the rest of it, that impressed them. But I think the more intelligent ones also saw a theory that allowed for a sort of jagged development of crisis. Because the official theory in that period [the late 1990s] theoretically dismissed the possibility of a crisis.<\/p>\n

TH And this was the language of \u201can end to boom and bust\u201d and going beyond the business cycle?<\/strong><\/p>\n

EH <\/strong>Exactly. What happened from the 1970s on, first in the universities, in Chicago and elsewhere and, eventually, from 1980 with Thatcher and Reagan was, I suppose, a pathological deformation of the free-market principle behind capitalism: the pure market economy and rejection of state and public action that I don\u2019t think any economy in the 19th century actually practised, not even the USA. And it was in conflict with, among other things, the way in which capitalism had actually worked in its most successful era, between 1945 and the early 1970s.<\/p>\n

TH By \u201csuccessful\u201d, you mean in terms of raising living standards in the postwar years?<\/strong><\/p>\n

EH <\/strong>Successful in that it both made profits and ensured something like a politically stable and socially relatively contented population. It wasn\u2019t ideal, but it was, shall we say, capitalism with a human face.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Excellent interview with the last of our great Marxist historians \u2014 Eric Hobsbawm \u2014 in the Guardian a couple days ago. Below the opening shots \u2014 you can read the whole thing here. Tristram...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[933,55,56],"tags":[934],"class_list":["post-5840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-intellectuals","category-interview","tag-eric-hobsbawm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5840"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5862,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5840\/revisions\/5862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}