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Marxist Unrepentant
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14452 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1996 |
1,918 Words |
| Author
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Dennis O''Keeffe
Dennis O'Keeffe is senior lecturer in sociology of education
at the University of North London. |
AGE OF EXTREMES
The Short Twentieth Century, 1914--1991
Eric Hobsbawm
New York: Pantheon, 1995
627 pp., $30.00
Eric Hobsbawm's book on the twentieth century is a strange mixture of brilliance and nagging, obstinate Marxist perversity. The range is stunning, embracing, in a global sweep, the economics, politics, social arrangements and mores, arts, and sciences of our century. Confronted with the elegance and aplomb with which this complex subject matter is managed, one sees why a conservative historian like Oxford's Norman Stone, while utterly rejecting Hobsbawm's Marxism, can praise his abilities in exposition (and does so, extravagantly, on the dust jacket of the British edition).
Hobsbawm has not specialized in this century; yet his erudition is vast, and his "outsiderness" promises a sort of freshness. He is justified, too, in choosing to bracket the sense of our century between 1914, which ushered in a world war ending in communist revolution in Russia, and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. His subtitle is, convincingly, The Short Twentieth Century. The rise and fall of communism has, indeed, defined our era, especially in terms of its horrors--a rider Hobsbawm would not add.
It is because he would not that the book ultimately fails. This is not a question of knowledge but of moral vision. In moral terms, the book not only fails; it repels. I read it open-mindedly, expecting, in the light of events since the late 1980s, some element of
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