Eric Hobsbawm: A man whose hopes lived on to haunt him after their sources had died

Even those who are outspoken critics of Marxism happily attest to Eric Hobsbawm’s status as one of the most important historians of the 20th century, if not the pre-eminent one. His own intellectual history resonates with the tragedy of the Left in India as it battles gathering marginalisation. He grew up identifying the Soviet Union as the embodiment of socialism and accepting its political practice, complete with an authoritarian party, which dictated even the personal choices of its members, and control of elected, popular bodies by party factions.

Only after the 20th congress of the Russian communist party where Krushchev denounced Stalin’s excesses did his faith shake. He continued to be a member of the British communist party till very nearly its dissolution in 1991 — out of loyalty to his close comrades who had died in the French resistance and others who had devoted their lives to the party. It would have been betrayal of their sacrifice, he explained, had he left the party, even as he was vocally critical of many of its policies.

Whenever some cyclical crisis struck the global economy, fond hopes from the past resurfaced, and he wrote elegant, elegiastic pieces against capitalism. That history contains in its womb a post-capitalist future of shared human brotherhood and well-being he did not doubt. The trouble was when he projected this hope on to the proximate present and got it wrong, time and again.

Luckily, he did not have to make policy choices in governance . His hopes, ebullient or dashed, remained in the realm of ideas, whose power to disrupt or distort was at one remove. The comrades in India have to deal with actual choices in governance and politics.

A party programme that has declared capitalism moribund conflicts , for them, with the reality of having to produce jobs and prosperity for the voters, a task that can be achieved only by building capitalist enterprises. This schizophrenia breeds confusion, corruption and consternation. Their lot is on the margins, till they accept that Hobsbawm’s ideal society cannot be achieved by Hobbesian submission to outdated dogma.