Nuevos asedios a la historia

[ENSAYO] En el IV Seminario Internacional sobre Historiografía, el académico francés François Hartog presenta hoy Creer en la historia, en la U. Finis Terrae.

por Pablo Marín - 28/11/2014 - 08:56

Tomado de http://www.latercera.com/noticia/cultura/2014/11/1453-606466-9-nuevos-asedios-a-la-historia.shtml 

En su Gran Diccionario de 1866-76, Pierre Larousse anotaba que “hoy la historia se ha vuelto, por así decirlo, una religión universal. Reemplaza, en todas las almas, las creencias extintas y quebrantadas (…). El derecho, la política, la filosofía, le piden prestadas sus luces. Está destinada a ser, en medio de la civilización moderna, lo que fue la teología en la Edad Media y en la Antigüedad: reina y moderadora de las conciencias”.

Hoy la disciplina, tras Hiroshima, el Holocausto y el fin de los grandes relatos redentores, tiene un estatus distinto: nuestro mundo ya no está atravesado por el avance sin freno de la historia y los historiadores ya no son intermediarios entre pasado, presente y futuro. Entre otras cosas, porque el futuro apenas se vislumbra. Y porque sustituimos al ídolo de la historia por un cuarteto -memoria, conmemoración, patrimonio, identidad- dirigido por el presente.

Pero que estemos secuestrados por el “presentismo” no significa que haya que dejar de creerle a la historia y, menos aún, de creer en ella. Más bien lo contrario. Eso sí, señala François Hartog a La Tercera, “antes de creer (nuevamente) en la historia, hay que saber por qué ya no creemos, al menos en esa historia que fue la gran creencia del siglo XIX y la mayor parte del XX”. Actualmente, concluye, “no tenemos un concepto de historia a tono con la experiencia del tiempo contemporáneo”.

Las palabras de Hartog, director de estudios y profesor de historiografía en la Escuela de Altos Estudios en Ciencias Sociales de París, explican el sentido general de su último libro. Aparecido en Francia el año pasado, Creer en la historia es fruto de una traducción local y su presentación, hoy a las 12.00 en la U. Finis Terrae, se enmarca en el IV Seminario Internacional sobre Historiografía. Un volumen que interroga el concepto moderno de historia y constata el vuelco contemporáneo en nuestras relaciones con el tiempo, complementando sus reflexiones en obras como Regímenes de historicidad (2003).

De Balzac a McCarthy

Dividida en cuatro partes y un intermedio, la obra se pregunta por el rol del historiador (¿Juez de instrucción? ¿Un “experto” más de la mediósfera contemporánea?), por los acercamientos y rupturas con la retórica y la poética, por las políticas memoriales. Y termina preguntándose si, en los últimos años, desdibujada hace tiempo ya la flecha del progreso, ha vuelto la historia a “ponerse en marcha”.

Y para dar sentido a un concepto arisco, cabe investigar o reconsiderar una variedad de fuentes. Por ejemplo, el Angelus Novus, la pintura de Paul Klee que fue propiedad de Walter Benjamin y sobre la cual éste escribió una de las tesis que figuran en Sobre el concepto de historia. Benjamin vio acá un “angel de la historia” que mira al pasado mientras un huracán (el progreso) lo empuja irremediablemente hacia el futuro”. A Hartog, por su parte, la obra le sugiere otra interpretación: “Cuando la figura del progreso no era discutida, la historia que escribían los historiadores esclarecía la historia que hacían los hombres, mostrando lo que habían hecho. De aquí en adelante, o por el momento, se ha terminado ese régimen historiográfico”.

Pero más necesaria para Hartog es la novela: mal que mal, “la historia moderna y la literatura moderna, bajo la forma de la novela, triunfan juntas”. Parte por el siglo XIX, “que vio imponerse esta evidencia doble: la de la historia, concebida como proceso, llevada por un tiempo actor, viviéndose según el modo de la aceleración; la de la novela, llamada a decir este mundo nuevo”. Y arranca con Balzac, pues el autor de La comedia humana instala temporalidades distintas en un mismo cuadro histórico, dando cuenta, por ejemplo, de “trayectorias aceleradas o quebradas de personajes que suben muy alto o que caen muy bajo”. La sociedad balzaciana, agrega, “está enteramente atravesada por tiempos discordantes que se frotan y chocan entre sí, a veces trágicamente. Frente a las pervivencias, están las novedades, la moda del día, los torbellinos de lo que está en boga, las fortunas que se hacen y se deshacen”.

El largo camino por las letras acá recorrido, que pasa entre otros por Tolstoi, Musil y Sebald, lo lleva hasta la literatura norteamericana de nuestros días. A Don DeLillo y Cormac McCarthy, que “exploran la post-catástrofe”, como explica Hartog desde París. Respecto del segundo, el académico entra en las minucias de La carretera (2006), precisamente por su ambientación post-apocalíptica. Más aún, llama la atención sobre las abismales diferencias entre dos obras de nombres muy parecidos, escritas con medio siglo de diferencia por dos talentos de sus respectivas generaciones: En el camino, de Jack Kerouac (On the road) y la señalada novela de McCarthy (The road). “Se podría decir que los viajeros de Kerouac también viven al día, sin dinero pero con astucias, de borrachera en borrachera”, afirma Hartog. “Sin embargo, tienen la certeza de un porvenir, no del suyo, sino del porvenir como tal. El presente de los segundos no es el mismo que el de los primeros. De una ‘carretera’ a la otra, el futuro se ha eclipsado”.

Héctor Maldonado: "Eric Hobsbawm: una vida dedicada"

Stuart Hall obituary. Influential cultural theorist, campaigner and founding editor of the New Left Review

David Morley and Bill Schwarz

• Tomado de http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/10/stuart-hall
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• The Guardian, Monday 10 February 2014 13.00 GMT
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Stuart Hall was born in Jamaica and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, arriving in 1951. He always saw himself as a 'familiar stranger' in Britain. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

When the writer and academic Richard Hoggart founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964, he invited
Stuart Hall, who has died aged 82, to join him as its first research fellow. Four years later Hall became acting director and, in 1972, director. Cultural studies was then a minority pursuit: half a century on it is everywhere, generating a wealth of significant work even if, in its institutionalised form, it can include intellectual positions that Hall could never endorse.

The foundations of cultural studies lay in an insistence on taking popular, low-status cultural forms seriously and tracing the interweaving threads of culture, power and politics. Its interdisciplinary perspectives drew on literary theory, linguistics and cultural anthropology in order to analyse subjects as diverse as youth sub-cultures, popular media and gendered and ethnic identities – thus creating something of a model, for example, for the Guardian's own G2 section.

Hall was always among the first to identify key questions of the age, and routinely sceptical about easy answers. A spellbinding orator and a teacher of enormous influence, he never indulged in academic point-scoring. Hall's political imagination combined vitality and subtlety; in the field of ideas he was tough, ready to combat positions he believed to be politically dangerous. Yet he was unfailingly courteous, generous towards students, activists, artists and visitors from across the globe, many of whom came to love him. Hall won accolades from universities worldwide, despite never thinking of himself as a scholar. Universities offered him a base from which he could teach – a source of great pleasure for him – and collaborate with others in public debate.

He was born in Kingston, into an aspiring Jamaican family. His father, Herman, was the first non-white person to hold a senior position – chief accountant – with United Fruit in Jamaica. Jessie, his formidable mother, had white forebears and identified with the ethos of an imaginary, distant Britain. Hall received a classical English education at Jamaica College in Kingston – while allying himself with the struggle for independence from colonial rule.

But he found the country's racial and colonial restrictions intolerable and an escape presented itself when he won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford University. He arrived in Britain in 1951, part of the large-scale Caribbean migration that had begun symbolically with the arrival of the Empire Windrush three years earlier. Hall recalled that when he took the train from Bristol to Paddington station in London, he saw a landscape familiar to him from the novels of Thomas Hardy.

However, if Britain was a culture he knew from the inside, it was also one he never entirely felt part of, always imagining himself a "familiar stranger". At Merton College, studying English, he experienced this sense of displacement, his enthusiasms – for a new politics, for bebop, for a world alive to the values of human difference – incomprehensible to the cavalry-twilled former public schoolboys who surrounded him.

As his time in Britain lengthened, so his identifications with blackness deepened. Ambivalent about his relation both to his place of departure and to his place of arrival, he sought to survive the medieval gloom of Oxford by making common cause with the city's displaced migrant minority. Out of these new attachments, and out of the political cataclysm of 1956 – marked by the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt and by the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution – emerged the new left, in which Hall was an influential figure: it provided him with a political home. At this point he found himself "dragged backwards into Marxism, against the tanks in Budapest" – and, if his Marxism came "without guarantees", it was nonetheless a vital part of him to the end.

In 1957 these issues became the catalyst for the launching of the Universities and Left Review, in which Hall was an active presence, and which subsequently merged with the New Reasoner to form the New Left Review, of which Hall was the founding editor. Abandoning his thesis on Henry James, he moved to London. By day he worked as a supply teacher in Brixton and, late into the night, on the Soho-based NLR. In 1961, he became a lecturer in film and media at Chelsea College, London University. Brixton and Soho had proved congenial to him where Oxford had not, and he began his work on popular culture. The Popular Arts (1964), co-authored with Paddy Whannel, opened a field of inquiry he was to develop at Birmingham.

On the 1964 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament march from Aldermaston to London, Hall met Catherine Barrett, and they married later that year. With his appointment to the CCCS they moved to Birmingham where their two children, Becky and Jess, were born, and where they lived until 1979. During these years Catherine became an acclaimed historian, and the marriage proved to be a source of great mutual love and support. Their homes, in Birmingham and then in London, were welcoming places, drawing in their many friends.
In Birmingham, under Hall's charismatic leadership – and on a shoestring budget – cultural studies took off. But as Hoggart remarked, Hall rarely used the first person singular, preferring to speak of the collaborative aspects of the work. His energy was prodigious and he shifted the terms of debate on the media, deviancy, race, politics, Marxism and critical theory.
While there are no single-authored, scholarly monographs to his name, Hall produced an astonishing array of collectively written and edited volumes, essays and journalism – translated into many languages – as well as countless political speeches, and radio and television talks.

In 1979 he became professor of sociology at the Open University, attracted by the possibility of reaching out to those who had fallen through the conventional educational system. He remained there until 1998 – later becoming emeritus professor – launching a series of courses in communications and sociology. Increasingly, he focused on questions of race and postcolonialism, and on theorising the migrant view of Britain that he had always cherished.
The move to the OU coincided with the election victory of Margaret Thatcher. Before the election, Hall, convinced that the emergence of this new Conservatism marked a profound cleavage in British political history, coined the term Thatcherism, in a visionary article in Marxism Today. Drawing both on his long involvement with Antonio Gramsci's theorisation of the forms of political hegemony and on the collaborative CCCS volume Policing the Crisis (1978), he emphasised the role of race in Thatcherite politics, particularly in relation to the creed of law and order which he characterised as "authoritarian populism".
In The Politics of Thatcherism (1983), he insisted that the left's traditional statism was in part responsible for creating the conditions that had allowed the Thatcherites to win ascendancy, pointing to the degree to which Thatcherism had rooted itself in authentically popular sentiment – something he believed the left had failed to do. This generated fierce controversy among those who might otherwise have been among his political allies. His conviction that Thatcherism would define the politically possible, long after Thatcher herself had departed, proved enormously prescient, providing a key to understanding the politics not only of New Labour, but also of the subsequent coalition.
Hall, a campaigner for racial justice, was invited to join many official, and unofficial, public bodies. From 1997 to 2000 he served on the Runnymede Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, and was shocked by the media reaction to the commission's observation that the idea of Britain itself was racially far from innocent. He knew that the persistence of race thinking ran deep among the British.

He enjoyed university life but was relieved to relinquish his full-time academic role. This presented him with another opportunity to reinvent himself, by then in alliance with young artists and film-makers, exploring the politics of black subjectivity. A new Hall emerged, evident in catalogue introductions and workshop discussions in galleries in Britain and across Europe.
Once again he collaborated with – and learned from – people considerably younger than himself, chairing Autograph (the Association of Black Photographers) and the International Institute of Visual Arts. He was proud that he helped secure funding for Rivington Place, in Hoxton, east London, a location dedicated to public education in multicultural issues, drawing from contemporary art and photography. His involvement in the movement for black arts gave him a new lease of intellectual life. This Stuart Hall was reflected in the history of his life and work produced by the film-maker John Akomfrah, in the form of a much lauded gallery installation, The Unfinished Conversation (2012), and in a widely distributed film, The Stuart Hall Project (2013), which brought Hall to the attention of a new generation.

Latterly Hall's health, always more precarious than he let on, declined; he had to face intensive dialysis and later, at an advanced age, a kidney transplant. This ate up his time and energy, gradually constraining his mobility and his ability to take part in public life. But to the end, he held court at home to an endless stream of visitors keen to discuss the politics of contemporary times.
Under New Labour he became increasingly furious that managerialism was hollowing out public life, and increasingly pessimistic about the global situation. Yet he was cheered that "someone with Hussein for a middle name" was sitting in the White House and, after the credit crunch, was mesmerised by the sight of capitalism falling apart of its own accord. Throughout, he maintained an optimism of the will, and as late as last year he and his colleagues on Soundings magazine were producing manifestos for a post-neoliberal politics.
In 2005 he was made a fellow of the British Academy. His published work includes the collaborative volumes Resistance Through Rituals (1975); Culture, Media, Language (1980); Politics and Ideology (1986); The Hard Road to Renewal (1988); New Times (1989); Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (1996); and Different: A Historical Context: Contemporary Photographers and Black Identity (2001). All these works testify to the breadth of Hall's intellectual engagements, and to the ways he moved through the various new times of his own life.

When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, Hall talked about his lifelong passion for Miles Davis. He said that the music represented for him "the sound of what cannot be". What was his own intellectual life but the striving, against all odds, to make "what cannot be" alive in the imagination?

He is survived by Catherine, Becky and Jess, by his grandchildren, Noah and Ishaan, and by his sister Patricia.


• Stuart McPhail Hall, teacher, cultural theorist and campaigner, born 3 February 1932; died 10 February 2014
• Stuart Hall talking to Laurie Taylor on Thinking Allowed, Radio 4, 2011

Edward Palmer Thompson. Un historiador nada convencional

Edward Palmer Thompson. Un historiador nada convencional

Emma Griffin

The Guardian

Traducción para Sin Permiso de Lucas Antón.

Hace cincuenta años, un obscuro historiador que trabajaba en el departamento de Educación para Adultos de la Universidad de Leeds entregó, con retraso y un grosor mayor de lo esperado, un manuscrito a Victor Gollancz - editorial entonces especializada en ensayo socialista e internacionalista. Nadie podía haber previsto la recepción del libro. The Making of the English Working Class [La formación de la clase obrera en Inglaterra, Capitán Swing, Madrid, 2012], de E. P. Thompson, se convirtió en un descomunal éxito comercial y crítico. La demanda de este mamotreto de 800 páginas fue ni más ni menos que notable. En 1968, Pelican Books compró los derechos de The Making. y publicó una versión revisada como volumen número mil de su catálogo. En menos de una década se reeditó cinco veces.

Cincuenta años después, todavía sigue en catálogo, como obra canónica de historia social. No era el primer libro de Thompson. Había aparecido una historia de William Morris en 1955, recibida con la indiferencia que le cabe en suerte a la mayor parte de las monografías académicas. Después de The Making. vino Whigs & Hunters, un libro sobre las Black Acts [Leyes Negras], la infame legislación de la época georgiana que criminalizaba no solo matar ciervos sino cualquier actividad sospechosa que pudiera dar indicios de la intención de matar ciervos. A esto le siguió una serie de originales ensayos sobre temas diversos, entre ellos el tiempo y el capitalismo industrial, las revueltas del hambre y la venta de esposas (sí, en el siglo XVIII los hombres llegaban de verdad a llevar a sus mujeres al mercado y "venderlas"). Una y otra vez, Thompson se mostró capaz de abordar nuevos temas y volver sobre los antiguos con enfoques nuevos, creando un corpus de obras que era a la vez original y de enorme influencia.

Y sin embargo, Thompson no fue nunca un historiador convencional. Sus muchos años en Leeds no transcurrieron en el Departamento de Historia sino en el de Educación para Adultos. Su puesto de titular en la recién creada Universidad de Warwick fue breve: renunció justo seis años después de haber aceptado la plaza, disgustado por el giro comercial que estaba adoptando. Perenne hombre de letras, acompañó su renuncia de un extensor opúsculo en el que delineaba sus objeciones intelectuales [Warwick University Limited. 1971]. El resto de su vida lo dedicó a una serie de causas políticas. Thompson fue miembro activo del Partido Comunista en los años 40 y 50, y fundador del Grupo de Historiadores del Partido Comunista en 1946. Formó parte del éxodo masivo del Partido que siguió en la década de los 50 a la invasión soviética de Hungría, pero siguió estrechamente aliado a toda una serie de movimientos de izquierda. Hacia finales de la década de los 70, Thompson desempeñaba un papel clave, lo mismo como incansable organizador que como mascarón de proa intelectual en el naciente movimiento por la paz, causa de la que siguió siendo devoto hasta su muerte en 1993. La suya fue una vida de activismo, tanto como de investigación académica.

Pero por encima de todo sigue descollando The Making., con ese prólogo que de modo tan memorable declaraba la intención del libro de "rescatar al pobre calcetero, al cosechador ludita, al 'obsoleto' tejedor con su telar a mano, al artesano 'utópico' y hasta al crédulo seguidor de Joanna Southcott [profetisa religiosa de finales del XVIII] del enorme desdén de la posteridad". El mítico estatus del libro no debería distraernos de la franca originalidad de la obra. En 1963, tejedores y artesanos no solían ser material de los libros de Historia. Historiadores sociales pioneros llevaban estudiando a los trabajadores desde principios del siglo XX, pero su enfoque seguía concentrándose en lo tangible, lo mensurable, lo "significativo": salarios, condiciones de vida, sindicatos, huelgas, cartistas.

Thompson abordaba los sindicatos y los salarios reales, por supuesto, pero la mayor parte de su libro estaba dedicado a algo a lo que él se refería como "experiencia". Mediante un paciente y extenso examen de archivos tanto locales como nacionales, Thompson había puesto de manifiesto detalles sobre costumbres y rituales de los talleres, conspiraciones fallidas, cartas de amenaza, canciones populares y carnés de clubes sindicales. Recogió en los archivos lo que otros habían considerado sobras y las interrogó para ver qué nos contaban acerca de las creencias y objetivos de quienes no estaban en el bando de los vencedores. Aquí y allí había un libro que divagaba sobre aspectos de la experiencia humana que nunca antes habían tenido su historiador. Y el momento de su aparición casi no podía haber sido más afortunado. La década de 1960 fue testigo de una agitación y expansión sin precedentes del sector universitario, con la creación de nuevas universidades repletas de profesores y estudiantes cuyas familias no habían tenido tradicionalmente acceso al privilegiado mundo de la educación superior. Poco puede extrañar, por lo tanto, que hubiese tantos que sintieran una especial afinidad con los marginados y perdedores de Thompson. Y había algo más. A lo largo de The Making. discurre una ira mordaz frente a la explotación económica y sólidos comentarios sobre los tiempos de su capitalismo. Thompson rechazaba la noción de que el capitalismo fuera inherentemente superior al modelo alternativo de organización económica que substituía. Se negaba a admitir que los artesanos se hubieran quedado obsoletos, o que su aflicción fuera un ajusto doloroso pero necesario a la economía de mercado. Era un argumento que gozaba todavía de una amplia resonancia en los años 60, cuando los intelectuales marxistas podían creer todavía que existía una alternativa realista al capitalismo, podían aducir que no se había ensayado adecuadamente el "verdadero" marxismo.

Aparecido en el apogeo del marxismo académico, el marco político de The Making. estuvo en la entraña del éxito del libro. Acaso su mayor logro, con todo, estribe en cómo ha logrado capear la posterior caída en desgracia académica del marxismo. Para la década de 1980, la historiografía marxista ya no mantenía una posición relevante en los departamentos académicos de Historia. Desde entonces, ha estado a la defensiva. Repasando la discusión literaria entre Thompson y el filósofo polaco, Leszek Kolakowski - que, después de años vivir bajo el comunismo, había tenido la temeridad de desertar de las banderas del marxismo - Tony Judt observó que "Nadie que la lea volverá a tomarse jamás en serio a E. P. Thompson". Y sin embargo, claro que seguimos tomándonos en serio a Thompson. Más que cualquiera de sus libros, The Making. continúa deleitando e inspirando a nuevos lectores. Por supuesto, la investigación académica de Thompson era parcial y se movía de acuerdo con su política. Pero la originalidad, el vigor y la iconoclastia de su libro harán que con seguridad perdure.

Emma Griffin, profesora de Historia en la Universidad de East Anglia, es especialista en la historia social y económica de Gran Bretaña entre 1700 y 1870. Autora de A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution, y Blood Sport: A History of Hunting in Britain, acaba de publicar Liberty´s Dawn: A People´s History of the Industrial Revolution (Yale University Press).

Fuente original: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/06/ep-thompson-unconventional-historian

Fuente de la traducción: http://www.sinpermiso.info/articulos/ficheros/thom.pdf

Releer a Edward Palmer Thompson, dos recomendaciones

Dos recomendaciones de lectura del genial Edward Palmer Thompson (1924-1993).  Una de ellas es "Opción cero" y la otra es una tesis titulada "E.P. Thompson, la conciencia crítica de la Guerra Fría . Democracia, pacifismo y diplomacia ciudadana" que se puede bajar de la siguente dirección web  http://digibug.ugr.es/bitstream/10481/566/1/15327954.pdf

Thompson  que fue docente en la enseñanza de la historia y que se vinculó a las Universidades como investigador fue también un activista político de primer orden. 

Thompson  fue un intelectual que comprendió que los el propósito de la historia cuando se utilizan los medios para su divulgación es formar criterios y no imponer visión de mundo. Las lecturas sesgadas de Thompson no dejan ver una gran faceta promovida por él como fue su preocupación por preguntarse tanto cuál es la función social que cumple el conocimiento histórico que se transmite a la sociedad como su decidida opción por plantearse acciones ciudadanas dentro de la sociedad que vivimos.

Las lecturas sugeridas nos permiten visualizar un ámbito historiográfico a veces olvidado como es la la historia como práctica historiográfica pero también como práctica vital, elementos que en Thompson resultan claves para un historiador.

Eric Hobsbawm: a conversation about Marx, student riots, the new Left, and the Milibands

As he publishes his latest book, 93-year-old historian Eric Hobsbawm talks communism and coalition with one of Britain's newer breed, Tristram Hunt, now a Labour MP

Tristram Hunt · 16/01/2011 · guardian.co.uk

Tomado de https://apps.facebook.com/theguardian/books/2011/jan/16/eric-hobsbawm-tristram-hunt-marx?fb_ref=U-C9BbqqoyaOZc4StNIjCGfQ-CFCONX01FRS-2mc44XXX&fb_source=other_multiline&fb_action_types=news.reads&code=AQD6DQEkmoZP2HwX8FN4tcvJLZK7MErgX5cYdeKilckIirzT_FFn4g63Og3-Kokq7XwAT-N5_7FQTlkvrr3EGWC_2XExfVuE17dQuG84WoXXULA9EIilb5lFVAz7bASA2h4U8K7ktxMD6-9O9HMsaKrRl4po7qbHlFD9sYI3dPPMrZ5w9YbxsUYGFrIVUMl1POs#_=_

Eric Hobsbawm, left, in conversation with Tristram Hunt. Photograph: Karen Robinson

Hampstead Heath, in leafy north London, is proud of its walk-on part in the history of Marxism. It was here, on a Sunday, that Karl Marx would walk his family up Parliament Hill, reciting Shakespeare and Schiller along the way, for an afternoon of picnics and poetry. On a weekday, he would join his friend Friedrich Engels, who lived close by, for a brisk hike around the heath, where the "old Londoners", as they were known, mulled over the Paris Commune, the Second International and the nature of capitalism.

Today, on a side road leading off from the heath, the Marxist ambition remains alive in the house of Eric Hobsbawm. Born in 1917 (in Alexandria, under the British protectorate of Egypt), more than 20 years after both Marx and Engels had died, he knew neither man personally, of course. But talking to Eric in his airy front room, filled with family photos, academic honours and a lifetime of cultural objets, there is an almost tangible sense of connection to the men and their memory.

The last time I interviewed Eric, in 2002, his brilliant autobiography Interesting Times – chronicling a youth in Weimar Germany, a lifetime's love of jazz and his transformation of the study of history in Britain – had appeared to great acclaim. It was also amid another cyclical media attack, in the wake of Martin Amis's anti-Stalin book Koba the Dread, on Eric's membership of the Communist party. The "Marxist professor" of Daily Mail ire did not seek, as he put it, "agreement, approval or sympathy", but, rather, historical understanding for a 20th-century life shaped by the struggle against fascism.

Since then things have changed. The global crisis of capitalism, which has wreaked havoc on the world economy since 2007, has transformed the terms of debate.

Suddenly, Marx's critique of the instability of capitalism has enjoyed a resurgence. "He's back," screamed the Times in the autumn of 2008 as stock markets plunged, banks were summarily nationalised and President Sarkozy of France was photographed leafing through Das Kapital (the surging sales of which pushed it up the German bestseller lists). Even Pope Benedict XVI was moved to praise Marx's "great analytical skill". Marx, the great ogre of the 20th century, had been resuscitated across campuses, branch meetings and editorial offices.

So there seemed no better moment for Eric to bring together his most celebrated essays on Marx into a single volume, together with new material on Marxism in light of the crash. For Hobsbawm, the continual duty to engage with Marx and his multiple legacies (including, in this book, some fine new chapters on the meaning of Gramsci) remains compelling.

But Eric himself has changed. He suffered a nasty fall over Christmas and can no longer escape the physical constraints of his 93 years. But the humour and the hospitality of himself and his wife, Marlene, as well as the intellect, political incisiveness and breadth of vision, remain wonderfully undimmed. With a well-thumbed copy of the Financial Times on the coffee table, Eric moved seamlessly from the outgoing President Lula of Brazil's poll ratings to the ideological difficulties faced by the Communist party in West Bengal to the convulsions in Indonesia following the 1857 global crash. The global sensibility and lack of parochialism, always such a strength of his work, continue to shape his politics and history.

And after one hour of talking Marx, materialism and the continued struggle for human dignity in the face of free-market squalls, you leave Hobsbawm's Hampstead terrace – near the paths where Karl and Friedrich used to stroll – with the sense you have had a blistering tutorial with one of the great minds of the 20th century. And someone determined to keep a critical eye on the 21st.

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?

Eric Hobsbawm 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 – 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, 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. Then, a bit later on, I was having lunch with [financier] George Soros, who asked: "What do you think of Marx?" Even though we don't agree on very much, he said to me: "There's definitely something to this man."

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's the part that attracted the CEOs flying United Airlines?

EH I think that it is globalisation, 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.

TH And this was the language of "an end to boom and bust" and going beyond the business cycle?

EH 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't 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.

TH By "successful", you mean in terms of raising living standards in the postwar years?

EH Successful in that it both made profits and ensured something like a politically stable and socially relatively contented population. It wasn't ideal, but it was, shall we say, capitalism with a human face.

TH And do you think that the renewed interest in Marx was also helped by the end of the Marxist/Leninist states. The Leninist shadow was taken away and you were able to return to the original nature of Marxian writing?

EH With the fall of the Soviet Union, the capitalists stopped being afraid and to that extent both they and we could actually look at the problem in a much more balanced way, less distorted by passion than before. But it was more the instability of this neoliberal globalised economy that I think began to become so noticeable at the end of the century. You see, in a sense, the globalised economy was effectively run by what one might call the global north-west [western Europe and North America] and they pushed forward this ultra-extreme market fundamentalism. Initially, it seemed to work quite well – at least in the old north-west – even though from the start, you could see that at the periphery of the global economy it created earthquakes, big earthquakes. In Latin America, there was a huge financial crisis in the early 1980s. In the early 1990s, in Russia, there was an economic catastrophe. And then towards the end of the century, there was this enormous, almost global, breakdown ranging from Russia to [South] Korea, Indonesia and Argentina. This began to make people think, I feel, that there was a basic instability in the system that they had previously dismissed.

TH There has been some suggestion to say that the crisis we've seen since 2008 in terms of America, Europe and Britain isn't so much a crisis of capitalism, per se, but of the modern west's finance capitalism. Meanwhile, Brazil, Russia, India and China – "Bric" – are growing their economies on increasingly capitalist models at the same time. Or is this simply our turn to suffer the crises they had 10 years ago?

EH The real rise of the Bric countries is something that has happened in the past 10 years, 15 years at most. So to that extent you can say that it was a crisis of capitalism. On the other hand, I think there's a risk in assuming, as neoliberals and free marketeers do, that there's only one type of capitalism. Capitalism is, if you like, a family, with a variety of possibilities, from the state-directed capitalism of France to the free-market of America. It's therefore a mistake to believe that the rise of the Bric countries is simply the same thing as the generalisation of western capitalism. It isn't: the only time they tried to import free-market fundamentalism wholesale was into Russia and there it became an absolutely tragic failure.

TH You raised the issue of the political consequences of the crash. In your book, you drop an insistence on looking at the classic texts of Marx as providing a coherent political programme for today, but where do you think Marxism as a political project goes now?

EH I don't believe that Marx ever had, as it were, a political project. Politically speaking, the specific Marxian programme was that the working class should form itself into a class-conscious body and act politically to gain power. Beyond that, Marx quite deliberately left it vague, because of his dislike of utopian things. Paradoxically, I would even say that the new parties were largely left to improvise, to do what they could do without any effective instructions. What Marx had written about simply amounted to little more than clause IV-style ideas about public ownership, nowhere actually near enough to provide a guidance to parties or ministers. My view is that the main model that 20th-century socialists and communists had in mind was the state-directed war economies of the first world war, which weren't particularly socialist but did provide some kind of guidance on how socialisation might work.

TH Are you not surprised by the failure of either a Marxian or a social democratic left to exploit the crisis of the last few years politically? We sit here some 20 years on from the demise of one of the parties you most admire, the Communist party in Italy. Are you depressed by the left's state at the moment in Europe and beyond?

EH Yes, of course. In fact, one of the things I'm trying to show in the book is that the crisis of Marxism is not only the crisis of the revolutionary branch of Marxism but in the social democratic branch too. The new situation in the new globalised economy eventually killed off not only Marxist-Leninism but also social democratic reformism – which was essentially the working class putting pressure on their nation states. But with globalisation, the capacity of the states to respond to this pressure effectively diminished. And so the left retreated to suggest: "Look, the capitalists are doing all right, all we need to do is let them make as much profit and see that we get our share."

That worked when part of that share took the form of creating welfare states, but from the 1970s on, this no longer worked and what you had to do then was, in effect, what Blair and Brown did: let them make as much money as possible and hope that enough of it will trickle down to make our people better off.

TH So there was that Faustian bargain that during the good times, if the profits were healthy and investment could be secured for education and health, we didn't ask too many questions?

EH Yes, so long as the standard of living improved.

TH And now with the profits falling away, we are struggling for answers?

EH Now that we're going the other way with western countries, where economic growth is relatively static, even declining, then the question of reforms becomes much more urgent again.

TH Do you see as part of the problem, in terms of the left, the end of a conscious and identifiable mass working class, which was traditionally essential to social democratic politics?

EH Historically, it is true. It was around the working-class parties that social democratic governments and reforms crystallised. These parties were never, or only rarely, completely working class. They were, to some extent, always alliances: alliances with certain kinds of liberal and leftwing intellectuals, with minorities, religious and cultural minorities, possibly many countries with different kinds of working, labouring poor. With the exception of the United States, the working class remained a massive, recognisable bloc for a long time – certainly well into the 1970s. I think the rapidity of deindustrialisation in this country has played hell with not only the size but also, if you like, the consciousness of the working class. And there is no country now in which the pure industrial working class in itself is sufficiently strong.

What is still possible is that the working class forms, as it were, the skeleton of broader movements of social change. A good example of this, on the left, is Brazil, which has a classic case of a late-19th-century Labour party based on an alliance of trade unions, workers, the general poor, intellectuals, ideologists and varying kinds of left [wingers], which has produced a remarkable governing coalition. And you can't say it's an unsuccessful one after eight years of government with an outgoing president on 80% approval ratings. Today, ideologically, I feel most at home in Latin America because it remains the one part of the world where people still talk and conduct their politics in the old language, in the 19th- and 20th-century language of socialism, communism and Marxism.

TH In terms of Marxist parties, something that comes out very strongly in your work is the role of intellectuals. Today, we see enormous excitement on campuses such as yours at Birkbeck, with meetings and rallies. And if we look at the works of Naomi Klein or David Harvey or the performances of Slavoj Zizek, there's real enthusiasm. Are you excited by these public intellectuals of Marxism today?

EH I'm not sure there has been a major shift, but there's no doubt: over the present government cuts there will be a radicalisation of students. That's one thing on the positive side. On the negative side… if you look at the last time of massive radicalisation of students in '68, it didn't amount to all that much. However, as I thought then and still think, it's better to have the young men and women feel that they're on the left than to have the young men and women feel that the only thing to do is to go and get a job at the stock exchange.

TH And do you think men such as Harvey and Zizek play a sort of helpful role in that?

EH I suppose Zizek is rightly described as a performer. He has this element of provocation that is very characteristic and does help to interest people, but I'm not certain that people who are reading Zizek are actually drawn very much nearer rethinking the problems of the left.

TH Let me move from west to east. One of the urgent questions you ask in this book is whether the Chinese Communist party can develop and respond to its new place on the global stage.

EH This is a big mystery. Communism's gone, but one important element of communism remains, certainly in Asia, namely the state Communist party directing society. How does this work? In China, there is, I think, a higher degree of consciousness of the potential instability of the situation. There is probably a tendency to provide more elbow room for a rapidly growing intellectual middle class and educated sectors of the population, which, after all, will be measured in tens, possibly hundreds of millions. It's also true that the Communist party in China appears to be recruiting a largely technocratic leadership.

But how you pull all this stuff together, I don't know. The one thing that I think is possible with this rapid industrialisation is the growth of labour movements, and to what extent the CCP can find room for labour organisations or whether they would regard these as unacceptable, in the way they regarded the Tiananmen Square demonstrations [as unacceptable], is unclear.

TH Let's talk about politics here in Britain, to get your sense of the coalition. It seems to me there's a 1930s air to it in terms of its fiscal orthodoxy, spending cuts, income inequalities, with David Cameron as an almost Stanley Baldwin figure. What is your reading of it?

EH Behind the various cuts being suggested, with the justification of getting rid of the deficit, there clearly seems to be a systematic, ideological demand for deconstructing, semi-privatising, the old arrangements – whether it's the pension system, welfare system, school system or even the health system. These things in most cases were not actually provided for either in the Conservative or the Liberal manifesto and yet, looking at it from the outside, this is a much more radically rightwing government than it looked at first sight.

TH And what do you think the response of the Labour party should be?

EH The Labour party on the whole has not been a very effective opposition since the election, partly because it spent months and months electing its new leader. I think the Labour party should, for one thing, stress much more that for most people in the past 13 years, the period was not one of collapse into chaos but actually one where the situation improved, and particularly in areas such as schools, hospitals and a variety of other cultural achievements – so the idea that somehow or other it all needs to be taken down and ground into the dust is not valid. I think we need to defend what most people think basically needs defending and that is the provision of some form of welfare from the cradle to the grave.

TH You knew Ralph Miliband, as the Miliband family are old friends. What do you think Ralph would have made of the contest between his sons and the outcome of Ed leading the party?

EH Well, as a father, he obviously couldn't help but be rather proud. He would certainly be much to the left of both of his sons. I think that Ralph was really identified for most of his life with dismissing the Labour party and the parliamentary route – and hoping that somehow it would be possible that a proper socialist party could come into being. When Ralph finally got reconciled to the Labour party, it was in the least useful period, namely in the Bennite period when it didn't really do much good. None the less, I think Ralph would certainly have hoped for something much more radical than his sons have so far looked like doing.

TH The title of your new book is How to Change the World. You write, in the final paragraph, that "the supersession of capitalism still sounds plausible to me". Is that hope undimmed and does that keep you working and writing and thinking today?

EH There's no such thing as undimmed hope these days. How to Change the World is an account of what Marxism fundamentally did in the 20th century, partly through the social democratic parties that weren't directly derived from Marx and other parties – Labour parties, workers' parties, and so on – that remain as government and potential government parties everywhere. And second, through the Russian Revolution and all its consequences.

The record of Karl Marx, an unarmed prophet inspiring major changes, is undeniable. I'm quite deliberately not saying that there are any equivalent prospects now. What I'm saying now is that the basic problems of the 21st century would require solutions that neither the pure market, nor pure liberal democracy can adequately deal with. And to that extent, a different combination, a different mix of public and private, of state action and control and freedom would have to be worked out.

What you will call that, I don't know. But it may well no longer be capitalism, certainly not in the sense in which we have known it in this country and the United States.