"Team Herodotus" vs. "Team Thucydides"

"We are, Mr. Cohen writes, in a 'golden age' of history writing. For most of human existence, the recording of the past has been 'sacred history,' propaganda put forth by a priestly caste or authorities who claimed to rule by divine right—or, sometimes, simply to be divine. History as we know it—honest and free inquiry across the disciplines—has, he argues, only been possible in two epochs. The first was the founding era of the Greeks and the Romans. The second is ours, the era initiated in 1520, when Pope Leo X commissioned Niccolò Machiavelli to write a 'History of Florence.' Homer uses histor to mean a 'good judge.' A historian's judgment is impaired when a theological thumb is on the scales—but is the judgment of secular historians any better?"

Dominic Green at The Wall Street Journal reviews Richard Cohen's Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past.

"The Way We Think About History, Especially British History, Has Changed"

"Hobsbawm wrote Industry and Empire when Britain was still an industrial nation. It isn't now. AJP Taylor ended his book, English History, 1914-1945, with the famous words, 'Few now sang "Land of Hope and Glory". Few even sang "England Arise". England has risen all the same.' This optimism had more resonance in the Swinging Sixties, a time of rising affluence when Britain had just elected its first Labour government since Attlee. Which British historians writing today could share that optimism now?"

David Herman at The Critic wonders why publishers have released so many biographies of British historians from the mid-twentieth century.

"Became a Pronounced Cultural Conservative"

"Although there was no purge of Communists from universities in England as there was in the United States, to be a known Communist was a disadvantage. He and several others openly formed the Communist Party Historians' Group after the war, and paid a weird visit to Russia over the Christmas of 1954, 'a dispiriting trip for foreign communist intellectuals, for we met hardly anyone there like ourselves,' Hobsbawm obtusely said. He did find a post at Birkbeck College, where he spent 35 years, the last 15 of them as a professor. This admirable institution, part of the University of London, is for mature students who often have day jobs, and teaching them in the evenings left Hobsbawm's own days free for reading. He did little archival research, but his books are founded on a huge breadth and depth of printed sources in numerous languages."

At The New Republic, Geoffrey Wheatcroft reviews Richard J. Evans's Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History.

"It Is This Side of His Work, Rather Than His Marxism, That Now Does the Most to Keep It Readable and Relevant"

"In the preface to Fractured Times, Hobsbawm relates its essays to the larger themes of his historical work, and formulates the following thesis. 'The logic of both capitalist development and bourgeois civilisation itself,' he writes, 'were bound to destroy its foundation, a society and institutions run by a progressive elite minority.' Technological innovation, mass politics and above all the rise of 'mass consumption' made it impossible for the educated bourgeoisie to dictate taste to the rest of the population, or even to preserve their own cultural practices and institutions. In a world of mass entertainment, swept by constant technological innovation and the ceaseless pursuit of the new, artistic and literary production could no longer consist primarily of adding a steady stream of fresh, critically approved works to a stable canon. The traditional forms themselves—orchestral music, opera, framed painting—waned, and the cultural initiative passed to the producers of film, television and rock music. Symphony halls closed while Hollywood grew fat."


David A. Bell in The National Interest reviews Eric Hobsbawm's Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century.

Invented Letter Circle Child

The New York Times runs obits for historian Eric Hobsbawm, environmentalist Barry Commoner, singer R. B. Greaves, and songwriter Frank Wilson.

And The New Republic reprints Eugene Genovese's 1995 review of Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991.

The Wrong Moment

"Nor can conservatives claim that Mr Bush is a country-club Republican like his father. He has devoted his energies to giving 'the movement' what it wants: the invasion of Iraq for the neoconservatives (who had championed it long before September 11th); tax cuts for business and the small-government conservatives; restricting federal funding for stem-cell research for the social conservatives; and conservative judges to please every faction.
"This desire to pander to the conservative movement is partly to blame for the administration's practical incompetence. Mr Bush outdid previous Republican presidents in recruiting his personnel from the conservative counter-establishment. But this often meant choosing people for their ideological purity rather than their competence or intelligence. Some 150 Bush administration officials were graduates of Pat Robertson's Regent University, including Monica Goodling, who put on such a lamentable performance before a House inquiry into the firing of nine US attorneys. A more pragmatic president would surely have sacked many of the neoconservative ideologues who have made a hash of American foreign policy"

The Economist surveys the state of American conservatism under George W. Bush.

Interesting Times

"In short, flux is the order, or disorder, of the day: 'We are in a period of considerable trouble and crisis, rather as we were between the wars.'
"The tremendous dynamism of globalised capitalism is now outside the control of national governments, he says, yet there are no global authorities worth talking about."

David Rosenthal in The Scotsman observes Eric Hobsbawm's ninetieth birthday, and the publication of a new book of essays, by checking in with the famed historian.