Paulo Freire
Born	September 19, 1921 Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil
Died	May 2, 1997 (aged 75) São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Nationality	Brazilian
Occupation	Educator, author
Known for	Theories of education
Influenced by	Jean-Paul Sartre, Erich Fromm,Louis Althusser, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Marx, Ivan Illich,Mao Zedong, Antonio Gramsci,Frantz Fanon, Emmanuel Mounier
Influenced	Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux,Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley R. Steinberg, Antonia Darder,Augusto Boal, James D. Kirylo, Priya Paramar

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Paulo Reglus Neves Freire, Ph.D (pron.: /ˈfrɛəri/, Portuguese: [ˈpawlu ˈfɾeiɾi]; September 19, 1921 – May 2, 1997) was a Brazilian educator, philosopher, and influential theorist of critical pedagogy. He is best known for his influential work,Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is considered one of the foundation texts of thecritical pedagogy movement.^[1][2][3]

[edit]Biography

Freire was born September 19, 1921 to a middle class family in Recife, Brazil. Freire became familiar with poverty and hunger during the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1931, the family moved to the less expensive city of Jaboatão dos Guararapes, and in 1933 his father died. In school, he ended up four grades behind, and his social life revolved around playing pick up football with other poor children, from whom he learned a great deal. These experiences would shape his concerns for the poor and would help to construct his particular educational viewpoint. Freire stated that poverty and hunger severely affected his ability to learn. This influenced his decision to dedicate his life to improving the lives of the poor: “I didn’t understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn’t dumb. It wasn’t lack of interest. My social condition didn’t allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship between social class and knowledge” (Freire as quoted in Stevens, 2002) .^[4] Eventually his family’s misfortunes turned around and their prospects improved.

Freire enrolled at Law School at the University of Recife in 1943. He also studied philosophy, more specifically phenomenology, and the psychology of language. Although admitted to thelegal bar, he never actually practiced law but instead worked as a teacher in secondary schools teaching Portuguese. In 1944, he married Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira, a fellow teacher. The two worked together and had five children.

In 1946, Freire was appointed Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the state of Pernambuco. Working primarily among the illiterate poor, Freire began to embrace a non-orthodox form of what could be considered^[5] liberation theology. In Brazil at that time, literacy was a requirement for voting in presidential elections.

In 1961, he was appointed director of the Department of Cultural Extension of Recife University, and in 1962 he had the first opportunity for significant application of his theories, when 300 sugarcane workers were taught to read and write in just 45 days. In response to this experiment, the Brazilian government approved the creation of thousands of cultural circles across the country.

In 1964, a military coup put an end to that effort. Freire was imprisoned as a traitor for 70 days. After a brief exile in Bolivia, Freire worked in Chile for five years for the Christian Democratic Agrarian Reform Movement and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In 1967, Freire published his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom. He followed this with his most famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in Portuguese in 1968.

On the strength of reception of his work, Freire was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard University in 1969. The next year, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published in both Spanish and English, vastly expanding its reach. Because of political feuds between Freire, a Christian socialist, and successive authoritarian military dictatorships, the book wasn’t published in Brazil until 1974, when General Ernesto Geisel became the then dictator president beginning the process of a slow and controlled political liberalisation.

After a year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, Freire moved to Geneva, Switzerland to work as a special education advisor to the World Council of Churches. During this time Freire acted as an advisor on education reform in former Portuguese colonies in Africa, particularly Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique.

In 1979, he was able to return to Brazil, and moved back in 1980. Freire joined the Workers’ Party (PT) in the city of São Paulo, and acted as a supervisor for its adult literacy project from 1980 to 1986. When the PT prevailed in the municipal elections in 1988, Freire was appointed Secretary of Education for São Paulo.

In 1986, his wife Elza died. People close to him felt that he had given up after the loss of his wife and worried that he might die. Freire was teaching a graduate course, and became reconnected with Maria Araújo from Recife. She was a child in the school where he was a principal. Eventually, they fell in love. Freire married Maria Araújo Freire, who continues with her own educational work. Freire often said that Nita saved his life, she was the culmination of the radical love he sought.

Freire died of heart failure on May 2, 1997 in São Paulo.

[edit]Theoretical contributions

“There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”

—Richard Shaull, drawing on Paulo Freire^[6]

Paulo Freire contributed a philosophy of education that came not only from the more classical approaches stemming from Plato, but also from modern Marxist and anti-colonialist thinkers. In fact, in many ways his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) may be best read as an extension of, or reply to, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), which emphasized the need to provide native populations with an education which was simultaneously new and modern (rather than traditional) and anti-colonial (not simply an extension of the culture of the colonizer).

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Freire, reprising the Oppressors–oppressed distinction, differentiates between the two positions in an unjust society, the oppressor and the oppressed. Freire makes no direct reference to his most direct influence for the distinction, which stems back at least as far as Hegel in 1802, and has since been reprised by many authors including Engels, Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Simone Weil and others.

Freire champions that education should allow the oppressed to regain their sense of humanity, in turn overcoming their condition. Nevertheless, he also acknowledges that in order for this to occur, the oppressed individual must play a role in their liberation. As he states:

No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption (Freire, 1970, p. 54).^[7]

Likewise, the oppressors must also be willing to rethink their way of life and to examine their own role in the oppression if true liberation is to occur; “those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly” (Freire, 1970, p. 60).

Freire believed education to be a political act that could not be divorced from pedagogy. Freire defined this as a main tenet of critical pedagogy. Teachers and students must be made aware of the “politics” that surround education. The way students are taught and what they are taught serves a political agenda. Teachers, themselves, have political notions they bring into the classroom (Kincheloe, 2008).^[8] Freire believed that “education makes sense because women and men learn that through learning they can make and remake themselves, because women and men are able to take responsibility for themselves as beings capable of knowing — of knowing that they know and knowing that they don’t” (Freire, 2004, p. 15)^[9]

[edit]Banking model of education

In terms of actual pedagogy, Freire is best known for his attack on what he called the “banking” concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. He notes that “it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power” (Freire, 1970, p. 77). The basic critique was not new — Rousseau’s conception of the child as an active learner was already a step away from tabula rasa (which is basically the same as the “banking concept”). In addition, thinkers like John Dewey were strongly critical of the transmission of mere facts as the goal of education. Dewey often described education as a mechanism for social change, explaining that “education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction” (1897, p. 16).^[10]Freire’s work, however, updated the concept and placed it in context with current theories and practices of education, laying the foundation for what is now called critical pedagogy.

[edit]Student-teacher dualism

^{[original research?]}

More challenging is Freire’s strong aversion to the teacher-student dichotomy. This dichotomy is admitted in Rousseau and constrained in Dewey, but Freire comes close to insisting that it be completely abolished.

[edit]Culture of silence

According to Freire, the system of dominant social relations creates a culture of silence that instills a negative, silenced and suppressed self-image into the oppressed. The learner must develop a critical consciousness in order to recognize that this culture of silence is created to oppress.^[11] Also, a culture of silence can cause the “dominated individuals [to] lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that is forced on them by a dominant culture.”^[12] Social domination of race and class are interleaved into the conventional educational system, through which the “culture of silence” eliminates the “paths of thought that lead to a language of critique”^[13]

[edit]Global impact

Freire’s major exponents in North America are Peter McLaren, Donaldo Macedo, Joe L. Kincheloe, Ira Shor, and Henry Giroux. One of McLaren’s edited texts, Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, expounds upon Freire’s impact in the field of critical education. McLaren has also provided a comparative study concerning Paulo Freire and the Argentinian revolutionary icon Che Guevara. Freire’s work has also influenced the so-called “radical math” movement in the United States, which emphasizes social justice issues and critical pedagogy as components of mathematical curricula [1]

In 1991, the Paulo Freire Institute was established in São Paulo to extend and elaborate upon his theories of popular education. The Institute now has projects in many countries and is currently headquartered at UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies where it actively maintains the Freire archives. The director is Dr. Carlos Torres, a UCLA professor and author of Freirean books including La praxis educativa de Paulo Freire (1978). Since the publication of the English edition in 1970,Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programs, according to Sol Stern, a social commentator critical of the entry of Freire’s Marxist-inspired teachings into the mainstream curriculum. Connections of Freire’s non-dual theory and pedagogy has also recently been made with eastern philosophical traditions such as the Advaita Vedanta^[14]

In 1999 PAULO a National Training Organisation, named in honour of Freire was established in the United Kingdom. This agency was approved by the New Labour Government to represent some 300,000 community based education practitioners working across the UK. PAULO was given formal responsibility for setting the occupational training standards for people working in this field.^{[citation needed]}

The Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference is held each spring and is guided by the theory and practice of these two liberatory practitioners. The Conference networks a wide variety of people with interests in Freire and Augusto Boal—liberatory education and theatre, community organizing, community-based analysis, TIE, race/gender/class/sexual orientation/geography analysis, performance/performance art, comparative education models, etc.

The Paulo and Nita Freire Project for International Critical Pedagogy has been founded at McGill University. Here Joe L. Kincheloeand Shirley R. Steinberg have worked to create a dialogical forum for critical scholars around the world to promote research and re-create a Freirean pedagogy in a multinational domain.

In 2012 a group of educators in Western Massachusetts received permission from the state to found the Paolo Freire Social Justice Charter School in Holyoke, Massachusetts, which is set to open in September 2013.^[15]

At his death, Freire was working on a book of ecopedagogy, a platform of work carried on by many of the Freire Institutes and Freirean Associations around the world today. It has been influential in helping to develop planetary education projects such as theEarth Charter as well as countless international grassroots campaigns per the spirit of Freirean popular education generally.

[edit]Recognition

• King Baudouin International Development Prize 1980. Paulo Freire was the very first person to receive this prize. He was nominated for the prize by Dr. Mathew Zachariah, Professor of Education at the University of Calgary.
• Prize for Outstanding Christian Educators with his wife Elza
• UNESCO 1986 Prize for Education for Peace
• Honorary Doctorate, the University of Nebraska at Omaha, 1996, along with Augusto Boal, during their residency at the Second Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference in Omaha.
• An independent public high school in Holyoke, Massachusetts, called the Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter School, won state approval on 28 February 2012. and is scheduled to open in the fall of 2012.^[16]
• Honorary Degree from Claremont Graduate University, 1992

[edit]Bibliography

Freire wrote and co-wrote over 20 books on education, pedagogy and related themes.^[17]

[edit]See also

[edit]Notes

[edit]References

• Mann, Bernhard, The Pedagogical and Political Concepts of Mahatma Gandhi and Paulo Freire. In: Claußen, B. (Ed.) International Studies in Political Socialization and ion. Bd. 8. Hamburg 1996. ISBN 3-926952-97-0
• Aronowitz, Stanley (1993). Paulo Freire’s radical democratic humanism. In P. McLaren & P. Leonard. (Eds.), Paulo Freire: A critical encounter (pp. 9-)
• Kincheloe, Joe L. (2008). Critical Pedagogy. 2nd Ed. New York: Peter Lang.

[edit]Further reading

• Coben, Diana (1998), Radical heroes. Gramsci, Freire and the Politics of Adult Education, New York: Garland Press.
• Darder, Antonia (2002), Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love, Boulder: Westview.
• Elias, John (1994), Paulo Freire: Pedagogue of Liberation, Florida: Krieger.
• Ernest, Paul; Greer, Brian; Sriraman,Bharath(eds.), “Critical Issues in Mathematics Education”, The Mathematics Enthusiast: Monograph Series in Mathematics Education, Information Age Publishing; Charolotte, NC, ISBN 978-1-60752-039-9
• Freire, Paulo (1997) “Mentoring the mentor: a critical dialogue with Paulo Freire”, Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education, Vol 60, 1997, ISBN 0-8204-3798-0
• Gadotti, Moacir (1994), Reading Paulo Freire. His Life and Work, Albany: SUNY Press.
• Gibson, Rich (2004), “The Promethean Literacy.” Unpublished dissertation online.
• McLaren, Peter (2000) Che Guevara, Paulo Freire and the Pedagogy of Revolution, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
• McLaren, Peter and Leonard, Peter (eds.) (1993), Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, London and New York: Routledge.
• McLaren, Peter and Lankshear, Colin (eds.) (1994), Politics of Liberation. Paths from Freire, London and New York: Routledge.
• Mayo, Peter (1999), Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education. Possibilities for Transformative Action, London and New York: Zed Books.
• Mayo, Peter (2004, 2008), Liberating Praxis. Paulo Freire’s Legacy for Radical Education and Politics, Westport, Connecticut: Praeger; Rotterdam and Taipei: Sense.
• Morrow, Raymond A. and Torres, Carlos .A. (2002), Reading Freire and Habermas. Critical pedagogy and Transformative Social Change, New York and London: Teachers College Press.
• O’Cadiz, Maria del Pilar, Wong, Pia L. and Torres, Carlos A. (1997), Education and Democracy. Paulo Freire, Social Movements and Educational Reform in São Paulo, Boulder: Westview Press.
• Roberts, Peter (2000), Education, Literacy, and Humanization Exploring the Work of Paulo Freire, Westport, Connecticut: Bergin & Garvey.
• Rossatto, Cesar A. (2005), Engaging Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy Of Possibility: From Blind To Transformative Optimism, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Sriraman, Bharath (2007), On the origins of social justice: Darwin, Freire, Marx and Vivekananda, The Montana Mathematics Enthusiast, Monograph 1, pp.1-6, University of Montana Press.
• Taylor, Paul V. (1993), The Texts of Paulo Freire, Buckingham: Open University Press.
• Torres, Carlos A and Noguera, Pedro (eds.) (2008), Social Justice Education For Teachers. Paulo Freire and the Possible Dream, Rotterdam and Taipei: Sense.

[edit]Paulo Freire Institutes around the world

• The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy
• The Paulo Freire Institute at UCLA
• The Paulo Freire Institute of South Africa
• Instituto Paulo Freire of Spain
• Instituto Paulo Freire, Brasil
• Paulo Freire Institute, Malta
• Paulo Freire Research Center, Finland

[edit]External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Paulo Freire

• Digital Library Paulo Freire (Pt-Br)
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
• PopEd Toolkit – Exercises/Links inspired by Freire’s work
• Interview with Maria Araújo Freire on her marriage to Paulo Freire
• Interview excerpt with Paulo Freire on liberation theology and Marx
• A dialogue with Paulo Freire and Ira Shor (1988)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire

Eric Hobsbawm
Hobsbawm in 2011
Born	Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm 9 June 1917 Alexandria, Sultanate of Egypt
Died	1 October 2012 (aged 95) London, United Kingdom
Occupation	Historian, social theorist and author
Citizenship	British
Alma mater	King’s College, Cambridge
Genres	World history, Western history
Spouse(s)	Muriel Seaman (1943–1951); Marlene Schwartz
Children	Joshua Bennathan, Julia andAndy Hobsbawm
Influences[show]
Influenced[show]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Eric Hobsbawm

Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, CH, FBA, FRSL (/ˈhɒbz.bɔːm/; 9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012) was a British Marxist historian of the rise of industrial capitalism,socialism, and nationalism. His best-known works include his trilogy about the long 19th century (The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875; The Age of Empire: 1875–1914), The Age of Extremes on the short 20th century, and an edited volume which introduced the influential idea of “invented traditions“.

Hobsbawm’s household, which was Jewish, was living in Egypt when Hobsbawm was born. They moved to Vienna, Austria, two years later, and from there to Berlin, Germany. Following the death of his parents and the rise to power of Hitler, Hobsbawm moved to London, England, with his adoptive family and obtained his PhD in History at the University of Cambridge, before serving in World War II. Hobsbawm was President of Birkbeck, University of London for ten years until his death.^[1] In 1998 he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour, a UK national honour bestowed for outstanding achievement in the arts, literature, music, science, politics, industry or religion.^[2] In 2003 he was the recipient of the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900, “For his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of twentieth-century Europe and for his ability to combine in-depth historical research with great literary talent.”

Early life and education

Hobsbawm was born in 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt, to Leopold Percy Hobsbaum (néObstbaum), a merchant from the East End of London who was of Polish Jewishdescent,^[3] and Nelly Hobsbaum (née Grün), who was from a middle-class Austrian Jewish family background. His early childhood was spent in Vienna, Austria, and Berlin, Germany. A clerical error at birth altered his surname from Hobsbaum to Hobsbawm.^[4]Although the family lived in German-speaking countries, his parents spoke to him and his younger sister Nancy in English.

In 1929, when Hobsbawm was 12, his father died, and he started contributing to his family’s support by working as an au pair and English tutor. Upon the death of their mother two years later (in 1931), he and Nancy were adopted by their maternal aunt, Gretl, and paternal uncle, Sidney, who married and had a son named Peter. Hobsbawm was a student at the Prinz Heinrich-GymnasiumBerlin (today Friedrich-List-School) when Hitler came to power in 1933; that year the family moved to London, where Hobsbawm enrolled in St Marylebone Grammar School (now defunct).^[4]

Hobsbawm attended King’s College, Cambridge from 1936,^[5] where he was elected to the Cambridge Apostles. He received a doctorate (PhD) in History from Cambridge University for his dissertation on the Fabian Society. During World War II, he served in the Royal Engineers and the Royal Army Educational Corps.

Personal life

Hobsbawm’s first marriage was to Muriel Seaman in 1943. They divorced in 1951.^[3] His second marriage was to Marlene Schwarz, with whom he had two children, Julia Hobsbawm and Andy Hobsbawm. Julia is chief executive of Hobsbawm Media and Marketing and a Visiting Professor of Public Relations at the College of Communication, University of the Arts London.^[6][7] He also had a son, Joshua Bennathan,^[3] from a previous relationship.

Academia

In 1947, he became a Lecturer in History at Birkbeck. He became Reader in 1959, Professor between 1970–82 and an Emeritus Professor of History 1982. He was a Fellow between 1949–55 of King’s College, Cambridge.^[4] Hobsbawm spoke of the weaker version of McCarthyism that took hold in Britain and affected Marxist academics: “you didn’t get promotion for 10 years, but nobody threw you out”.^[8] Hobsbawm was also denied a lectureship at Cambridge by political enemies, and, given that he was also blocked for a time from a professorship at Birkbeck for the same reasons, spoke of his good fortune at having got a post at Birkbeck in 1948 before the Cold War really started to take off.^[8] David Pryce-Jones has questioned the existence of such career obstacles.^[9]

Hobsbawm helped found the academic journal Past & Present in 1952.^[8] He was a Visiting Professor at Stanford in the 1960s. In 1970, he was appointed Professor and in 1978 he became a Fellow of the British Academy. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.^[10]

He retired in 1982 but stayed as Visiting Professor at The New School for Social Research in Manhattan between 1984–97. He was, until his death, President of Birkbeck (from 2002) and Professor Emeritus in The New School for Social Research in thePolitical Science Department. A polyglot, he spoke German, English, French, Spanish and Italian fluently, and read Portugueseand Catalan.^[4]

Works

Hobsbawm wrote extensively on many subjects as one of Britain’s most prominent historians. As a Marxist historiographer he has focused on analysis of the “dual revolution” (the political French Revolution and the British industrial revolution). He saw their effect as a driving force behind the predominant trend towards liberal capitalism today. Another recurring theme in his work was social banditry, which Hobsbawm placed in a social and historical context, thus countering the traditional view of it being a spontaneous and unpredictable form of primitive rebellion.^{[4][11][12][13][14][15][16]} He also coined the term “long nineteenth century“, which begins with the French Revolution in 1789 and ended with the start of The Great War in 1914.

Outside his academic historical writing, Hobsbawm wrote a regular column (under the pseudonym Francis Newton, taken from the name of Billie Holiday‘s communist trumpet player, Frankie Newton) for the New Statesman as a jazz critic, and time to time over popular music such as with his “Beatles and before” article.^[17] He published numerous essays in various intellectual journals, dealing with subjects such as barbarity in the modern age, the troubles of labour movements, and the conflict between anarchismand communism. Among his final publications were Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism (2007), On Empire (2008), and the collection of essays How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840–2011 (2011).

Politics

Hobsbawm joined the Sozialistischer Schülerbund (Association of Socialist Pupils), an offshoot of the Young Communist League of Germany, in Berlin in 1931,^[8] and the Communist Party in 1936. He was a member of the Communist Party Historians Group from 1946 until its demise and subsequently President of its successor, The Socialist History Society until his death. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 led most of its members to leave the British Communist Party – but Hobsbawm, unique among his notable colleagues, remained in the Party. He signed a historians’ letter of protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary and was strongly in favour of the Prague spring.^[4]

Hobsbawm was later a leading light of the Eurocommunist faction in the CPGB that began to gather strength after 1968, when the CPGB criticised the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring and the French CP failed to support the May students in Paris.^[18] In “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” (originally a Marx Memorial Lecture, “The British Working Class One Hundred Years after Marx”, that was delivered to a small audience of fellow Marxists in March 1978 before being published in Marxism Today in September 1978), he argued that the working class was inevitably losing its central role in society, and that left-wing parties could no longer appeal only to this class; a controversial viewpoint in a period of trade union militancy.^[18][19] Hobsbawm supported Neil Kinnock‘s transformation of the British Labour Party from 1983 (the party received just 28% of the vote in that year’s elections, just 2% more than than the Social Democratic Party/Liberal Alliance), and, though not close to Kinnock, came to be referred to as “Neil Kinnock’s Favourite Marxist”.^[18] His interventions in Kinnock’s remaking of the Labour Party helped prepare the ground for the Third Way, New Labour, and Tony Blair,^[18] whom Hobsbawm later derisively referred to as “Thatcher in trousers”.^[20] Until the cessation of publication in 1991, he contributed to the magazine Marxism Today. A third of the 30 reprints of Marxism Todays feature articles that appeared in The Guardian during the 1980s were articles or interviews by or with Hobsbawm, making him by far the most popular of all contributors.^[18] From the 1960s, his politics took a more moderate turn, as Hobsbawm came to recognise that his hopes were unlikely to be realised, and no longer advocated “socialist systems of the Soviet type”.^[21] Until the day of his death, however, he remained firmly entrenched on the Left, maintaining that the long-term outlooks for humanity were ‘bleak’.^{[22][23][24][25][26]}

Miscellaneous views

Regarding the Queen, Hobsbawm stated that constitutional monarchy in general has “proved a reliable framework for liberal-democratic regimes” and “is likely to remain useful”.^[27] On the nuclear attacks on Japan in World War II, he adhered to the view that “there was even less sign of a crack in Japan’s determination to fight to the end [compared with that of Nazi Germany], which is why nuclear arms were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ensure a rapid Japanese surrender”. ^[28] He also believed there was an ancillary political, non-military reason for the bombings: “perhaps the thought that it would prevent America’s ally the USSR from establishing a claim to a major part in Japan’s defeat was not absent from the minds of the US government either.”^[29]Hobsbawn is also quoted as saying that, next to sex, there is nothing so physically intense as ‘participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exhaltation’^[30]

Praise and criticism

In 1994, Neal Ascherson said of Hobsbawm: “No historian now writing in English can match his overwhelming command of fact and source. But the key word is ‘command’. Hobsbawm’s capacity to store and retrieve detail has now reached a scale normally approached only by large archives with big staffs.”^[8] In 2002, Hobsbawm was described by right-leaning magazine The Spectatoras “arguably our greatest living historian—not only Britain’s, but the world’s”,^[31] while Niall Ferguson wrote: “That Hobsbawm is one of the great historians of his generation is undeniable. . . . His quartet of books beginning with The Age of Revolution and ending with The Age of Extremes constitute the best starting point I know for anyone who wishes to begin studying modern history. Nothing else produced by the British Marxist historians will endure as these books will.”^[32] In 2003, The New York Timesdescribed him as “one of the great British historians of his age, an unapologetic Communist and a polymath whose erudite, elegantly written histories are still widely read in schools here and abroad.”^[33] James Joll wrote in The New York Review of Booksthat “Eric Hobsbawm’s nineteenth century trilogy is one of the great achievements of historical writing in recent decades.”^[34] Ian Kershaw said that Hobsbawm’s take on the twentieth century, his 1994 book, The Age of Extremes, consisted of “masterly analysis”.^[35] Meanwhile, Tony Judt, while praising Hobsbawm’s vast knowledge and graceful prose, cautioned that Hobsbawm’s bias in favour of the USSR, communist states and communism in general, and his tendency to disparage any nationalist movement as passing and irrational, weakened his grasp of parts of the 20th century.^[36]

With regard to the impact of his Marxist outlook and sympathies on his scholarship, Ben Pimlott saw it as “a tool not a straitjacket; he’s not dialectical or following a party line”, although Judt argued that it has “prevented his achieving the analytical distance he does on the 19th century: he isn’t as interesting on the Russian revolution because he can’t free himself completely from the optimistic vision of earlier years. For the same reason he’s not that good on fascism.”^[4]

British historian David Pryce-Jones conceded that Hobsbawm was “no doubt intelligent and industrious, and he might well have made a notable contribution as a historian”, but also charged that, as a professional historian who has “steadily corrupted knowledge into propaganda, and scorns the concept of objective truth”, he was “neither a historian nor professional.”^[9] Brad DeLong strongly criticised Age of Extremes: “The remains of Hobsbawm’s commitment to the religion of World Communism get in the way of his judgment, and twist his vision. On planet Hobsbawm, for example, the fall of the Soviet Union was a disaster, and the Revolutions of 1989 a defeat for humanity. On planet Hobsbawm, Stalin planned multi-party democracies and mixed economies for Eastern Europe after World War II, and reconsidered only after the United States launched the Cold War.”^[12] After reading Age of Extremes, Kremlinologist Robert Conquest concluded that Hobsbawm suffers from a “massive reality denial” regarding the USSR,^[33] and John Gray, though praising his work on the nineteenth century, has described Hobsbawm’s writings on the post-1914 period as “banal in the extreme. They are also highly evasive. A vast silence surrounds the realities of communism, a refusal to engage which led the late Tony Judt to conclude that Hobsbawm had ‘provincialised himself’. It is a damning judgement”.^[37]

In an interview with Canadian author and politician Michael Ignatieff on British television, Hobsbawm responded in the affirmative to the question of whether 20 million deaths may have been justified had the proposed communist utopia been created.^[3][38] The following year, when asked the same question on BBC Radio 4‘s Desert Island Discs, that is if “the sacrifice of millions of lives” would have been worth a communist utopia, he replied: “That’s what we felt when we fought the Second World War”.^[4] Hobsbawm has similarly argued that, “In a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing”.^[39]

Tony Judt opined that Hobsbawm “clings to a pernicious illusion of the late Enlightenment: that if one can promise a benevolent outcome it would be worth the human cost. But one of the great lessons of the 20th century is that it’s not true. For such a clear-headed writer, he appears blind to the sheer scale of the price paid. I find it tragic, rather than disgraceful.”^[4] Neil Ascherson believes that, “Eric is not a man for apologising or feeling guilty. He does feel bad about the appalling waste of lives in Soviet communism. But he refuses to acknowledge that he regrets anything. He’s not that kind of person.”^[4] Hobsbawm himself, in his autobiography, wrote that he desires “historical understanding . . . not agreement, approval or sympathy”.^[40]

Hobsbawm stressed that since the utopia had not been created, the sacrifices were in fact not justified—a point he emphasised inAge of Extremes:

Still, whatever assumptions are made, the number of direct and indirect victims must be measured in eight rather than seven digits. In these circumstances it does not much matter whether we opt for a “conservative” estimate nearer to ten than to twenty million or a larger figure: none can be anything but shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification. I add, without comment, that the total population of the USSR in 1937 was said to have been 164 millions, or 16.7 millions less than the demographic forecasts of the Second Five-Year Plan (1933–38).^[41]

Elsewhere he has insisted:

I have never tried to diminish the appalling things that happened in Russia, though the sheer extent of the massacres we didn’t realise. . . . In the early days we knew a new world was being born amid blood and tears and horror: revolution, civil war, famine—we knew of the Volga famine of the early ’20s, if not the early ’30s. Thanks to the breakdown of the west, we had the illusion that even this brutal, experimental, system was going to work better than the west. It was that or nothing.^[4]

With regard to the 1930s, he has written that

It is impossible to understand the reluctance of men and women on the left to criticise, or even often to admit to themselves, what was happening in the USSR in those years, or the isolation of the USSR’s critics on the left, without this sense that in the fight against fascism, communism and liberalism were, in a profound sense, fighting for the same cause. Not to mention the more obvious fact . . . that, in the conditions of the 1930s, what Stalin did was a Russian problem, however shocking, whereas what Hitler did was a threat everywhere.^[42]

Gina Herrmann, in her 2010 study of Spanish communists’ memoirs,^[43] claimed that “of the many myths that Western Communists lived by, perhaps the most abiding is that of Communist anti-Fascism of the 1930s and 1940s—one that was consolidated in Spain’s Civil War of 1936–1939.” However, the profound fascist/anti-fascist schism of the period described by Hobsbawm was real enough, as Yale historian Timothy Snyder notes:

For many Europeans and Americans, the show trials were simply trials, and confessions were reliable evidence of guilt. Some observers who were sympathetic to the Soviet Union saw them as a positive development: the British socialist Beatrice Webb, for example, was pleased that Stalin had “cut out the dead wood.” Other Soviet sympathizers no doubt suppressed their suspicions, on the logic that the USSR was the enemy of Nazi Germany and thus the hope of civilization. European public opinion was so polarized by 1936 that it was indeed difficult to criticize the Soviet regime without seeming to endorse fascism and Hitler.^[44]

Nevertheless, Snyder also claimed that “The Spanish Civil War revealed that Stalin was determined, despite the Popular Front rhetoric of pluralism, to eliminate opposition to his version of socialism”, and that his determination was knowable and known even contemporaneously (Snyder cites George Orwell‘s analysis of, and dismay at, communist actions in Spain).^[45] On the communist role in Spain, Hobsbawm writes simply that “its pros and cons continue to be discussed in the political and historical literature”,^[46]and refers to Orwell, not by his literary name, but as “an upper-class Englishman called Eric Blair”.^[9][47] He also claimed that the demise of the USSR was “traumatic not only for communists but for socialists everywhere”,^[48] a statement that led journalistFrancis Wheen to retort: “Speak for yourself, comrade. I, like many other socialists, greeted the fall of the Soviet model with unqualified rejoicing; and I don’t doubt that Karl Marx would have been celebrating. His favourite motto, de omnibus disputandum(‘everything should be questioned’), was not one that had any currency in the realm of ‘actually existing socialism’—a hideous hybrid of mendacity, thuggery and incompetence.”^[49]

The 1930s aside, Hobsbawm was criticised for never relinquishing his Communist Party membership. Whereas people like Arthur Koestler left the Party after seeing the friendly reception of Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Moscow during the years of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939–1941),^[50] Hobsbawm stood firm even after the Soviet invasions of Hungary andCzechoslovakia, though he was against them both.^[4][33] In his review of Hobsbawm’s 2002 memoirs, Interesting Times, Niall Ferguson wrote:

The essence of Communism is the abnegation of individual freedom, as Hobsbawm admits in a chilling passage: “The Party . . . had the first, or more precisely the only real claim on our lives. Its demands had absolute priority. We accepted its discipline and hierarchy. We accepted the absolute obligation to follow ‘the lines’ it proposed to us, even when we disagreed with it . . . We did what it ordered us to do . . . Whatever it had ordered, we would have obeyed . . . If the Party ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did so.”Consider some of the “lines” our historian dutifully toed. He accepted the order to side with the Nazis against the Weimar-supporting Social Democrats in the great Berlin transport strike of 1932. He accepted the order to side with the Nazis against Britain and France following the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939. He accepted the excommunication of Tito. He condoned the show trials of men like Laszlo Rajk in Hungary.

In 1954, just after Stalin’s death, he visited Moscow as one of the honoured members of the Historians’ Group of the British Communist Party. He admits to having been dismayed when, two years later, Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. When Khrushchev himself ordered the tanks into Budapest, Hobsbawm finally spoke up, publishing a letter of protest. But he did not leave the Party.^[32]

Hobsbawm let his membership lapse not long before the party’s dissolution in 1991.^[4] In his review of Hobsbawm’s memoirs, David Pryce-Jones accuses him of actually supporting the invasion of Hungary:

[H]e carefully makes sure not to quote the letter he published on 9 November 1956 in the Communist Daily Workerdefending the Soviet onslaught on Hungary: “While approving, with a heavy heart, of what is now happening in Hungary, we should therefore also say frankly that we think the USSR should withdraw its troops from the country as soon as this is possible.” Which is more deceitful, the spirit of this letter, or the omission of any reference to it [in his memoirs]?^[9]

In those memoirs, Hobsbawn wrote: “The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me  . . . I have abandoned, nay, rejected it, but it has not been obliterated. To this day, I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness.”^[51] Reviewing the book, David Caute wrote: “One keeps asking of Hobsbawm: didn’t you know what Deutscher and Orwell knew? Didn’t you know about the induced famine, the horrors of collectivisation, the false confessions, the terror within the Party, the massive forced labour of the gulag? As Orwell himself documented, a great deal of evidence was reliably knowable even before 1939, but Hobsbawm pleads that much of it was not reliably knowable until Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956.”^[31]

Reviewing Hobsbawm’s 2011 How to Change the World in The Wall Street Journal, Michael Moynihan argued:

When the bloody history of 20th-century communism intrudes upon Mr. Hobsbawm’s disquisitions, it’s quickly dismissed. Of the countries occupied by the Soviet Union after World War II—”the Second World War,” he says with characteristic slipperiness, “led communist parties to power” in Eastern and Central Europe—he explains that a “possible critique of the new [postwar] socialist regimes does not concern us here.” Why did communist regimes share the characteristics of state terror, oppression and murder? “To answer this question is not part of the present chapter.” Regarding the execrable pact between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which shocked many former communist sympathizers into lives of anticommunism, Mr. Hobsbawm dismisses the “zig-zags and turns of Comintern and Soviet policy,” specifically the “about-turn of 1939–41,” which “need not detain us here.” In one sense, Mr. Hobsbawm’s admirers are right about his erudition: He possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of Marxist thought, specifically Italian communism and pre-Soviet socialist movements. But that knowledge is wasted when used to write untrustworthy history.^[33]

Reviewing the same book, Francis Wheen argued in a similar vein: “When writing about how the anti-fascist campaigns of the 1930s brought new recruits to the communist cause, he cannot even bring himself to mention the Hitler-Stalin pact, referring only to ‘temporary episodes such as 1939–41’. The Soviet invasion of Hungary and the crushing of the Prague Spring are skipped over.”^[49]

David Evanier, in an article published in the American conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, called Hobsbawm “Stalin’s cheerleader,” writing: “One can learn almost nothing about the history of communism from Hobsbawm’s Interesting Times—nothing about the show trials, the torture and execution of millions, the Communist betrayal of Spain.”^[52]

In 2008, the historian Tony Judt summed up Hobsbawm’s career this way:

Eric J. Hobsbawm was a brilliant historian in the great English tradition of narrative history. On everything he touched he wrote much better, had usually read much more, and had a broader and subtler understanding than his more fashionable emulators. If he had not been a lifelong Communist he would be remembered simply as one of the great historians of the 20th century.^[3]

Death

In the early hours of 1 October 2012 Hobsbawm died at the Royal Free Hospital, London.^[53] His daughter Julia confirmed that he died of pneumonia, while suffering complications of his leukemia. She said,

He’d been quietly fighting leukemia for a number of years without fuss or fanfare. Right up until the end he was keeping up what he did best, he was keeping up with current affairs, there was a stack of newspapers by his bed.^[54]

Following Hobsbawm’s death reactions included praise for his “sheer academic productivity and prowess” and “tough reasoning” inThe Guardian.^[55] Reacting to news of Hobsbawm’s death, Ed Miliband called him “an extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics […] He brought history out of the ivory tower and into people’s lives.”^[56]

Partial publication list

Honours and awards

Insignia of C.H.

• 1973: Honorary Fellow, King’s College, Cambridge
• 1978: Fellow of the British Academy
• 1995: Deutscher Memorial Prize; Lionel Gelber Prize
• 1996: Wolfson History Oeuvre Prize
• 1998: Companion of Honour, Order of the Companions of Honour
• 1999: Buchpreis zur Europäischen Verständigung Leipziger Buchpreis zur Europäischen Verständigung(Hauptpreis)
• 1999: Honorary degree from Universidad de la República Montevideo, Uruguay
• 2000: Ernst Bloch Prize
• 2003: Balzan Prize recipient
• 2006: Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature^[61]
• 2008: Honorary citizenship from Vienna
• 2008: Honorary degree from University of Vienna
• 2008: Honorary degree from Charles University in Prague
• 2008: Bochum History Prize

See also

• Independent Jewish Voices

Notes

References

• Blackledge, Paul (2012). “Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012)”. Socialist Review 374 (London).
• Bounds, Philip, “From Folk to Jazz: Eric Hobsbawm, British Communism and Cultural Studies”, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, Vol. 40 No. 4, 2012, pp. 575–593.
• Campbell, J. “Towards the Great Decision: review of the The Age of Empire” from Times Literary Supplement, Volume 4428, 12 February 1988, p. 153.
• Carlin, Norah & Birchall, Ian, “Eric Hobsbawm and the working class”, from International Socialism, No.2:21, Autumn 1983.
• Cronin, J. “Creating a Marxist Historiography: the contribution of Hobsbawm” from Radical History Review, Volume 19, 1979, pp. 87–109.
• Elliott, Gregory, Hobsbawm: History and Politics, London: Pluto Press, 2010.
• Genovese, Eugene “The Squandered Century: review of The Age of Extremes” from The New Republic, Volume 212, 17 April 1995, pp. 38–43
• Hampson, Norman. “All for the Better? review of Echoes of the Marseillaise” from Times Literary Supplement, Volume 4550, 15 June 1990, p. 637.
• Herrmann, Gina (2010). Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain. Champaign, IL: Illinois University Press. ISBN 978-0-252-03469-5.
• Judt, Tony. “Downhill All the Way: review of The Age of Extremes” from New York Review of Books, 25 May 1995, Volume 49, Issue # 9, pp. 20–25.
• Kershaw, Ian (2001) [1998]. Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris. London: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-013363-9.
• Landes, David “The Ubiquitous Bourgeoisie: review of The Age of Capital” from Times Literary Supplement, Volume 3873, 4 June 1976, pp. 662–664.
• McKibblin, R. “Capitalism out of Control: review of The Age of Extremes“from Times Literary Supplement, Volume 4778, 28 October 1994, p. 406.
• Mingay, G. E. “Review of Captain Swing” from English Historical Review, Volume 85 (337), 1970, p. 810.
• Samuel, Raphael & Jones, Gareth Stedman (editors) Culture, Ideology and Politics: essays for Eric Hobsbawm, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
• Seton-Watson, H. “Manufactured Mythologies: review of The Invention of Tradition” from Times Literary Supplement, Volume 4207, 18 November 1983, p. 1270.
• Smith, P. “No Vulgar Marxist: review of On History“from Times Literary Supplement, Volume 4917, 27 June 1997, p. 31.
• Snowman, Daniel. “Eric Hobsbawm” from History Today, Volume 49, Issue 1, January 1999, page 16–18.
• Snyder, Timothy (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. London: The Bodley Head. ISBN 978-0-224-08141-2.
• Thane, P.; Crossick, G. & Floud, R. (editors) The Power of the Past: essays for Eric Hobsbawm, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
• Thane, P. & Lunbeck, E. “Interview with Eric Hobsbawm”, in: Visions of History, edited by H. Abelove, et al., Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983; pp. 29–46.
• Weber, Eugen. “What Rough Beast?” from Critical Review, Volume 10, Issue # 2, 1996, pp. 285–298.
• Wrigley, Chris. “Eric Hobsbawm: an appreciation” from Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, Volume 38, Issue No. 1, 1984, p. 2.

External links

• Eric Hobsbawm at the Internet Movie Database
• http://www.davidhigham.co.uk/clients/Eric_Hobsbawm.htm
• Profile in the London Review of Books
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/14/biography.history
• http://www.ncsu.edu/acontracorriente/spring_04/Slatta.pdf
• http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=7315
• Interview with Eric Hobsbawm and Donald Sassoon: European Identity and Diversity in Dialogue, Barcelona Metropolis, Spring 2008.
• Eric Hobsbawm interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 13 September 2009 (film)
• Where have the rebels gone? An interview with Eric Hobsbawm (video), Books & Ideas, 21 January 2010.
• World Distempers: interview with Eric Hobsbawm, New Left Review 61, January–February 2010.
• Brief bio and links to articles, Spartacus.SchoolNet.co.u