AN ORPHAN is a diaspora of one, carrying an enormous burden of memory. Before he became the indispensable historian of the rise of industrial capitalism and its nemesis, the socialist movement—before he was known by millions of readers worldwide for his historical omniscience and his obdurate refusal to quit the Communist Party—Eric Hobsbawm was a Jewish boy in teetering interwar Europe, lost and mainly alone, displaced from one country, then another. He never stopped trying to understand what had happened. Like the Angel of History in Walter Benjamin’s famous vision, Hobsbawm’s face was turned toward the past. “Where we perceive a chain of events,” Benjamin wrote of the Angel, “he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”
So it was for Hobsbawm, who died in 2012. He wasn’t a historian of the Holocaust, or of fascism, or even of the ideology to which he subscribed—communism—as if these were objects that could be considered in isolation, like ships in bottles. He wanted to tell the story of the crisis of bourgeois civilization whole, beginning centuries before and stretching long after the climactic epoch between the French and Russian revolutions.
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