Centre for Historical Studies
School of Social Sciences
Special Lecture
Being Communist
The Political Apprenticeship of Eric Hobsbawm
Emile Chabal
University of Edinburgh
Room no: 326, Committee Room, CHS, SSS-III
9th February 2018, 4pm (Friday)
Abstract: By the time he died in 2012, Eric Hobsbawm was one of the best-known historians in the world. And yet he achieved this distinction without ever formally renouncing his Communism. He repeatedly claimed that his lifelong adherence to Communism had to do with his political awakening in 1930s Germany; he was, he claimed, a child of the Weimar Republic and interwar anti-fascism. But how credible is this story? In this paper, I take a closer look at Hobsbawm's political apprenticeship and show that, while he was emotionally tied to his Weimar days, his political commitment cannot be understood without reference to the overlapping social worlds of British, European and transnational student Communism.
About the Speaker: Emile Chabal is a Chancellor's Fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh. He is a specialist on postwar French and European history. He has published widely on French politics, including A Divided Republic: nation, state and citizenship in contemporary France (Cambridge, 2015). He is currently working on an intellectual biography of Eric Hobsbawm and the history of global Marxism in the twentieth century.