Essays:They don't come more brilliant or eccentric than the author of this book, the one-time orphan and near-destitute from Vienna.
He made it to London at the age of 15, found time to excel at his studies in Cambridge and join the elite society of the Cambridge Apostles, began a 60-year devotion to the now-defunct Communist Party of Great Britain, and lost his virginity in a Paris brothel - all with that confidence and curiosity that characterised the man and his activities for the rest of his life. "It's just what young men did," he explained.
This young man would later be pilloried for his obstinate attachment to the communist line, and ostracised by Oxbridge colleges despite his growing intellectual stature and international reputation. In 1998, when he was 81, Queen Elizabeth made him a Companion of Honour - perhaps hoping that at that stage the troublesome professor would be willing to come inside the tent and join the rest of life's privileged for the fag end of his life. Eric Hobsbawm published his acclaimed autobiography, Interesting Times, five years later and celebrated his 90th birthday in June this year - still outside the tent and showing no sign of revising the Marxist theory or socialist ideals of his youth.
HOBSBAWM'S LATEST BOOK is a collection of essays and lectures written over the past decade and selected here for publication for their relevance to the general themes of war and peace, democracy and violence, nationalism and imperialism, the global market and global inequality. Addressing an audience in India in 2004, he saw every likelihood that the United States would remain an imperial power into the future; and meanwhile the only hope for the rest of us is that they will "return from megalomania to rational foreign policy". A year later, his lecture at Harvard University shifted ground somewhat and held out some hope that the imperialist project of neoconservativism would fail. But if the US's political leadership fails to learn the lesson of past empires and continues to rely on force to maintain its hegemony, the consequences may not be peace but global conflict, "not the advance of civilisation but of barbarism".
In two chapters discussing the role of democracy in international politics - and with a clear nod towards events in Iraq and Afghanistan - Hobsbawm argues that democracy, however desirable, is not an effective device for solving global problems, and the effort to create world order by spreading democracy is "not merely quixotic, it is dangerous". "More nonsense and meaningless blather is talked in Western public discourse today about democracy," he writes, "and specifically about the miraculous qualities assigned to governments elected by arithmetical majorities of voters choosing between rival parties, than about almost any other word or political concept."
Revealing that peculiar antagonism towards the European Union that has long been a reflex of the British left, Hobsbawm points to the EU as an example of the hypocrisy of major states. The organisation developed into a powerful body precisely because it was constructed with a "democratic deficit". Its problems arose, he argues, as soon as the people, rather than their governments, were given a voice in its future.
SUCH AN ASSERTION by so eminent a historian - even allowing for the limitations of format in a collection of past lectures - is so superficial as to invite the lese-majesty of questioning Hobsbawm's ideological impartiality in general. He was once described by Tony Judt as "the best-known historian in the world . . . a master of English prose . . . [ who] writes intelligible history for literate readers". For fellow historian Roy Foster, Hobsbawm "brought British social and labour history into an intellectually exciting and European-influenced sphere".
But in one respect he was less than intellectually exciting. Throughout his life he has never confronted the moral implications of his stubborn support for the communist project in Stalinist Russia. Even today his comments on democracy and dictatorship hint at a whiff of nostalgia for a world that never was but that he never ceased to conjure.
When he was born, he writes here in an essay on the end of empire, almost all Europeans and most of Africa lived in states that were a part of empire - British, Ottoman, and Habsburg, among others. He lived his life to the accompaniment of global wars and shattering imperialism, emerging into the relative calm and peace of the end of the Cold War in 1991. In his lifetime, he tells us, the number of independent states quadrupled, each of them grasping the gift of self-determination held out by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt only to find themselves now existing in an era of global fear, terror, and instability. "Should we wonder," he writes, "that in some countries the survivors of former empires regret their passing?"
ONE FORMER EMPIRE that receives only surface attention in Hobsbawm's discussion of imperialism and its legacies is the Soviet Union. Hobsbawm has never adequately explained his tenacious support for communism and its earthly manifestation throughout and following the Stalinist period. When fellow-communist intellectuals revoked their party membership after the crushing of the Hungarian rebellion in 1956, or the Prague Spring in 1968, Hobsbawm soldiered on in defiant support until 1991, when the death of communism left him with no cause to support, no utopia to hope for.
He was asked later on the BBC's Desert Island Discs if he thought the prospect of a communist world was worth the sacrifice of millions of lives? "Yes," he answered, "that's what we felt when we fought the second World War."
If the regime of Stalinist terror left Hobsbawm clinging injudiciously to his communist ideals, it can at least be acknowledged that his idealism was misplaced in the pursuit of a passionate moral concern for social justice and equality. "The dream of the October revolution is still there somewhere inside me," he wrote in his memoirs. It is that same dream of a just social order, the hope of which left him clinging pathetically to the wreckage of communism for six decades, that now drives his anger against the Bush administration and the regime of terror inaugurated by the war in Iraq.
Bill McSweeney teaches international politics at the School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin
Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism By Eric Hobsbawm Little Brown, 184pp. £17.99