The conversation is and feels like it’s from another era. It’s not so much what Hitchens and Hobsbawm have to say to each other, but the freedom with which they express their opinions, their frankness and honesty. There is no treading on eggshells, self-censorship or fear of offending.
Both men are now deceased – Hitchens died in 2011 and Hobsbaw in 2012 – and with their passing Britain lost not only two of its most prominent public intellectuals and exponents of Enlightenment values of reason, liberty, progress, but also two of its mordant contrarians. In fact, one of the pleasures of listening to the two men is how Hobsbawm consistently refuses to accept the premises of Hitchens’ questions and terms, demanding greater clarity and precision.
Of course, both Hitchens and Hobsbawm started out as Marxist revolutionaries. Hitchens was a 1960s radical while Hobsbawm says he became a communist in early 1930s Berlin out of necessity. Since Germany’s experiment with liberal democracy had collapsed and capitalism had palpably failed, it appeared to Hobsbawm that the only way to oppose fascism – with its existential threat to Jews (Hobsbawm was the scion of English and Austrian Jews via Alexandria) – was by becoming a communist. (On the importance of being Jewish, Hobsbawm says: ‘You can’t get away from it. They won’t let you.’)
Revolutionary Marxism was an ideology from which Hobsbawm never wavered. As a student at 1930s Cambridge University – Hobsbawm’s family had wisely emigrated to England in 1933 when Eric was 16 – he moved in the same circles as the Cambridge Five, the spy ring that passed on information to the USSR during the Second World War, asserting that if he had been asked to spy for Stalin he would have done so; while after the death and denunciation of Stalin and the invasion of Hungary, when other intellectuals left the Communist Party of Great Britain, Hobsbawm remained a dedicated member and defender of the faith – leaving him open to perennial accusations of Stalinism and of being an apologist for communist repression and mass murder.
Ironically, this life-long commitment to communism doesn’t stop Hobsbawm from admitting that the working class – which with its virtues of solidarity and fairness was seen by Marxists as the bearer of a more fraternal and equitable society – had lost its influence and potential. Hobsbawm even mourns the decline of the British establishment – wounded by Suez and 1960s popular culture and finished off by Thatcherism and neoliberalism, which decimated both the labour movement and the old British elite.
A more vigorous debate between Hitchens and Hobsbawm on the 2003 Iraq war would have been interesting. Hobsbawm does denounce the invasion not only as misguided – by invading Iraq, Hobsbawm says, America threw away the global imperium it had gained as a result of winning the Cold War – but also an act of barbarism.
Yet Hitchens who supported the effort to topple Saddam Hussein doesn’t put his case forward, other than to teasingly call opponents of the war ‘reactionaries’. If Hitchens had defended himself he probably would have argued that in supporting the invasion of Iraq he had not made the journey from revolutionary Marxist to Republican neocon, but was being consistent in his loathing for brutal dictators – whether Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein – and in his belief that the West had a moral imperative to take military action to bring freedom to those suffering under their repulsive rule.