The Age of Extremes

...H obsbawm blames the short peace that followed World War I on the Great Depression and the rise of two vying movements—communism and fascism—that eventually fed off it...

...about 1965, and in Europe twenty years later...

...In retrospect, the great triumph of the Roosevelt administration was to preserve a working democracy in the face of doctored statistics pouring out of the totalitarian utopias...

...president," "a believer in reform and peaceful coexistence"), along with a tendency to elide past inconvenient facts ("Khrushchev's taste for bluff...

...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...

...This quotation from The Age of Ex-tremes[Nikita Khrushchev,] this admirable rough diamond, a believer in reform and peaceful coexistence, who incidentally emptied Stalin's concentration camps, dominated the international scene in the next few years...

...Such demographic movements brought dizzying shifts in lifestyle, culThe American Spectator June 1995 59 ture (particularly "youth culture, an invention of the age"), and morality...

...He uses them to ask whether the social changes wrought by the boom make it a "golden age" at all...

...Yet the New Deal went far enough towards authoritarianism: among the Western economies, the United States fared by far the worst in pulling itself out of the Depression...

...This dereliction is more than a mere averting of the glance from monsters: Martin Luther King, Jr., Douglas MacArthur, and Jimmy Carter don't figure in this story, although Chico Buarque, Bal Ganghadar Tilak, Miroslav Krleza, and Namdi Azikiwe do...

...In no major Western country did the student population less than quintuple...

...More relevant, he thinks, is the clash between the Enlightenment (presumably meaning its belief in rationality, order, progress) and various new heresies thrown up in the last eighty years...

...In the context of what Hobsbawm calls the Golden Age (1945-73), when the West experienced not only peace but also a boom in its living standards unknown in history, he is right to focus on the details...

...by the mid-1980s it was one divorce for every 2.2 weddings...

...The very existence of the new masses," says Hobsbawm, "implied questions about the society that had engendered them, and from questions to criticism is but one step...

...In this light, our era has begun a necessary dismantling of a highly unnatural system of government—welfare socialism—invented to loot the proceeds of a one-shot boom...

...But documenting the catastrophes of the totalitarian century is not what Hobsbawm is aiming at...

...As of 1985, over half the births in Sweden were illegitimate...

...The fascists were "revolutionaries of counterrevolution," for theirs was a politics based on movement from below and non-traditional leadership principles...

...He is revolted by the nihilistic architecture of the 1960s, which decade he thinks did more to uglify the urban landscape than any other...

...It was portable radios that allowed Charles de Gaulle to speak directly to French conscripts to thwart a military coup in 1961...

...If, on the other hand, the prosperity was an aberration, 60 The American Spectator June 1995 then the "Landslide" of disappointed expectations in the 1970s and '80s becomes more explicable and less ominous...

...Whatever the New Deal's political successes, it was economically disastrous, plunging the United States into a second crash in 1937 at a time when Sweden and Japan, for instance, were doubling their economic outwe'll THE AGE OF EXTREMES: A HISTORY OF THE WORLD, 1914-1991 Eric Hobsbawm Pantheon /627 pages / $30 reviewed by CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL 58 The American Spectator June 1995 put...

...Hobsbawm sees the usual historian's distinction between socialist and capitalist camps as an artificial construct, and a barren one...

...England and Wales in 1938 registered one divorce for every 58 weddings...

...H obsbawm's treatment of World War II is a brief collection of sallies at the conventional military wisdom...

...For prosperity eroded cultures and moral systems thousands of years old—to replace them, in many societies (less so in the U.S...

...Hobsbawm notes, for instance, that Nazi Germany eliminated unemployment during the period 1933-38: Are we to credit Hitler with saving Western capitalism...

...In these circumstances it does not much matter whether we opt for a "conservative" estimate nearer to ten than to twenty millions or a larger figure: none can be anything but shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification...

...With urbanization and prosperity came an explosion of university enrollment...

...All told, a writer blessed with such a gift for compressed argument and narrative momentum that his very tendentiousness is a delight, even at those moments when Christopher Caldwell is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...

...Taylor, he is one of those great English historians who write to polemicize as well as instruct...

...H obsbawm is a kind of anti-commonsensical historian...

...The most spectacular development was the evaporation of the peasantry...

...Less expected is Hobsbawm's sudden reappraisal of the nineteenth century as one of "moral progress," from which our own has fallen away...

...That much will be familiar to readers of Hobsbawm's work on nineteenth-century topics, from industry to imperialism, which made his academic reputation...

...Those who would therefore expect Hobsbawm to flinch from a reckoning of the crimes of the high tide of Stalinist terror in the late 1930s, when the author was backing him to the hilt, will be surprised...

...He sees a discomfort with revolutionary ideology in the growth of the detective story, "a deeply conservative genre" that puts a premium on the restoration of order, and mourns that a "taste for writing thrillers has, alas, rarely gone with left-wing convictions...

...Likely as not, he owns, the dead of the purges are to be measured in eight rather than seven digits...

...Correctly, he calls Communism a "force of conservation," and points to the Cold War as having created a stable framework in which the Western world prospered greatly...

...Hobsbawm can be accused of crocodile tears here—didn't the international left want the peasantry modernized out of existence?—but his sense of the role of population growth and migration in changing the world around us is keen...

...Hobsbawm follows an argument, more often advanced by scholars of the right, that fascism was a progressive movement with certain similarities to communism...

...you want to pick up his books and hurl them against a wall...

...president of the century...

...He applies his caution in more or less equal measure to separatist nationalism in Central Asia, European anti-immigrant violence, racial divvying in the United States, and religious fundamentalism everywhere...

...Second, it provided the necessary incentive for capitalism to reform itself away from "free market orthodoxy," for the Soviet Union was immune to the Great Depression, having gone from producing 5 percent of the world's goods and services in 1929 to 18 percent in 1938...

...On economics, at least, Hobsbawm winds up caught between two opposing arguments: if the Golden Age was as reliably and predictably prosperous as he claims it was, then capitalism is vindicated of the charges of unworkability that dogged it after the Great Depression...

...The welfare state is not without its own cultural contradictions...

...But there's a limit to damning capitalism for its triumphs and praising Communism for its failures...

...His favorite examples are New Age mysticism ("[Non-scientists] could only react against their sense of impotence by seeking out things which 'science could not explain"), pro-choice abortion rhetoric (although Hobsbawm supports a right to abortion), and ethnic euphemism ("Never was the word 'community' used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological sense became hard to find...

...Hobsbawm is on safer ground when he examines why liberal democracies—by the reckoning of their own citizens—falter...

...Hobsbawm knows well that this is hardly the kind of stability Communism sought to create...

...Even including—faintly—a kind of bourgeois ethic...

...He thinks France was more than capable of repulsing the German advance in 1940, and holds that Germany used the Blitzkrieg not out of any particular savagery but because, trapped on several fronts the moment it initiated any aggression, it had to...

...In the past, Hobsbawm seemed to think that capitalism would collapse because of its economic failures—and this seems to be the critique he brings to his discussion of the Great Depression...

...Thus we come face to face with the "cultural contradictions of capitalism...

...First, it won the war against Hitler...

...France's rose from under 100,000 to 651,000 in twenty years...

...But that is about all Hobsbawm has to tell us about the Depression: his economic explanation—that growing inequality (excess profits) robbed workers of purchasing power and drove down demand—is one that surely not even John Kenneth Galbraith believes any longer...

...Hedoes not share the right's view that communism inspired fascism, but he does think it suggested fascism's tactics...

...Had Hitler not turned the culture of international fascism anti-Semitic and expansionist, Hobsbawm thinks, Europe would likely have lived with it, as it lived with Mussolini for nearly two decades until his alliance with Hitler...

...Algeria has seen its peasantry decline from 75 to 20 percent since the war...

...The entire book is such an echo chamber, with dead events and doomed ideologies once again making themselves heard at odd moments...

...This does not mean that such statistics, widely trumpeted by Nazis and Communists alike, were not powerful as propaganda...

...He divides it into three parts: the "Age of Catastrophe," which opens with Europe's enthusiastic self-immolation in World War I and ends with the dropping of the atomic bombs...

...It's a style that is not so much enlightening as invigorating, demanding not just patient attention but alert engagement—and Hobsbawm's history of the twentieth century is one of the last major books receive from that grand tradition...

...Disappointingly, then, Hobsbawm offers up the standard Communist chestnut that World War II was caused by the West's "sheer reluctance" to form an anti-fascist alliance with Russia in 1938-39...

...He has a high opinion of—if no explanation for—the prophesying powers of haute couture...

...Hobsbawm clearly wants to show us that we've been there before: "Even national conflicts were less unmanageable, so long as each minority's politicians could feed at the state's common trough," he writes of Austria-Hungary early this century—but it is clearly a remark that he means to ring through our understanding of our own times...

...Our century should be understood, Hobsbawm thinks, as one of religious wars, with "intolerance their chief characteristic...

...the "Golden Age" of stability and prosperity that ran until 1973 or so...

...gives the strengths and weaknesses of Hobsbawm's historical method in a nutshell: the playing of favorites (particularly those in the Communist Party, to which he belonged as a younger man), the delightful sports-trivia tidbit ("the only peasant boy . . ."), a tendency to push his points too far ("dominated the international scene"), and a sweeping bluntness that fans will call courage and detractors propaganda ("the most overrated U.S...

...This history is the polar opposite of (or the perfect complement to) Paul Johnson's Modern Times, which shows things right in front of your face—focusing on Einstein, Hitler, Stalin, and Churchill, and leaving Namdi Azikiwe tending his flock...

...Fifty-two percent of Japanese were farmers in 1947, fewer than 9 percent in 1985...

...Here Hobsbawm sets up a way of looking at societies on the verge of authoritarian takeover that will ricochet throughout the book until its ominous final chapters...

...He was also perhaps the only peasant boy ever to rule a major state...

...6 6 he problems which had dominated the critique of capitalism before the war," Hobsbawm warns, "and which the Golden Age had largely eliminated for a generation—`poverty, mass unemployment, squalor, instability'—reappeared after 1973...

...There is only half a page on concentration camps, and Auschwitz goes completely unmentioned...

...He shows the fatuity, the flaccidity of mind and spirit that even ardent defenders of capitalism will allow a prosperous society must guard against...

...As if it would have been wise to put the armed might of the West at the service of a leader who, at that point, had killed about 10 million more people than Hitler...

...This kind of rhetoric grows dangerous when it produces what Hobsbawm calls the "militant nostalgia" of racial and tribal politics...

...Yet it's possible to acknowledge the danger signs without jumping to the conclusion that we're picking up where we left off in 1939...

...With the West beleaguered by fascism, it was Communist Russia, Hobsbawm holds, that "proved to be the saviour of liberal capitalism...

...He even defends the military logic of Hitler's decision to invade Russia on the grounds that it would have to be done sooner or later, and that June 1941 was as propitious a moment as any for Germany to take advantage of both the element of surprise and Allied disarray in the Western theater...

...The student protests that broke out in the late sixties in every industrial country—and in nearly every university center in the free world in 1968 had less to do with localized issues such as the Vietnam war than with a demographic flexing of muscles, inevitable given the accident of the largest age bracket in Western history being also the most prosperous one...

...Precisely because of the greater and more uncontrollable dynamism of the capitalist economy," he notes, "the social texture of Western societies had been far more profoundly undermined than that of socialist ones...

...Meanwhile, the industrial working class began to decline sharply in the U.S...

...Though his cultural points are well taken, Hobsbawm is—still--so anxious to see a crisis in capitalism that he makes his economic and political case with more zeal than the situation warrants...

...It is significant that he now calls the last century a time of "moral progress"—even if that amounts to saying that the nineteenth century was great because the twentieth century has been miserable...

...now they make up less than a tenth everywhere...

...In his books on imperialism, revolution, and industry in the nineteenth century, Hobsbawm always seemed to hold, with Victor Hugo, that "the nineteenth century is great because 'the twentieth century will be happy...

...Such statistics are not trustworthy, of course, and it would be difficult to draw a lesson from them even if they were...

...It was the fear of being left to confront Hitler alone which eventually drove Stalin, since 1934 the unswerving champion of an alliance with the West against him, into the Stalin-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939...

...In his discussion of post-World War II events, however, he follows Schumpeter, Polanyi, and Daniel Bell in envisioning capitalism brought low by the moral frivolity engendered by its very successes...

...In the U.S., married couples with children fell from 44 percent of the population in 1960 to 29 percent in 1980...

...Hobsbawm is fascinated by scarcely noticeable developments with big consequences: the invention of the transistor, for example, and its implications for politics...

...and the "Landslide" of the last two decades, in which Hobsbawm sees a collapse of old certitudes at precisely the worst time: as some of the most nettlesome problems of 1914 loom anew...

...with anonymous armies of rootless urban loners...

...However, détente had first to survive what looked like an unusually tense spell of confrontations between Khrushchev's taste for bluff and impulsive decisions and the gesture politics of John F. Kennedy (1960-63), the most overrated U.S...

...Pol Pot, in many ways the representative man of Hobsbawm's "Landslide" decade of the 1970s, gets half a paragraph...

...Before World War II, in all the European countries except Belgium and Britain, peasants and farmers made up over a third of the population...