Revolutionarie

...The second memory was of a graying Englishman in a three-piece suit who, following a seminar at a gathering of the American Historical Association, paid me a compliment for a paper I had just given on Marxism...

...Trapped in this quandary, thinkers from his background "became either Communists—or if we chose our own version of blood-and-soil nationalism, Zionists...

...Some, like Hans Joachim Schoeps, became monarchists and others, like Ernst Kantorowicz, conservative nationalists...

...as a result, the Spanish Left was domated by the "libertarian gestures" of the non-Communists within it and the revolution foredoomed even before the Civil War...

...In at least two essays, he castigates the anarchists for the failure of the Loyalist side...

...Whatever the value of such occasional insights, Hobsbawm still lets the best question go begging: Not why, at some distant point in the past, he first became a Communist, but why he has chosen to remain one...

...Raytond Aron has approached the same quesons by analyzing the imperious need for )mmitment among the modern intellimtsia and their fear of becoming increasingly superfluous in an advanced technological society...

...But it was not the dominant choice of his generation...

...Unhappily the personality type being described could be aE easily applied to leftist as to rightist fanat...

...Most of his coreligionists living in Germany and Austria before and after the First World War, identified themselves politically with the center-Left...

...So much...

...In the 1920s "what could young Jewish intellectuals become...

...Thus there were no "authoritarian personalities similar to the Fascists," but primarily idealists and radicals de la vieille souche, active in the European Communist Parties...

...But then neither were the convictions of Hobsbawm...

...It should be conceded that there are definite merits apparent in his book...

...Only later did I learn that I had been chatting with an eminent Marxist...

...The effect of the goodwill produced thereby was to impair my critical judgment regarding his activities...

...Hobsbawm's ideology similarly interferes with his discussion of the Spanish Civil War...

...Fortunately, I have never met a Cold Warrior, even quasi-literate, who claimed that most Communists are deviants, and so I am a bit mystified by his repeated assault on this particular accusation...

...ow did reforming iconoclasts of the thires—e.g., Lincoln Steffens, Anatole rance, and Heinrich Mann—come to be-eve that, by denouncing Stalin's atrocies, one would lose the only viable model )r a just society...

...He also states the case for censorship in American society, albeit in Marxist jargon, with great astuteness: "Liberal toleration and freedom of expression help to saturate the atmosphere with those images of blood and torture which are.so incompatible with the liberal ideal of a society based on consent and moral force...

...There are questions that conservative thinkers have asked themselves abou Western Communists and fellow travelers and perhaps one might pose them her' without assuming the risk of being caller a "witch hunter...

...This assertion might be accurate in reflecting its author's youthful anxieties, but it does not hold water as a generalization...

...for the objectivity of historians...

...What is far more annoying is that his orthodoxy interferes with his attempt to be truly analytical...

...And it was not the dominantchoice of most of the pre-World War II Jewish intelligentsia of central Europe...

...If there is an answer to that question, it cannot be discovered in Revolutionaries...

...Perhaps Hobsbawm is right in describing Communism as one of several choices open to the German Jewish youth of his generation...

...As an old-line Marxist, he expresses justified reservations about much of the New Left's theatrics, urging its followers not to confuse sexual revolt with a program for social revolution...

...As Jews we were precluded by definition from supporting parties based on confessional allegiance, or on a nationalism which excluded Jews, and in both cases on anti-Semitism...

...theless, has always been the special bal of the intellectual Left...

...Would it be loo impertinent to ask at what price in human lives and freedom this experiment was being performed...

...According to David Caute, such blindess resulted from its victims' almost !ckless attachment to the Enlightenment ream of making men rational by totally !ordering their social existence...

...The same was true of their brothers in France and Italy, though on the continent the struggle against fascism also brought a multitude of intellectuals into the fold...

...Many intellectuals who shared his religious and cultural heritage were neither Communists nor declared Zionists...

...As for the authoritarian personality, it was the radical Left—guided by such figures as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm—not the Right, that first developed this concept...

...for while censorship in this area might not jibe with "liberal toleration," it might be necessary for preserving the moral foundation of a free society...

...One need not wonder why Hobsbawm would react so vehemently against any charge of perversion among his comrades...

...By means of it, one could brand any opponent of socialism not only as politically wrong-headed but also as emotionally abnormal...

...These observations would no doubt be anathema to Hobsbawm, but they do reveal more than his apologetics...

...Hobsbawm also notes, right in the midst of the most massive and widely publicized Soviet military buildup since the Second World War, that "Still, by and large, Communist governed states have been passionately civilian minded...

...The last part of the book, a statement of self-vindication, dwells on the making of Hobsbawm's own Communist identity...

...This, Hobsbawm remarks, is "too complex for cursory treatment and I shall therefore omit discussion of it," though it should be said in fairness that one footnote in his book does discuss the outrages of the Stalinists in Spain...

...In an essay on the anti-Soviet Marxist Karl Korsch, the author finds his subject historically irrelevant for rejecting Stalin's Russia as "etatiste and totalitarian...

...Christian millenarianism, Latin anarchism, the Jacobins, and revolutionary brigands all figured prominently in his past writings...

...First, how can we ex plain the fidelity of Western intellectual to a social system whose triumph woub end both the freedom and cultural fermen essential for their mental survival...

...On the other hand, Hobsbawm justifies their barbarism at least indirectly, since it was supposedly the Communists' tailure to seize control of the revolution by any means possible, and from any rival for power, that led to the victory of the counterrevolution...

...Not liberals of any kind since the word of liberalism (which included social democracy) was precisely what had collapsed...

...The problem, as Hobsbawm sees it, stems from the inability of the Communists to take power when the monarchy fell and from their failure to eliminate their opposition between 1931 and 1936...

...Or, pu more crudely: Why should a Sartre o Hobsbawm, with such crass predictability defend governments intent on putting diE senters into concentration camps and lulu tic asylums, against a state which protect ieir right to speak out against it...

...Most Party members sprang from families with long certified radical traditions...

...Revolutionaries consists mostly of commissioned reviews and articles, together with autobiographical notes, all written between the mid-sixties and 1972 and all marked by a depressing doctrinal consistency...

...As a Communist of forty years' standing, it is not surprising that Hobsbawm should toe the party line as often as he does...

...Paul Gottfried...

...This lapse of critical judgment was in the past, however, for the volume being considered has relieved me of any such inhibition...

...Against the assumptions of "witch hunting" Cold Warriors, he asserts that the majority of the English Communist Party were "neither deviant nor individually alienated...

...They were "actually building new societies," where, unlike the western part of their land, the Nazi spirit was no longer tolerated...

...Growing up as a member of the Jewish middle-class culture of central Europe between the two wars, he regarded Communism as one of the few suitable answers to the precarious social existence of his group...

...The same argument can be made against the toleration of hard-core pornography...

...The ethos of revolt contained in the movements of the radical Left is peculiarly suited to satisfy this romantic passion, although neither Kristol nor Aron has found any intrinsic reason why a resurgent radical Right could not eventually do the same...

...Hobsbawm Pantheon $7.95 ual Loyalist defeat...

...Thus he ends a generally somber piece on the German Communist Party during the interwar period by sounding a rather incongruous hymn to the Ulbricht regime...

...One is tempted of course to ask what effect the cannibalism practiced by Stalinists against their fellow leftists during the struggle had in causing the eventRevolutionaries by E.J...

...Hobsbawm takes as much pain in vindicating the rank-and-file Communists he has known over the years as he does in defending his own political credentials...

...Then sere is the need for historical perspective...

...ics, a reality which impartial scholars much to the chagrin of the originators GI this idea, eventually began to point out The ideological use of psychology, none...

...He had spoken about my presentation with unexpected generosity, although its content could not have been entirely agreeable to one of his persuasion...

...More recently, Irving Kristol has come to similar conclusions through his examination of the conflict between the middle-class values of material comfort and ordered liberty and the intellectual's craving for a heroic existence...

...When Malcolm Muggeridge, in panning Hobsbawm's most recent work in Esquire, made pointed reference to his Communist affiliation, I heard myself muttering "Dirty Pool...

...I would not propose that such political stances were characteristic of all central European Jews...

...Whatever their failures in having misunderstood Hitler and in hastening the burial of Weimar Germany, the German Communists were now supposedly doing what few other parties would ever have the chance to do...

...Hobsbawm intend( to keep it that way, by insisting that w( ascribe the rigidity and sadomasochism o authoritarian personalities exclusively t( fascists and their sympathizers, but neve to Communists and theirs...

...only a minority, even of the educated classes, ever joined the Communist or Zionist movements...

...Also, how could intellecials have convinced themselves that the est defense against the brutality of fas:sm lay in embracing a movement whose !aders were then committing the foulest :ts since the days of Tamurlaine's igions...

...Why it was the only choice for him, on the other hand, and why he has remained loyal to his decision for over four decades, in spite of all chilling grounds for disenchantment, are questions never answered to my satisfaction...