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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Eric Hobsbawm is a man of the Enlightenment: does he not define socialism as the last and most extreme heir of the eighteenth century's rationalism? So it is not surprising that the distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘primitive’ or ‘archaic’ has an important place in his work. However, examining some of his writings, and in particular the three books from the period 1959-69 devoted to so-called archaic forms of revolt, it is evident that his approach differs markedly from the ‘progressive’ orthodoxy in its interest, sympathy, even fascination - these are his own words - for ‘primitive’ movements of peasant antimodern (anti-capitalist) resistance and protest. I refer to Primitive Rebels (1959), Bandits (1969) and Captain Swing (1969).
1. E. Hobsbawm (1959), Primitive Rebels. Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries (New York, Norton Library), p. 126.
2. I systematically put quotation marks round the words ‘primitive' or ‘archaic' - which Hobsbawm does not always do - to indicate a certain critical distance with regard to terms that are useful but nevertheless quite closely linked with an evolutionist or ‘modernist' view of history.
3. I shall not be dealing here with Hobsbawm's work on the peasantry published during the 1970s and included in the admirable collection Uncommon People (1998, New York, The New Press). Its problematic is different and it does not refer (or very little) to the two aspects that concern me in this article: resistance to capitalism and revolutionary millenarianism.
4. Primitive Rebels, pp. 2, 3.
5. Sadly this notion is not taken up by Hobsbawm in his history of the twentieth century: he demonstrates very pertinently how the process of modernization led to the spectacular decline of the peasantry after the Second World War, but he does not raise the question of peasant resistance to this decline, nor does he study more systematically the part played by ‘primitive' peasant groups in the century's great revolution ary movements. Cf. E. Hobsbawm (1994), Age of Extremes. The short twentieth century, 1914-1991 (London, Penguin), pp. 289-294.
6. Primitive Rebels, pp. 3, 67, 119.
7. E. Hobsbawm (2000), Bandits (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, first published in 1969), p. 27 and Primitive Rebels, pp. 82-83.
8. E. Hobsbawm and G. Rudé (1969), Captain Swing (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson), pp. 15, 16, 19, 83. All the passages quoted, like those that follow, refer to the chapters of the book written by Hobsbawm, according to the division of labour with his co-author Rudé indicated in the preface. It is clear that the England of the 1830s was at a much more advanced level of modernization of agriculture and develop ment of rural capitalism than regions in the south of Europe, where social banditry principally arose.
9. Primitive Rebels, pp. 46, 52, 75, 76. Hobsbawm's analysis owes much to the book by Karl Polanyi (1945), The Great Transformation, which he praises in a footnote of Captain Swing - p. 54 - as a ‘brilliant and unduly neglected book'.
10. Swing, p. 16.
11. Ibid., p. 19.
12. Ibid., pp. 281, 298. Many years before his colleague E. P. Thompson, Hobsbawm had defended the Luddites and other ‘machine breakers' against attacks inspired by ‘nineteenth-century middle class economic apolo gists'. See ‘The Machine Breakers' (1952), in Uncommon People, pp. 5-17.
13. Primitive Rebels, p. 119; Bandits, p. 31.
14. Bandits, p. 114. Curiously Hobsbawm seems to take no interest in that other great Mexican revolutionary, Emiliano Zapata. His name does not appear in Primitive Rebels. He mentioned him later, in the 1973 article on peasants and politics, but I feel he much underestimates the scope of that millenarian, revolutionary peasant movement when he writes that ‘the political influence of Zapata's agrarian programme derives from the fact that his peasant levies were close enough to occupy the capital [of Mexico]'. (E. Hobsbawm, ‘Peasants and Politics', in Uncommon People, p. 154.)
15. M. Löwy (1990), Redemption and Utopia. Libertarian Judaism in Central Europe (London: Athlone).
16. Primitive Rebels, pp. 57-58. Other religions, to the extent that they see the world as stable or cyclical, are less conducive to the rise of millenarianism.
17. Ibid., p. 64. Where does Hobsbawm's interest in millenarianism, in his work of the late 1950s, spring from? When I interviewed him on 20 March 1982, he suggested three possible explanations: ‘Perhaps it's because I belonged to a revolutionary movement. Then it was the moment of the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and we felt we needed to sum up, ask some basic questions. And finally I was influenced by anthropologists who had worked on that topic, in particular Max Glucksmann and his followers, such as Peter Worsley, who was a fellow-comrade in the party at the time.'
18. Hobsbawm dissociates himself here from Norman Cohn's work - The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957)- which he accuses, not without reason, of blurring the difference between the two.
19. Primitive Rebels, pp. 68-73.
20. Ibid., pp. 83-90.
21. Ibid., pp. 82-90, 107.
22. Ibid., pp. 90-91. Strangely, Hobsbawm does not mention the experience of the libertarian agrarian com munities in 1936-7. In other writings from the 1966-69, Hobsbawm dealt with anarchism, expressing his admiration but above all reservations and criticisms. Though he was convinced of the ‘ineffectiveness' of anarchist methods, he nevertheless rejected Stalin's attacks on libertarian ideas during the 1930s, in the context of the Spanish conflicts, putting them down to ‘the attempt to give a theoretical legitimation to the Stalinist development of a dictatorial and terrorist state' (‘Bolshevism and the Anarchists', 1969, in Revolu tionaries (New York, Meridian Books, 1975) p. 70).
23. Primitive Rebels, pp. 91-92.
24. The story of this group and its main leader is told in detail by Hobsbawm in his book Bandits. Though critical of his lack of realism, the author is literally fascinated by ‘Quico' Sabaté, that ‘public legend', that ‘tragic hero', who died in 1960 in a final battle with Franco's police. He devotes no less than 15 pages to him - in a slim volume of only 145 in the French edition. Curiously enough, the chapter has almost no footnotes: it is clear that Hobsbawm unearthed his character's biography by means of detailed primary research among ‘Quico's' old comrades and friends in exile in France. For Hobsbawm, who virtually rescued him from oblivion, ‘it is just that he [Francisco Sabaté] should be so remebered, in the company of other heroes'. See Bandits, p. 138.
25. Bandits, p. 114.
26. Primitive Rebels, pp. 96-97. These peasant organizations were also called 'fasci', but in order to avoid unfortunate confusion I prefer to use the term ‘leagues', which figures in Hobsbawm's book.
27. Ibid., pp. 98-101.
28. Ibid., pp. 101-105.
29. Ibid., pp. 106-107.
