Raphael Samuel (editor) - Culture, Ideology and Politics (Routledge Revivals): Essays for Eric Hobsbawm

Culture, Ideology and Politics

First published in 1982, this book is inspired by the ideas generated by Eric Hobsbawm, and has taken shape around a unifying preoccupation with the symbolic order and its relationship to political and religious belief. It explores some of the oldest questions in Marxist historiography the relationships between base and superstructure, art and social life. However it also examines the newest and most problematic questions, such as the relationship of dreams and fantasy to political action, or of past and present historical consciousness to the making of ideology. The essays, which range widely over period and place, are intended to break new ground and take on difficult questions.

Culture, Ideology and Politics

Essays for Eric Howsbawm

First published in 1982

by Routledge & Kegan Paul

This edition first published in 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

1982 History Workshop Journal

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Publisher's Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer

The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 82013222

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-67113-3 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-315-61716-9 (ebk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-67121-8 (pbk)

Essays for Eric Hobsbawm

The editors and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce the illustrations: the British Museum, London, for .

Raphael Samuel
Gareth Stedman Jones

This book originated as an international tribute to the work of Eric Hobsbawm, but it has taken shape around a unifying preoccupation with the symbolic order and its relationship to political and religious belief. The book explores some of the oldest questions in Marxist historiography e.g. the relationship of base and superstructure, art and social life; and also some of the newest and most problematic, e.g. the relationship of dreams and fantasy to political action; or of past and present - historical consciousness - to the making of ideology. The essays are intended to break new ground, and to take on difficult questions; at the same time they are accessibly written, and can be read with pleasure as independent studies in their own right.

These essays testify to the influence of Hobsbawms work far outside the periods with which he has been particularly concerned, and they also help to point up the difficulties and the excitement which his writing has consistently generated. For perhaps one of Hobsbawms most outstanding and least commented upon achievements has been his ability to bring together the propositions of classical Marxism and the empirical preoccupations of social and economic historians into a virtually seamless web. Moreover, he has done so in such a way that central topics of English and European history from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries and the prevalent approaches to such fundamental themes as industrialisation, popular rebellion, pre-industrial protest, unionisation, urbanisation and revolutionary parties have been populated with questions and research approaches which he more than any other individual historian first tried to map out. In the course of this work, certain ideas or areas of questioning recognisably Marxist in inspiration have lost their sectarian qualities and have become almost the common sense of these subjects. Such a way of working, however, has not so much been an application of Marxism, as a new form of it, the creation of a type of marxist history, which simply did not exist before. The marriage between Marxism and Hobsbawms sustained and imaginative historical curiosity about the particular cannot be attributed to the product of any one pre-existent historiographical tradition. Nor, except with strong reservations can it be seen as the shared property of an English school. It is true that some abroad have seen in Hobsbawms peculiar and not very characteristically English combination of detailed but economical primary research, wealth of comparative reference and broad yet immediately testable historical generalisation encased in concise and elegantly written essay form, the distinctive hallmarks of an anglo-Marxist school of historical interpretation. If this interpretation has a moment of truth, it is only with the important caveat that like many of that gifted generation of Central Europeans driven, fortunately, to our shores by Nazism, Hobsbawm was better able to discern and develop the best in native traditions in ways that had never occurred to the native born. Perhaps it was only because of his linguistic fluency, his ease with non-English theoretical idioms and his confrontation with English culture as a whole for the first time as a teenager, that he was able to take so much from the different qualities of Dobb, Postan or Clapham whom he encountered as a history undergraduate in pre-war Cambridge, that he was able so powerfully to use the wealth of scholarship and theorising accumulated by the Webbs in the course of his first essays into historical research and that he was able to discern so sharply the most distinctive and uncommented upon features of the history of the English labour movement in the collection eventually published as