“Losers,” Hobsbawm once said, “make the best historians.” Yet, if it was Hobsbawm’s destiny to enjoy intellectual success while suffering political failure, the experience may have been more generative than he realized. As early as 1990, Hobsbawm foresaw how the disintegration of the Soviet Union would accelerate forces that “have been kept frozen for up to 70 years.” He came to see the consequences of that disintegration less as the disappointment of his hopes than as a coda to “the most murderous century” in history, which saw, in Europe, a revival of torture, the deliberate slaughter of millions, the collapse of state structures, and the erosion of norms of social solidarity. Not only did the cause to which he had devoted his life expire in infamy but the rubbish that it had promised to sweep from the stage-ethnic and national chauvinism-would, in time, make a new bid for legitimacy. Hobsbawm joined the Communist Party in 1936 and stayed in it for about fifty years. He left behind an astonishing body of work, including a widely read tetralogy spanning the years 1789-1991 and a vocabulary that revolutionized the study of modern history: the “invention of tradition,” “primitive rebels,” the “general crisis” of the seventeenth century, the “dual revolution,” the “long nineteenth century,” and the “short twentieth century.” When he died, in 2012, at the age of ninety-five, nearly all of his books were still in print, his writings had been translated into more than fifty languages, and he was eulogized across the globe. The first pursuit brought him great success.

Eric Hobsbawm was a historian and a Communist.

Communist america alternate history