Liberalism and socialism have had a complicated relationship since their emergence as self-conscious political-ideological tendencies in the wake of the French Revolution. Liberals, from Mill and Herzen to Weber, Polanyi, Bobbio and Rawls, have had interesting things to say about socialism, reckoning its strengths and probing its weaknesses. What about vice versa? The record is chequered. Marx learned a good deal from Ricardo, eviscerated Proudhon, ignored Mill. Lenin drew selectively from Hobson without systematically criticizing him, reserving that for right-wing currents within social democracy. Gramsci engaged with Croce’s work in depth. Eric Hobsbawm’s complex relationship to liberalism—and to liberals—has not been much discussed.

There is no shortage of anecdotes and incidents in Richard Evans’s 600-page biography of Hobsbawm, but one appears particularly illuminating in this respect. Describing the regular trips that Hobsbawm took to Paris in the 1950s, Evans notes the heterodox political-intellectual company he kept—Sartre, Lefebvre, Barthes, Vailland, Cartier-Bresson; ‘unorthodox Marxists’, ‘dissident left-wing intellectuals’, ‘former members of the Resistance’. Evans also mentions several future historians, Communist Party members at the time, with whom Hobsbawm ‘had nothing to do’: François Furet, Annie Kriegel, Alain Besançon, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.footnote¹

Some decades later, Hobsbawm would again find himself aligned against this group, though it had changed camps in the meantime. By now virulently anti-communist, this layer was at the centre of a ‘liberal revival’ in France that first took off around 1975, in the wake of the Portuguese Revolution. Its immediate target was the spectre of a Communist-Socialist government in France; with the pcf–ps Union of the Left riding high in French opinion polls in the late 1970s, newly-minted anti-totalitarians like André Glucksmann, Claude Lefort and Bernard-Henri Lévy went into high gear, warning that French Marxism’s intellectual charisma had blinded its proponents to the realities of the gulag. But the ideological ambitions of this milieu were broader: to purge France of its sentimental attachment to 1789 and thus to ‘the illusion’ of revolutionary politics tout court; it was all too easy for the twentieth-century left to promote the history of the French Revolution as a palimpsest for the socialist uprising to come.footnote²

The stakes of this ‘liberal revival’ were thus deeply historical. Furet led a sweeping—and proudly presentist—attack against left exaltations of the French Revolution, presented as the root of totalitarianism in the twentieth century: ‘Today, the Gulag leads us to rethink the Terror, understood as part of one and the same project.’footnote³ The aim, he explained in ‘La Révolution est terminée’, was to declare 1789 over and done with, putting an end to the cycles of celebration and execration that continued to surround it; only then could French politics be ‘normalized’, proofed against the violent extremes that had perverted its course since the Jacobin Terror. From the mid-80s, Furet set out to mastermind the Mitterrand–Rocard government’s bi-centennial commemorations in 1989, with stunning success.footnote⁴

Hobsbawm figured more centrally than any other foreign historian in the debates generated by the ‘liberal revival’ in France—illuminating his long engagement with liberalism as a historical force, in the wake of what he famously called the ‘dual revolutions’ in France and Britain, and the forms this took amidst the Atlanticist triumphalism of the early 1990s. Two works placed Hobsbawm at the centre of the storm—since, in different ways, they contradicted each end of the emerging revisionist narrative of modernity, that ran from 1789 to 1989, by way of 1917. The first was Echoes of the Marseillaise, given as lectures at Rutgers in 1989 and published the following year. Here Hobsbawm took direct aim at the revisionist historiography of the Revolution being championed by Furet and others, as well as their predecessor Alfred Cobban in Britain. The second was Age of Extremes, the last volume of Hobsbawm’s tetralogy of the modern age, covering ‘the short twentieth century’. On its publication in 1994, Pierre Nora—Furet’s powerful brother-in-law, as director of Gallimard, editor of Le Débat, and historian at the ehess—intervened, refusing to translate or publish Age of Extremes, effectively blocking its appearance in the Hexagon. A public row ensued, in which Nora pleaded a mix of financial constraint as a publisher and the discrepancy of the work with the ‘tenor of the times’.footnote⁵ Editors, he wrote, with an Althusserian twist of the knife in Le Débat, ‘are obliged, for better or for worse, to take into account the intellectual and ideological conjuncture’.footnote⁶

Age of Extremes did at last come out in French in 1999, after an obscure Belgian press agreed to publish it, on the back of a subscription drive organized by Le Monde Diplomatique, in defiance of what its editors called the ‘editorial McCarthyism’ of Parisian publishers. By then, if Hobsbawm felt pique at his treatment, he could vent it in a sense of vindication: selling 40,000 copies in two months, the book proved that neither the French public—nor all its intellectuals—were, as he put it in a talk at the Sorbonne that fall, in thrall to ‘the fashionable orthodoxies of the nineties’. footnote⁷ Looking back at the episode in his autobiography, Hobsbawm clearly identifies his antagonists, as ‘ideologists of moderate liberalism, immoderate anti-communism and market society, always an untypical minority in France, who came to dominate Parisian intellectual fashions in the late 1980s and early 1990s’.footnote⁸ But what did l’affaire Hobsbawm reveal about the relation of those ‘fashionable orthodoxies’—or the ‘ideological conjuncture’, as Nora put it—to Hobsbawm’s work as a historian? To get a better sense of that, we need to return to the books themselves.

Evans writes that in Echoes of the Marseillaise, Hobsbawm ‘mounted an impassioned defence of the traditional Marxist interpretation of the Revolution’. footnote⁹ But in at least two critical ways that is not accurate. First of all, Hobsbawm was less focused in Echoes on defending a particular view of the Revolution than in pointing out how the axe-grinding of Furet and the other revisionists involved them in distortions of the very liberal tradition many claimed to be reviving. In a sense, these were lectures about liberalism—its political heroes, historians, apologists, ideologists—that took the battle over the historical record and the reinterpretation of the Revolution onto the terrain of liberalism itself. It did so on several fronts.