How to Change the World by Eric Hobsbawm

Author:Eric Hobsbawm [Hobsbawm, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Yale University Press, 9780300176162
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-11-20T04:57:40.160000+00:00

The Influence of Marxism 1880–1914

practical concern, theorists needed Marx to discover them.

Ostrogorski (1854–1921), exceptionally for a Russian, shows no more signs of Marx’s influence than de Tocqueville, Bagehot or Bryce. Nevertheless, Gumplowicz’s doctrine that the state is always the tool of the minority holding the majority in subjection, which may have even had some effect on Pareto and Mosca, was certainly in part influenced by Marx, and the Marxist influence on Sorel and Michels is obvious. Little more need be said about a field which was then little developed in comparison with more recent periods.

If sociology was obviously influenced by Marx, the fortress of official academic history defended itself passionately against any such incursions, especially in the West. It was a defence not only against social democracy and revolution, but against all the social sciences. It denied historical laws, the primacy of forces other than politics and ideas, evolution through a series of predetermined stages; indeed it doubted the legitimacy of any historical generalisation. ‘The basic issue’, argued the young Otto Hintze, ‘is the old controversial question about whether historic phenomena have the regularity of law’. 46 Or, as a less cautious review of Labriola put it, ‘History will and should be a descriptive discipline.’47

The enemy was thus not only Marx but any encroachment by social scientists on the historian’s field. In the acrimonious German debates of the mid-90s, which had some international echoes, the main adversary was not Marx but the polemically minded Karl Lamprecht; all historians inspired by Comte; or –the tone of suspicion is clear – any economic history which tended to derive political history from socio-economic evolution, or even any economic history.48 And yet in Germany at least it was evident that Marxism was much in the minds of those who attacked all ‘collectivist’ history as essentially a ‘materialist conception of history’. 49 Conversely, Lamprecht (supported by younger historians like R. Ehrenberg, whose Zeitalter der Fugger came under similar attack) claimed that he was accused of 243

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