Revolutionaries by Eric J. Hobsbawm

Author:Eric J. Hobsbawm [Hobsbawm, Eric J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, History, Politics, Philosophy, Purchased
ISBN: 9781565846982
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 2001-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

(1962)

1 Leopold Labedz (ed.), Revisionism, Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas, London 1962.

CHAPTER 16

The Principle of Hope

In our age men distrust the western universe and do not expect much of the future except perhaps Crusoe’s luck, a personal island off the beaten track. To resist the assaults of the large machines made by and of men, to survive the consequences of collective human lunacy, are the highest ambitions of Atlantic intellectuals. Even the dream of the hungry, a continent filled with T-bone steaks and television quizzes, turns into a reality of ulcers and fatty degeneration. A modest wariness seems the best posture for man: lack of passion his least harmful social goal.

Can we, after all, it is argued, hope for anything better than that the human race will just avoid blowing up its planet, that political institutions will maintain a gentle order among foolish or sinful men, with perhaps a little improvement here and there; that a tacit truce be established between ideals and realities, individuals and collectivities? It is probably no accident that the four major states of the west were at the end of the 1950s presided over by paternal or avuncular images drawn (in Europe at least) from memories of the last age of stability which our continent recalls, that before 1914.

An entire generation was educated into such emotional middle age in the affluent but insecure societies of the postwar west, and its ideologists have been those of despair or scepticism. Fortunately the education has been ineffective. Already the late products of the 1950s, works like Mr Daniel Bell’s End of Ideology or Professor Talmon’s High Tide of Political Messianism, are oddly out of tune with the passionate, turbulent, confused but hopeful atmosphere of that international phenomenon, the intellectual ‘new left’. Perhaps it is time for Ernst Bloch’s Das Prinzip Hoffnung.1 The historian of the future may well see this noble and massive work – all 1,657 pages of it testifying to its subject – standing outside the 1960s as the arch used to stand outside Euston station: symbolically, though not functionally, anticipating new departures.

Hope is Professor Bloch’s subject and indeed has been so since his unduly neglected career as a philosopher of men’s dreams began with Geistder Utopie (l9l8) and Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution (1921). Hope bore him through the years of American exile when the present work was written (1938–47). It appears before us now in both an East and a West German edition, as revised in 1953 and 1959.

It is a strange, overcrowded, sometimes absurd, but nevertheless superb work. The British reader may find it well-nigh incredible, for in our country the old-fashioned philosopher as our grandparents knew him is dying out like the bison of the prairies, hunted down by the mathematical logicians and the definers of askable questions. The German reader will recognize in him a splendid specimen of traditional German romantic philosophy, a sort of marxist Schelling, as one reviewer has with some justice called him. But even in his native country philosophers such as he are now rare.

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