Literally dying

Dying intellectual left awaits rebirth

The god that failed is losing its last adherents. Eric Hobsbawm, who has died at age 95, was an eminent historian who said earlier this year he was “slowly edging clear of the original world hope of October 1917”. As the generation of the unabashedly Marxist Hobsbawm passes, it leaves a gap. The financial crisis showed something is wrong with the modern, capitalist consensus, but the next big idea remains undiscovered.

From many perspectives, the radical left was a great 20th-century failure. The high dreams of the Russian revolution gave way to a USSR that was totalitarian, hypocritical and economically incompetent. Contrary to Marxist expectations, the global proletariat proved less interested in revolution than in joining the bourgeoisie. The established order survived and thrived after two destructive world wars.

Yet the vision that moved Hobsbawm and so many contemporary intellectuals — a just and prosperous society without crude nationalism or an exploitative ruling class — was inspirational. It was also influential in good ways. Pressure from the left, and the right’s fear of communism, helped create the successful modern alternative: social democracy with its mixed economy and welfare state. That economic recipe has worked well in both rich and poor countries.

This may have been a practical success for the left, but it doesn’t hide the vacuum left by the demise of its intellectual wing. The leading democratic parties agree, in essence, on how the world should work. The lack of a rival set of ideas is a shame, and not only because idealism is noble. The current arrangement is in need of critical scrutiny. Intellectual failure, not merely regulatory error, may have contributed to the financial and economic meltdown of 2008. Without a full diagnosis of the failings, post-crisis adjustments are likely to fall short.

Free-market zealots think they know what went wrong, but seem caught in a pre-Hobsbawm 19th-century world view. In the historian’s youth, Catholic Social Teaching — which reckoned communitarian thinking could create a just society — was considered a credible rival to communism in much of Europe. It is now ignored. These days, the few popular bands of non-conformists include sentimental Maoists in China and wild Keynesians in Europe and the United States. The world deserves a new generation of thinkers something like Hobsbawm.