Plain Facts The Selective Truth

Eric Hobsbawm believes in facts. That an esteemed historian should have to declare this belief may seem absurd. But in 1992 Cambridge University conferred an honorary degree upon the magus of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida: a fair sign, then, that facts are academically out of fashion.

There will be a time when teachers of history are expected once more to scratch on their blackboards the order of battle at Trafalgar. But not yet, while the truth is still deemed as just another construct.

Though he does not admit it, Hobsbawm must concede some virtue in the trend to deconstruct. He himself has served as high priest of deconstructing the traditions of modern nationalism, and revealing them for the partisan fabrications they are. As he points out here, history is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamental ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction.

 

According to Hobsbawms view of the historians vocation, however, absolute truths can be established in the record of the past. For him, the historian is a detective who burrows for evidence overlooked, forgotten, or deliberately obscured. This evidence constitutes facts. It can be forensically tested, and ordered into figures, statistics, dates. Then such close attention can be capped by the synoptic vision of the historian as interpreter whose task it is to tell us why our world transformed as it did.

Seems reasonable enough. But in this collection of essays and lectures covering 30 years, Hobsbawm has constantly to keep his guard up on the supremacy of evidence issue. Throughout that period have lurked those who would doggedly target his premises. Derrida himself has recently spoken of archive fever (mal darchive), and explored the presuppositions of information storage in societies past and present. In archive assemblage, selection processes are never far away, giving Derrida the angle of subjectivity he needs for critique.

It is a weakness of Hobsbawms stance that he never seriously engages with his deconstructionist opponents here, preferring the commonsensical brush-off (Rome defeated and destroyed Carthage in the Punic Wars, not the other way round). This knockabout style may draw cheers in the lecture-hall: it fails to prevail upon reflection. In the case of Carthage, for instance, a deconstructionist might reasonably point out that our received wisdom about the Punic Wars comes chiefly from Roman or pro-Roman writers. But perhaps an 84-year-old master of his profession is allowed a cri de coeur. And it is not as if Hobsbawm would conceal his own ideological basis. His membership of the Communist Party was no secret; his Marxist motivation for writing history has always been admitted. As a Marxist, he must necessarily create his history from economic materialism empirically given circumstances, as Marx phrased it and chart the progress of the class struggle.

That is his grand narrative aim. Its sweep may be gauged by the following catalogue of factors invoked as materialist explanations of massive social and cultural transformations since 1950: the decline of the peasantry; crisis in the Catholic church; rocknroll; collapse of Communism; break-up of western family patterns; bankruptcy of avant-garde movement; scientific fascination with Big Bangs; decline of puritan work ethic and parliamentary government; and (wait for it) the unusually full coverage of the arts in, of all newspapers, the London Financial Times.

This is what the history-reading public wants: decipherment, shows of lateral thinking, data analysis. The resemblance Hobsbawm mentions on several occasions between history and the law-courts is telling. Mysteries remain from the past, and it is the historians duty to solve them. Very few of us would dismiss history as a fools obsession with the rear-mirror view (as Bill Gates and other futurists do); nor can many accept Francis Fukuyamas insistence that the twin triumphs of capitalism and democracy have brought an end to history. We need a comprehensive genealogy of ourselves.

Though Hobsbawm has been billed a radical, and slips easily into finger-wagging mode, he is essentially in the business of giving us what we crave: self-knowledge, and the comforting certitude of facts.