In the late evening of Friday 8 February 1929 my father returned from another of his increasingly desperate visits to town in search of money to earn or borrow, and collapsed outside the front door of our house. My mother heard his groans through the upstairs window and, when she opened them on the freezing air of that spectacularly hard alpine winter, she heard him calling to her. Within a few minutes he was dead, I assume from a heart attack. He was forty-eight years old. In dying, he also condemned to death my mother, who could not forgive herself for the way she felt she had treated him in what turned out to be the last terrible months, indeed the very last days, of his life…

Within two and a half years she was dead also, at the age of thirty-six. I have always assumed that her many self-lacerating, underdressed visits to his grave in the harsh winter months after his death contributed to the lung disease which killed her.

The months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist, or at least a man whose life would lose its nature and its significance without the political project to which he committed himself as a schoolboy, even though that project has demonstrably failed, and as I now know, was bound to fail. The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me, as deleted texts are still waiting to be recovered by experts, somewhere on the hard disks of computers. I have abandoned, nay rejected it, but it has not been obliterated.

I suppose taking part in that campaign (March 1933) was the first piece of genuinely political work I did. It was also my introduction to a characteristic experience of the communist movement: doing something hopeless and dangerous because the Party told us to. True, we might have wanted to help in the campaign in any case, but, given the situation, we did what we did as a gesture of our devotion to communism, that is to say to the Party. Much in the way that I, finding myself alone in the tram with two SA men, and justifiably scared, refused to conceal or take off my badge. We would go into the apartment buildings and, starting on the top floor, push the leaflets into each flat for signs of danger.  There was an element of playing at the Wild West in this – we were the Indians rather than the US cavalry – but there was enough real danger to make us feel genuine fear as well as the thrill of risk-taking… Distributing election appeals for the KPD was no laughing manner, especially in the days after the Reichstag fire. Nor was voting for it, although over 13 per cent of the electorate still did so on 5 March. We had a right to be scared, for we were risking not only our own skins, but our parents'.  

On 25 January 1933 the KPD organized its last legal demonstration, a mass march through the dark hours of Berlin converging on the headquarters of the Party, the Karl Liebknechthaus on the Bülowplatz (now Rosa Luxemburg-Platz), in response to a provocative mass parade of the SA on the same square. I took part in this march, presumably with other comrades from the SSB, although I have no specific memory of them.

Next to sex, the activity combining bodily experience and intense emotion to the highest degree is the participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exultation. Unlike sex, which is essentially individual, it is by its nature collective, and unlike the sexual climax, at any rate for men, it can be prolonged for hours. On the other hand, like sex it implies some physical action - marching, chanting slogans, singing – through which the merger of the individual in the mass, which is the essence of the collective experience, finds expression. The occasion has remained unforgettable, although I can recall no details of the demonstration…. What I can remember is singing, with intervals of heavy silence… We belonged together. I returned home to Halensee as if in a trance. When, in British isolation two years later, I reflected on the basis of my communism, this sense of "mass ecstasy" was one of the five components of it – together with pity for the exploited, the aesthetical appeal of a perfect and comprehensive intellectual system, "dialectical materialism", a little bit of the Blakean vision of the new Jerusalem and a good deal of intellectual anti-philistinism.

I experienced this musical revelation (a love of jazz) at the age of first love, sixteen or seventeen. But in my case it virtually replaced first love, for, ashamed of my looks and therefore convinced of being physically unattractive, I deliberately repressed my physical sensuality and sexual impulses. Jazz brought the dimension of wordless, unquestioning physical emotion into a life otherwise almost monopolized by words and the exercises of the exercises of the intellect.

I did not then guess that in adult life my reputation as a jazz-lover would serve me well in unexpected ways. Then and for most of my lifetime a passion for jazz marked off a small and unusually embattled group even among the cultural minority tastes. For two-thirds of my life this passion bonded together the minority who shared it, into a sort of quasi-underground international freemasonry ready to introduce their country to those who came to them with the right code-sign.

Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, a tall, angular, dangly, ugly, fair-haired fellow of eighteen and a half, quick on the uptake, with a considerable if superficial stock of general knowledge and a lot of original ideas, general and theoretical. An incorrigible striker of attitudes, which is all the more dangerous and at times effective, as he talks himself into believing in them himself. Not in love and apparently quite successful in sublimating his passions, which – not often – find expression in the ecstatic enjoyment of nature and art. Has no sense of morality, thoroughly selfish. Some people find him extremely disagreeable, others likeable, yet others (the majority) just ridiculous. He wants to be a revolutionary but, so far, shows no talent for organization. He wants to be a writer, but without energy and the ability to shape the material. He hasn't got the faith that will move the necessary mountains, only hope. He is vain and conceited. He is a coward. He loves nature deeply. And he forgets the German language.

From 1946 to 1956 we – a group of comrades and friends – conducted a continuous Marxist seminar for our selves in the Historians' Group of the Communist Party, by means of endless duplicated discussion papers and regular meetings, mainly in the upper room of the Garibaldi Restaurant in Saffron Hill and occasionally in the then shabby premises of Marx House on Clerkenwell Green… Perhaps this was where we really became historians.  Others have spoken of "the astonishing impact of this generation of Marist historians" without whom "the worldwide influence of British historical scholarship, especially since the 1960s, is inconceivable." Among other things it gave birth to a successful and eventually influential historical journal in 1953, but Past and Present was born not in Clerkenwell, but in the more agreeable ambience of University College, Gower Street.

The Historians' Group broke up in the year of communist crisis, 1956. Until then we, and certainly I, had remained loyal, disciplined and politically aligned Communist Party members, helped no doubt by the wild rhetoric of crusading anti-communism of the "Free World". But it was far from easy.

When some communist historians founded a new historical journal, Past and Present, in 1952, about as bad a time in the Cold War as can be imagined, we deliberately planned it not as a Marxist journal, but as a common platform for a "popular front" of historians, to be judged not by the badge in the author's ideological buttonhole, but by the contents of their articles. We desperately wanted to broaden the base of the editorial board, which at the start was naturally dominated by Party members, since only the rare, usually indigenous, radical historian with a safe academic base, such as A. H. M. Jones, the ancient historian from Cambridge, had the courage to sit at the same table as the Bolsheviks…

We were equally keen to extend the range of our contributors. For several years we failed in the first task, although, thanks to our excellent reputation amo0ng younger academics, we soon did better on the second. In 1958 we succeeded. A group of non-Marxist historians of subsequent eminence, led by Lawrence Stone, shortly about to go to Princeton, and the present Sir John Elliott, later Regius Professor at Oxford, who had sympathized with our objectives but until then had found it impossible formally to join the former red establishment, offered to join us collectively on condition that we dropped the ideologically suspect phrase "a journal of scientific history" from our masthead. It was a cheap price to pay. They did not ask us about our political opinions – actually orthodox communists were no longer easy to find on the board – we did not enquire into theirs, and no ideological problems have ever arisen on its board since then. Even the Institute of Historical Research, which had steadfastly refused to include the journal in its library, relented.

All of us have for many years advocated Marxist ideas both in our special fields and in political discussion in the Labour movement. We feel therefore that we have a responsibility to express our views as Marxists in the present crisis of international socialism.

We feel that the uncritical support given by the Executive Committee of the Communist Party to the Soviet action in Hungary is the undesirable culmination of years of distortion of fact, and failure by British Communists to think out political problems for themselves. We had hoped that the revelations made at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would have made our leadership and press realise that Marxist ideas will only be acceptable in the British Labour movement if they arise from the truth about the world we live in.

The exposure of grave crimes and abuses in the USSR and the recent revolt of workers and intellectuals against the pseudo-Communist bureaucracies and police systems of Poland and Hungary, have shown that for the past twelve years we have based our political analyses on a false presentation of the facts - not an out-of-date theory, for we still consider the Marxist method to be correct.

If the left-wing and Marxist trend in our Labour movement is to win support, as it must for the achievement of socialism, this past must be utterly repudiated. This includes the repudiation of the latest outcome of the evil past, the Executive Committee's underwriting of the current errors of Soviet policy.

The Industrial Revolution marks the most fundamental transformation of human life in the history of the world recorded in written documents. For a brief period it coincided with the history of a single country, Great Britain. An entire world economy was thus built on, or rather around, Britain, and this country therefore temporarily rose to a position of global influence and power unparalleled by any state of its relative size before or since, and unlikely to be paralleled by any state in the foreseeable future. There was a moment in the world's history when Britain can be described, if we are not too pedantic, as its only workshop, its only massive importer and exporter, its only carrier, its only imperialist, almost its only foreign investor; and for that reason its only naval power and the only one which had a genuine world policy. Much of this monopoly was simply due to the loneliness of the pioneer, monarch of all he surveys because of the absence of any other surveyors. When other countries industrialized, it ended automatically, though the apparatus of world economic transfers constructed by, and in terms of, Britain remained indispensable to the rest of the world for a while longer. Nevertheless, for most of the world the 'British' era of industrialization was merely a phase - the initial, or an early phase of contemporary history. For Britain it was obviously much more than this. We have been profoundly marked by the experience of our economic and social pioneering and remain marked by it to this day.

Tristram Hunt: Martin Amis's new book, Koba The Dread, has impugned the British Left - and you personally - for not condemning Stalin's atrocities. In your autobiography you vividly bring out the mind set of a believing Communist in the 1940s and 1950s: the party discipline and a reluctance "to believe the few who told us what they knew" of Soviet Russia. Yet you also bring out the historical context for joining the Communist Party - the battle against fascism on the streets of 1930s Berlin and a strong sense of the idealism of the October Revolution. There also remains the broader historical context that the Soviet Union remained a viable economic and political model to many in the West right up to the 1970s. Do you think this historical context seems absent in the current debate about "Communist guilt"?

Eric Hobsbawm: I must leave the discussion of Amis's views on Stalin to others. I wasn't a Stalinist. I criticised Stalin and I cannot conceive how what I've written can be regarded as a defence of Stalin. But as someone who was a loyal Party member for two decades before 1956 and therefore silent about a number of things about which it's reasonable not to be silent - things I knew or suspected in the USSR - I don't want to be critical of a book which brings out some of the horrors of Stalin. It isn't an original or important book. It brings nothing that we haven't known except perhaps about his personal relations with his father. But I don't want to say anything that might suggest to people that I'm in some ways trying to defend the record of something which is indefensible.

Tristram Hunt: Amis has criticised those on the Left who deny any moral equivalence between Nazism and Communism because the latter committed atrocities in the cause of a higher social ideal as opposed to racial genocide. The majority of deaths in the Soviet Union came not from political or racial persecution but famine caused by economic policies. As you have written of Stalin: 'His terrifying career makes no sense except as a stubborn, unbroken pursuit of that utopian aim of a communist society.' I want to tease out this issue of idealism. You stayed in the party after 1956 partly because of solidarity to the fallen and partly because of a belief in a societal ideal. Are you still drawn to an Enlightenment ideal of societal perfectibility or have you come to accept the limits of the human condition - what your friend Isaiah Berlin called, 'the crooked timber of humanity'?

Eric Hobsbawm: Why I stayed in the Communist Party is not a political question about communism, it's a one-off biographical question. It wasn't out of idealisation of the October Revolution. I'm not an idealiser. One should not delude oneself about the people or things one cares most about in one's life. Communism is one of these things and I've done my best not to delude myself about it even though I was loyal to it and to its memory. The phenomenon of communism and the passion it aroused is specific to the twentieth century. It was a combination of the great hopes which were brought with progress and the belief in human improvement during the nineteenth century along with the discovery that the bourgeois society in which we live (however great and successful) did not work and at certain stages looked as though it was on the verge of collapse. And it did collapse and generated awful nightmares.

Tristram Hunt: What struck me in your autobiography was that despite your lifelong Communist Party membership, you were deeply hostile to Militant Tendency attempts to take over the Labour Party during the 1980s. Indeed, to the fury of your comrades you became a committed supporter of Neil Kinnock's modernisation of the party - describing the 1992 general election night as the 'saddest and most desperate in my political experience'. Yet you have spoken out against Tony Blair, branding him "Thatcher in trousers". Surely New Labour was the inevitable conclusion of Kinnock's modernisation process?

Eric Hobsbawm: Most communists and indeed most socialists disagreed at the time (1980s) with the few of us who said it's absolutely no use, the Labour Party has got to go in a different direction. On the other hand, what we thought of was a reformed Labour Party not a simple rejection of everything that Labour had stood for. Obviously, any Labour Government, however watered down, is better than the right-wing alternative as the USA demonstrates. But I'm not absolutely certain that Labour Prime Ministers who glory in trying to be warlords - subordinate warlords particularly - are a thing that I can stick and it certainly sticks in my gullet.

Eric Hobsbawm was a schoolboy in Berlin when Hitler came to power. He knew he stood at a turning-point in history. "It was impossible to remain outside politics," he says. "The months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist." They may also have shaped his moral universe. When asked on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in 1995 whether he thought the chance of bringing about a communist utopia was worth any sacrifice, he answered "yes". "Even the sacrifice of millions of lives?" he was asked. "That's what we felt when we fought the second world war," he replied.

Martin Amis in his new book Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, discussing a perceived "asymmetry of indulgence" in attitudes towards Hitler's crimes and Stalin's Great Terror, characterises Hobsbawm's "yes" as "disgraceful". Interesting Times, Hobsbawm's autobiography, also out this month, offers an insight into the adherence to communism of many of the brightest of his generation, from an "unrepentant communist": Hobsbawm, who joined the party in 1936, remained in it until he let his membership lapse not long before the party's dissolution in 1991. His book - taking its title from the Chinese curse - traces his communist faith in "the most extraordinary and terrible century in human history".

"I've never tried to diminish the appalling things that happened in Russia, though the sheer extent of the massacres we didn't realise," says Hobsbawm."In the early days we knew a new world was being born amid blood and tears and horror: revolution, civil war, famine - we knew of the Volga famine of the early '20s, if not the early '30s. Thanks to the breakdown of the west, we had the illusion that even this brutal, experimental, system was going to work better than the west. It was that or nothing."

He says of Stalin's Russia: "These sacrifices were excessive; this should not have happened. In retrospect the project was doomed to failure, though it took a long time to realise this." Yet he appears to argue that some goals are worth any sacrifice. "I lived through the first world war, when 10 million-to 20 million people were killed. At the time, the British, French and Germans believed it was necessary. We disagree. In the second world war, 50 million died. Was the sacrifice worthwhile? I frankly cannot face the idea that it was not. I can't say it would have been better if the world was run by Adolph Hitler."

The Age of Extremes (1994), which was translated into 37 languages, extended Hobsbawm's range into the "short 20th century" almost spanned by his own life, from the first world war to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He sees his autobiography as a "flipside" to The Age of Extremes, being world history "illustrated by the experiences of an individual". Interesting Times also reveals other sides to a man, who, under the pseudonym Francis Newton, was the New Statesman's jazz critic for a decade. His proudest moments were receiving an honorary degree beside Benny Goodman and meeting the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. He disparaged modernism in high art, when the "real revolution", he suggested, lay elsewhere, such as in the movies.

Now 85, and professor emeritus at Birkbeck College, London University, Hobsbawm lives in Hampstead, on the slopes of Parliament Hill, with his second wife, Marlene, a recently retired music teacher and writer. They also have a cottage in Wales "between the Hay-on-Wye literary festival and the Brecon jazz festival", where, according to the biographer Claire Tomalin, "they reproduce the urban intelligentsia in a Welsh wilderness". The couple have a "social circle of immense variety", says Roy Foster, a former colleague at Birkbeck. "Eric's a European intellectual; he doesn't allow ideology to infect the ordinary relations of life." While some find Hobsbawm cold and imperious, for Pimlott he has a great serenity.

Peripatetic as a displaced child then as an academic, Hobsbawm speaks German, French, Spanish and Italian fluently, and reads Dutch, Portuguese and Catalan. His reputation is arguably even greater abroad. Official recognition came slowly in Britain, where he was made a Companion of Honour in 1998. Hobsbawm insists that "whatever I've achieved has been with minimum, or no, concessions".

Hobsbawm was a member of the Communist party historians' group of 1946-56, which included EP Thompson and Christopher Hill, and in 1952 he co-founded the influential journal, Past and Present, whose contributors included many non-Marxists. They pioneered social history from the "bottom up". For Roy Foster, Hobsbawm "brought British social and labour history into an intellectually exciting and European-influenced sphere, bringing in culture from Romantic music to the role of the flat cap and fish and chips in working-class consciousness. At the same time he was writing about Sicilian bandits and Chicago gangsters." Unlike fellow British Marxist historians, Hobsbawm took an international approach, in such works as Industry and Empire (1968).

Hobsbawm's decision to stay in the party continues to puzzle even his sympathisers. Yet the writer and journalist Neal Ascherson, a student of his at Cambridge in the early 1950s who became a friend, recalls Hobsbawm being "in great distress and finding it difficult to talk... He said that you could achieve more by criticising from within." Hobsbawm signed a historians' letter of protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary and was passionately in favour of the Prague spring, arguing against the "tankies" who backed its crushing by the Soviets in 1968. Yet he remained in the party, "recycling" himself from militant to fellow traveller, and resigning himself to interpreting the world, rather than actively changing it. Pimlott says Hobsbawm remained a member when it was deeply unfashionable and limiting; "he couldn't travel freely to the US. There was sacrifice in his position." Hobsbawm remained friends with many who did leave. Robin Blackburn, former editor of the New Left Review, for which he wrote, says, "I doubt he had many illusions about the Soviet Union after 1956; he was more hard-headed than many others."

In Paris in 1968, Hobsbawm found the events welcome "and puzzling to middle-aged left wingers". He was enthusiastic yet critical of the limitations of protests. "I misunderstood the historical significance of the 1960s," he says. "It wasn't a political or social revolution. It was more a spiritual equivalent of a consumer society - everybody doing their own thing. I'm not certain I welcome this." Another movement which some claim has eluded him is feminism. "His unwillingness to take seriously the research and concerns of women historians pissed off a whole generation of feminists in his profession in the '70s and '80s," says Harriet Jones, director of the Institute of Contemporary British History at London University. She senses a possible change of heart, however. "It's interesting that he has now identified women's history in the Communist party as one of the key gaps in 20th-century British politics."

Hobsbawm espoused Italian Eurocommunism, which distanced itself from Moscow (he found its late guru Gramsci "marvelously stimulating"). He also played a controversial role in the emergence of New Labour in Britain, having canvassed for the Labour party in 1945 ("If there was anything to be done in this country we knew it would be through the Labour party"). His Marx memorial lecture in 1978, The Forward March of Labour Halted? pointed to the inadequacy of Old Labour in the face of social and economic changes. Dubbed "Kinnock's guru", Hobsbawm has since criticised New Labour for going "much too far in accepting the logic of the free market", and been disparaged in turn as an out-of-touch "special intellectual" by the Number 10 adviser Geoff Mulgan, in 1998. Hobsbawm says: "While I share people's disappointment in Blair, it's better to have a Labour government than not."

Had Eric Hobsbawm died 25 years ago, the obituaries would have described him as Britain's most distinguished Marxist historian and would have left it more or less there. Yet by the time of his death at the age of 95, he had achieved a unique position in the country's intellectual life. In his later years he became arguably Britain's most respected historian of any kind, recognised if not endorsed on the right as well as the left, and one of a tiny handful of historians of any era to enjoy genuine national and world renown.

Unlike some others, Hobsbawm achieved this wider recognition without in any major way revolting against either Marxism or Marx. In his 94th year he published How to Change the World, a vigorous defence of Marx's continuing relevance in the aftermath of the banking collapse of 2008-10. What is more, he achieved his culminating reputation at a time when the socialist ideas and projects that animated so much of his writing for well over half a century were in historic disarray, and worse – as he himself was always unflinchingly aware.

In a profession notorious for microscopic preoccupations, few historians have ever commanded such a wide field in such detail or with such authority. To the last, Hobsbawm considered himself to be essentially a 19th-century historian, but his sense of that and other centuries was both unprecedentedly broad and unusually cosmopolitan.

The sheer scope of his interest in the past, and his exceptional command of what he knew, continued to humble many, most of all in the four-volume Age of... series, in which he distilled the history of the capitalist world from 1789 to 1991. "Hobsbawm's capacity to store and retrieve detail has now reached a scale normally approached only by large archives with big staffs," wrote Neal Ascherson. Both in his knowledge of historic detail and in his extraordinary powers of synthesis, so well displayed in that four-volume project, he was unrivalled.

Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, a good place for a historian of empire, in 1917, a good year for a communist. He was second-generation British, the grandson of a Polish Jew and cabinet-maker who came to London in the 1870s. Eight children, who included Leopold, Eric's father, were born in England and all took British citizenship at birth (Hobsbawm's Uncle Harry in due course became the first Labour mayor of Paddington).

But Eric was British of no ordinary background. Another uncle, Sidney, went to Egypt before the first world war and found a job there in a shipping office for Leopold. There, in 1914, Leopold Hobsbawm met Nelly Gruen, a young Viennese from a middle-class family who had been given a trip to Egypt as a prize for completing her school studies. The two got engaged, but the first world war broke out and they were separated. The couple eventually married in Switzerland in 1916, returning to Egypt for the birth of Eric, their first child.

"Every historian has his or her lifetime, a private perch from which to survey the world," he said in his 1993 Creighton lecture, one of several occasions in his later years when he attempted to relate his own lifetime to his own writing. "My own perch is constructed, among other materials, of a childhood in the Vienna of the 1920s, the years of Hitler's rise in Berlin, which determined my politics and my interest in history, and the England, and especially the Cambridge, of the 1930s, which confirmed both."

In 1919, the young family settled in Vienna, where Eric went to elementary school, a period he later recalled in a 1995 television documentary which featured pictures of a recognisably skinny young Viennese Hobsbawm in shorts and knee socks. Politics made their impact around this time. Eric's first political memory was in Vienna in 1927, when workers burned down the Palace of Justice. The first political conversation that he could recall took place in an Alpine sanatorium in these years, too. Two motherly Jewish women were discussing Leon Trotsky. "Say what you like," said one to the other, "but he's a Jewish boy called Bronstein."

In 1929 his father died suddenly of a heart attack. Two years later his mother died of TB. Eric was 14, and his Uncle Sidney took charge once more, taking Eric and his sister Nancy to live in Berlin. As a teenager in Weimar Republic Berlin, Eric inescapably became politicised. He read Marx for the first time, and became a communist.

He could always remember the day in January 1933 when, emerging from the Halensee S-Bahn station on his way home from his school, the celebrated Prinz Heinrich Gymnasium, he saw a newspaper headline announcing Hitler's election as chancellor. Around this time he joined the Socialist Schoolboys, which he described as "de facto part of the communist movement" and sold its publication, Schulkampf (School Struggle). He kept the organisation's duplicator under his bed and, if his later facility for writing was any guide, probably wrote most of the articles too. The family remained in Berlin until 1933, when Sidney Hobsbawm was posted by his employers to England.

The gangly teenage boy who settled with his sister in Edgware in 1934 described himself later as "completely continental and German speaking". School, though, was "not a problem" because the English education system was "way behind" the German. A cousin in Balham introduced him to jazz for the first time – the "unanswerable sound", he called it. The moment of conversion, he wrote some 60 years later, was when he first heard the Duke Ellington band "at its most imperial". He spent a period in the 1950s as jazz critic of the New Statesman, and published a Penguin Special, The Jazz Scene, on the subject in 1959 under the pen-name Francis Newton (many years later it was reissued with Hobsbawm identified as the author).

Learning to speak English properly, Eric became a pupil at Marylebone grammar school and in 1936 he won a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge. It was at this time that a saying became common among his Cambridge communist friends: "Is there anything that Hobsbawm doesn't know?" He became a member of the legendary Cambridge Apostles. "All of us thought that the crisis of the 1930s was the final crisis of capitalism," he wrote 40 years later. But, he added, "it was not."

When the second world war broke out, Hobsbawm volunteered, as many communists did, for intelligence work. But his politics, which were never a secret, led to rejection. Instead he became an improbable sapper in 560 Field Company, which he later described as "a very working-class unit trying to build some patently inadequate defences against invasion on the coasts of East Anglia". This, too, was a formative experience for the often aloof young intellectual prodigy. "There was something sublime about them and about Britain at that time," he wrote. "That wartime experience converted me to the British working class. They were not very clever, except for the Scots and Welsh, but they were very, very good people."

Hobsbawm married his first wife, Muriel Seaman, in 1943. After the war, returning to Cambridge, he made another choice, abandoning a planned doctorate on north African agrarian reform in favour of research on the Fabians. It was a move that opened the door to both a lifetime of study of the 19th century and an equally long-lasting preoccupation with the problems of the left. In 1947 he got his first tenured job, as a history lecturer at Birkbeck College, London, where he was to remain for much of his teaching life.

With the onset of the cold war, a very British academic McCarthyism meant that the Cambridge lectureship which Hobsbawm always coveted never materialised. He shuttled between Cambridge and London, one of the principal organisers and driving forces of the Communist Party Historians Group, a glittering radical academy which brought together some of the most prominent historians of the postwar era. Its members also included Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, AL Morton, EP Thompson, John Saville and, later, Raphael Samuel. Whatever else it achieved, the CP Historians Group, about which Hobsbawm wrote an authoritative essay in 1978, certainly provided a nucleus for many of his first steps as a major historical writer.

Hobsbawm's first book, Labour's Turning Point (1948), an edited collection of documents from the Fabian era, belongs firmly to this CP-dominated era, as does his engagement in the once celebrated "standard of living" debate about the economic consequences of the early industrial revolution, in which he and RM Hartwell traded arguments in successive numbers of the Economic History Review. The foundation of the Past and Present journal – now the most lasting, if fully independent, legacy of the Historians Group – also belongs to this period.

Hobsbawm was never to leave the Communist party and always thought of himself as part of an international communist movement. For many, this remained the insuperable obstacle to an embrace of his writing. Yet he always remained very much a licensed free-thinker within the party's ranks. Over Hungary in 1956, an event which split the CP and drove many intellectuals out of the party, he was a voice of protest who nevertheless remained.

Yet, as with his contemporary, Christopher Hill, who left the CP at this time, the political trauma of 1956 and the start of a lastingly happy second marriage combined in some way to trigger a sustained and fruitful period of historical writing that was to establish fame and reputation. In 1959 he published his first major work, Primitive Rebels, a strikingly original account, particularly for those times, of southern European rural secret societies and millenarian cultures (he was still writing about the subject as recently as 2011). He returned to these themes again a decade later in Captain Swing, a detailed study of rural protest in early 19th-century England co-authored with George Rudé, and Bandits, a more wide-ranging attempt at synthesis. These works are reminders that Hobsbawm was both a bridge between European and British historiography and a forerunner of the notable rise of the study of social history in post-1968 Britain.

By this time, though, Hobsbawm had already published the first of the works on which both his popular and academic reputations still rest. A collection of some of his most important essays, Labouring Men, appeared in 1964 (a second collection, Worlds of Labour, was to follow 20 years later). But it was Industry and Empire (1968), a compelling summation of much of his work on Britain and the industrial revolution, that achieved the highest esteem. It has rarely been out of print.

Even more influential in the long term was the Age of… series, which he began in 1962 with The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848. This was followed in 1975 by The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 and in 1987 by The Age of Empire: 1875-1914. A fourth volume, The Age of Extremes: 1914-91, more quirky and speculative but in some respects the most remarkable and admirable of all, extended the sequence in 1994.

The four volumes embodied all of Hobsbawm's best qualities – the sweep combined with the telling anecdote and statistical grasp, the attention to the nuance and significance of events and words, and above all, perhaps, the unrivalled powers of synthesis (nowhere better displayed than in a classic summary of mid-19th century capitalism on the very first page of the second volume). The books were not conceived as a tetralogy, but as they appeared, they acquired individual and cumulative classic status. They were an example, Hobsbawm wrote, of "what the French call 'haute vulgarisation'" (he did not mean this self-deprecatingly), and they became, in the words of one reviewer, "part of the mental furniture of educated Englishmen".

Hobsbawm's first marriage had collapsed in 1951. During the 1950s, he had another relationship which resulted in the birth of his first son, Joss Bennathan, but the boy's mother did not want to marry. In 1962 he married again, this time to Marlene Schwarz, of Austrian descent. They moved to Hampstead and bought a small second home in Wales. They had two children, Andrew and Julia.

In the 1970s, Hobsbawm's widening fame as a historian was accompanied by a growing reputation as a writer about his own times. Though he had a historian's respect for the Communist party's centralist discipline, his intellectual eminence gave him an independence that won the respect of communism's toughest critics, such as Isaiah Berlin. It also ensured him the considerable accolade that not one of his books was ever published in the Soviet Union. Thus armed and protected, he ranged fearlessly across the condition of the left, mostly in the pages of the CP's monthly, Marxism Today, the increasingly heterodox publication of which he became the house deity.

His conversations with the Italian communist – and now state president – Giorgio Napolitano date from these years, and were published as The Italian Road to Socialism. But his most influential political work centred on his increasing certainty that the European labour movement had ceased to be capable of bearing the transformational role assigned to it by earlier Marxists. These uncompromisingly revisionist articles were collected under the general heading The Forward March of Labour Halted.

By 1983, when Neil Kinnock became the leader of the Labour party at the depth of its electoral fortunes, Hobsbawm's influence had begun to extend far beyond the CP and deep into Labour itself. Kinnock publicly acknowledged his debt to Hobsbawm and allowed himself to be interviewed by the man he described as as "my favourite Marxist". Though he strongly disapproved of much of what later took shape as "New Labour", which he saw, among other things, as historically cowardly, he was without question the single most influential intellectual forerunner of Labour's increasingly iconoclastic 1990s revisionism.

His status was underlined in 1998, when Tony Blair made him a Companion of Honour, a few months after Hobsbawm celebrated his 80th birthday. In its citation, Downing Street said Hobsbawm continued to publish works that "address problems in history and politics that have re-emerged to disturb the complacency of Europe".

In his later years, Hobsbawm enjoyed widespread reputation and respect. His 80th and 90th birthday celebrations were attended by a Who's Who of left wing and liberal intellectual Britain. Throughout the late years, he continued to publish volumes of essays, including On History (1997) and Uncommon People (1998), works in which Dizzy Gillespie and Salvatore Giuliano sat naturally side by side in the index as testimony to the range of Hobsbawm's abiding curiosity. A highly successful autobiography, Interesting Times, followed in 2002, and Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism in 2007.

More famous in his extreme old age than probably at any other period of his life, he broadcast regularly, lectured widely and was a regular performer at the Hay literary festival, of which he became president at the age of 93, following the death of Lord Bingham of Cornhill. A fall in late 2010 severely reduced his mobility, but his intellect and willpower remained unvanquished, as did his social and cultural life, thanks to Marlene's efforts, love – and cooking.

That his writings continued to command such audiences at a time when his politics were in some ways so eclipsed was the kind of disjunction which exasperated right wingers, but it was a paradox on which the subtle judgment of this least complacent of intellects feasted. In his later years, he liked to quote EM Forster that he was "always standing at a slight angle to the universe". Whether the remark says more about Hobsbawm or about the universe was something that he enjoyed disputing, confident in the knowledge that it was in some senses a lesson for them both.

He is survived by Marlene and his three children, seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

MI5 amassed hundreds of records on Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill, two of Britain’s leading historians who were both once members of the Communist party, secret files have revealed.

The scholars were subjected to persistent surveillance for decades as MI5 and police special branch officers tapped and recorded their telephone calls, intercepted their private correspondence and monitored their contacts, the files show. Some of the surveillance gave MI5 more details about their targets’ personal lives than any threat to national security.

The files, released at the National Archives on Friday, reveal the extent to which MI5, including its most senior officers, secretly kept tabs on the personal and professional activities of communists and suspected communists, a task it began before the cold war. The papers also show that MI5 opened personal files on the popular Oxford historian AJP Taylor, the writer Iris Murdoch, and the moral philosopher Mary Warnock after they and Hill signed a letter supporting a march against the nuclear bomb in 1959....

Hobsbawm, who was refused access to his files when he asked to see them five years ago, died in 2012, and Hill died in 2009. Many passages, sometimes whole pages, of their files remain redacted and an entire file on Hobsbawm has been “temporarily retained”. The files include long lists of names and addresses of letters written by Hobsbawm and Hill.

They make clear that MI5 frequently read – or was sent – copies of as many as 10 letters a day. At the same time, its officers, or special branch officers, or their informants – one of whom was given the codename Ratcatcher – were secretly taking notes of their phone calls and meetings.

The files show that Hobsbawm, who became one of Britain’s most respected historians and was made a Companion of Honour by Tony Blair, first came to the notice of MI5 in 1942 when he and 38 colleagues were described as being “obvious members of the CPGB [the Communist party of Great Britain] on Merseyside”. He became number 211,764 on MI5’s index of personal files. Although he was cleared of "suspicion of engaging in subversive activities or propaganda in the army", MI5 noted it was doubtful that he would be suitable for the Intelligence Corps. Roger Hollis, later head of MI5, and Valentine Vivian, the deputy chief of MI6, prevented him from joining the Foreign Office’s political intelligence department.

At the end of the war, in July 1945, an MI5 officer noted: "As he is known to be in contact with communists I should be interested to see all his personal correspondence".

MI5 said the object of keeping checks on Hobsbawm was "to establish the identities of his contacts and to unearth overt or covert intellectual Communists who may be unknown to us". Similarly, Hill was kept under surveillance, the files note, to establish "the identity of his contacts at the University (of Oxford) and in the cultural field generally, and to obtain the names of intellectuals sympathetic to the (Communist) party who may not already be known to us".

One early file on Hobsbawm describes his uncle Harry, with whom he sometimes stayed, as "sneering, half Jew in appearance, having a long nose".

The surveillance intruded into the targets’ relationships. Hobsbawm is recorded in 1952 as having “difficulties with his (first) wife, who,” an MI5 officer noted, “does not consider him to be a fervent enough Communist”.

At a fraught meeting at the party’s headquarters at King Street in London’s Covent Garden, at the end of 1956, Hobsbawm, Hill and the writer Doris Lessing agreed to write a letter attacking the party leadership’s “uncritical support … to Soviet action in Hungary”, a reference to the crushing of the uprising there. That support, the letter explained, was “the undesirable culmination of years of distortion of facts”. Hill, who left the party a year later, used the phrase “the crimes of Stalin” at the meeting, according to the MI5 report. The party’s paper, the Daily Worker, refused to publish the letter which was later run by Tribune, the left wing weekly.

Unlike the very public manifestation of McCarthyism in the US, the discreet British version had its victims. Although political activities did not affect Hill’s academic career, Hobsbawm was prevented from getting the Cambridge lectureship he wanted. He was later appointed professor at Birkbeck College, London.

The documents show that years later MI5 was furious with the BBC for allowing Hobsbawm to broadcast. In October 1962, an MI5 officer noted: “My BBC contact tells me that Hobsbawm is still an occasional contributor to the Third Programme … Some recent talks were entitled "Sicilian Peasant Risings" and "Robin Hood". What is described as "slightly unexpected" was a series of talks on "Jazz".

Earlier that year, MI6 asked MI5 if they had any objection to telling the CIA that Hobsbawm was going on a tour of South America funded, to its surprise, by the Rockefeller Foundation (Hobsbawm had already visited Cuba). In a document marked Top Secret, dated 13 May 1963, MI5 told MI6: "A reliable and very delicate source has reported that Hobsbawm visited a number of countries."

Eric J. Hobsbawm, whose three-volume economic history of the rise of industrial capitalism established him as Britain’s pre-eminent Marxist historian, died on Monday in London. He was 95.

The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter, Julia Hobsbawm.

Mr. Hobsbawm, the leading light in a group of historians within the British Communist Party that included Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, helped recast the traditional understanding of history as a series of great events orchestrated by great men. Instead, he focused on labor movements in the 19th century and what he called the “pre-political” resistance of bandits, millenarians and urban rioters in early capitalist societies.

His masterwork remains his incisive and often eloquent survey of the period he referred to as “the long 19th century,” which he analyzed in three volumes: “The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848,” “The Age of Capital: 1848-1875” and “The Age of Empire: 1874-1914.” To this trilogy he appended a coda in 1994, “The Age of Extremes,” published in the United States with the subtitle “A History of the World, 1914-1991.”

“Eric J. Hobsbawm was a brilliant historian in the great English tradition of narrative history,” Tony Judt, a professor of history at New York University, wrote in an e-mail in 2008, two years before he died. “On everything he touched he wrote much better, had usually read much more, and had a broader and subtler understanding than his more fashionable emulators. If he had not been a lifelong Communist he would be remembered simply as one of the great historians of the 20th century.”

Unlike many of his comrades, Mr. Hobsbawm, who lived in London, stuck with the Communist Party after the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the Czech reform movement in 1968. He eventually let his party membership lapse about the time the Berlin Wall fell and the Eastern bloc disintegrated in 1989.

“I didn’t want to break with the tradition that was my life and with what I thought when I first got into it,” he told The New York Times in 2003. “I still think it was a great cause, the emancipation of humanity. Maybe we got into it the wrong way, maybe we backed the wrong horse, but you have to be in that race, or else human life isn’t worth living.”

Eric John Hobsbawm was born in 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt, where a confused clerk at the British consulate misspelled the last name of his father, Leopold Percy Hobsbawm, an unsuccessful merchant from the East End of London. His mother, Nelly Grün, was Austrian, and after World War I ended, the family, which was Jewish, settled in Vienna. The Hobsbawms were struggling to make ends meet when, in 1929, Eric’s father dropped dead on his own doorstep, probably of a heart attack. Two years later Nelly died of lung disease, and her son was shipped off to live with relatives in Berlin.

In the waning months of the Weimar Republic, Mr. Hobsbawm, a gifted student, became a passionate Communist and a true believer in the Bolshevik Revolution. “The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me, as deleted texts are still waiting to be recovered by experts, somewhere on the hard disks of computers,” he wrote in “Interesting Times,” a memoir published in 2003.

Mr. Hobsbawm, a cool introvert, found exhilaration and fellowship in the radical politics of the street in Germany. As a member of a Communist student organization, he slipped party fliers under apartment doors in the weeks after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and at one point concealed an illegal duplicating machine under his bed. Within weeks, however, he was sent to Britain to live with yet another set of relatives.

Forbidden by his uncle to join either the Communist Party or the Labour Party (which Mr. Hobsbawm hoped to subvert from within), he concentrated on his studies at St. Marylebone Grammar School in London and won a scholarship to Cambridge. There he joined the Communist Party in 1936, edited the weekly journal Granta and accepted an invitation to join the elite, informal society of intellectuals known as the Apostles.

“It was an invitation that hardly any Cambridge undergraduate was likely to refuse, since even revolutionaries like to be in a suitable tradition,” he wrote in “Interesting Times.” He described himself as a “Tory communist,” unsympathetic to the politics of personal liberation that marked the 1960s.

Mr. Hobsbawm graduated from King’s College with highest honors in 1939 and went on to earn a master’s degree in 1942 and a doctorate in 1951, writing his dissertation on the Fabian Society. In 1943 he married Muriel Seaman, a civil servant and fellow Communist. That marriage ended in divorce in 1950. In 1962 he married Marlene Schwarz, who survives him. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his son Andrew; another son, Joss Bennathan; seven grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

Mr. Hobsbawm served in the British Army from 1939 to 1946, a period he later called the most unhappy of his life. Excluded from any meaningful job by his politics, he languished on the sidelines in Britain as others waged the great armed struggle against fascism. “I did nothing of significance in it,” he wrote of the war, “and was not asked to.”

He began teaching history at Birkbeck College in the University of London in 1947, and from 1949 to 1955 he was a history fellow at King’s College.

Mr. Hobsbawm and his colleagues in the Historians’ Study Group of the Communist Party established labor history as an important field of study and in 1952 created an influential journal, Past and Present, as a home base.

The rich dividends from this new approach to writing history were apparent in works like “Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” “Laboring Men: Studies in the History of Labor” and “Industry and Empire,” the companion volume to Christopher Hill’s “Reformation to Industrial Revolution.”

During this period, Mr. Hobsbawm also wrote jazz criticism for The New Statesman and Nation under the pseudonym Francis Newton, a sly reference to the jazz trumpeter Frankie Newton, an avowed Communist. His jazz writing led to a book, “The Jazz Scene,” published in 1959.

If his political allegiances stymied his professional advancement, as he argued in his memoir, honors and recognition eventually came his way. At the University of London, he was finally promoted to a readership in 1959 and was named professor of economic and social history in 1970. After retiring in 1982 he taught at Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University and the New School for Social Research in Manhattan.

The accolades for works like his “Age of” trilogy led to membership in learned societies and honorary degrees, but to the end of his life the Communist militant coexisted uneasily with the professional historian.

Not until his 80s, in “The Age of Extremes,” did Mr. Hobsbawm dare turn to the century whose horrific events had shaped his politics. The book was an anguished reckoning with a period he had avoided as a historian because, as he wrote in his memoir, “given the strong official Party and Soviet views about the 20th century, one could not write about anything later than 1917 without the strong likelihood of being denounced as a political heretic.”

Mr. Hobsbawm continued to write well into his 90s, appearing frequently in The New York Review of Books and other periodicals. His “How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism” was published last year, and “Fractured Times,” a collection of essays on 20th-century culture and society, is scheduled to be published by Little, Brown in Britain in March 2013.

Although increasingly on the defensive, and quite willing to say that the great Communist experiment had not only failed but had been doomed from the start, Mr. Hobsbawm refused to recant or, many critics complained, to face up to the human misery it had created. “Historical understanding is what I’m after, not agreement, approval, or sympathy,” he wrote in his memoir.

In 1994, he shocked viewers when, in an interview with Michael Ignatieff on the BBC, he said that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens under Stalin would have been worth it if a genuine Communist society had been the result.

“The greatest price he will pay is to be remembered not as Eric J. Hobsbawm the historian but as Eric J. Hobsbawm the unrepentant Communist historian,” Mr. Judt said. “It’s unfair and it’s a pity, but that is the cross he will bear.”

Eric Hobsbawm was one of the UK's leading historians and one of the most significant intellectuals of the past half century. His life and works were shaped by his emotional commitment to radical socialism.

In his autobiography, published when he was 85, Eric Hobsbawm said: "I belong to the generation for whom the October Revolution represented the hope of the world."

He was born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, at Alexandria in Egypt, then a British protectorate.

But his father, a British tradesman, and his mother, an Austrian writer, both died during the Depression in central Europe.

Eric Hobsbawm was a 14-year-old orphan, living with his uncle in Berlin, when he joined the Communist Party.

In his 80s, he reflected: "Anybody who saw Hitler's rise happen first-hand could not have helped but be shaped by it, politically. That boy is still somewhere inside, always will be."

He came to Britain in 1933, went to school in London and won a scholarship to Cambridge, where the Soviet Union had many admirers.

There was a wartime marriage which did not last but Hobsbawm reckoned he was lucky to secure his first post as a history lecturer, at Birkbeck College in London, just before the Berlin crisis of 1948 and the height of the Cold War.

But it was partly because of his political affiliation that he had to wait until 1970 before he was promoted to professor.

He published his first major work, Primitive Rebels, in 1959, about southern European bandits, while, under the pseudonym Francis Newton, he was also the New Statesman's jazz critic for several years and later wrote The Jazz Scene.

In the 1960s, Eric Hobsbawm married again and began to establish an international standing as a historian.

This reputation rests largely on four works; The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, Empire, and his 1994 History of the 20th Century, The Age of Extremes, which has been translated into about 40 languages.

His books focused not on kings, queens and statesmen, but on the economic and social forces underpinning them.

Hobsbawm said he had lived "through almost all of the most extraordinary and terrible century in human history".

But, in a startling assertion, he argued that Communism was of "limited historical interest" compared to the gigantic success of the capitalist "mixed economy" from the mid-1950s to 1973, which he described as "the most profound revolution in society since the Stone Age".

Eric Hobsbawm came under fire for his reluctance to condemn the excesses of Communist totalitarianism.

Although he was still a card-carrying member of the British Communist Party until shortly before it was wound up in 1991, he said he had effectively ceased to be a member in 1956 when Soviet tanks crushed the uprising in Hungary and Khrushchev laid bare the evils of Stalinism.

But rejecting the ideal in which he had invested so much emotion was clearly a painful experience.

In 1998, the Blair government made him a Companion of Honour and while Hobsbawm said it was "better to have a Labour government than not," he was critical of the conduct of the "war on terrorism" and accused the United States of trying to "recolonise" the world.

Eric Hobsbawm said Communism had done the world a service by defeating fascism and to the end of his days he insisted that criticising capitalism was as important as ever.

"Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought," he said. "The world will not get better on its own."

His boyhood enthusiasm for the countryside, especially for its birds, never left him. His heart soared at the sight of a red kite or a hen harrier. He mourned how rarely he heard the song of the yellowhammer, “a-little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese”, on his hikes through the hills of mid-Wales to which he had retreated, close to the River Wye.

Eric Hobsbawm was a rare bird himself: “the last living Communist”, as he was teased at his 90th birthday party, and one of the last committed Marxist historians. He had become a Communist at secondary school in Berlin in 1932, and joined the party when he went up to his beloved King’s, Cambridge in 1936, because politics was his passion and it was either Hitler or the other side. But he remained for 50 years until Communism foundered, collapsing “so completely”, he wrote, “that it must now be obvious that failure was built into this enterprise from the start.” Why, then, had he stayed? Because he was of the generation that believed the October Revolution of 1917 was the great hope of the world; and he could not bear to betray either the revolution itself, or those who had fought for it.

There were testing moments, for sure. In 1956, after Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising and Khrushchev exposed the crimes of the Soviet past, Mr Hobsbawm’s embrace of Stalinism was revealed for the folly it was. Most of his intellectual friends left the party. He stayed, gradually regretting that he had remained an apologist for “Uncle Joe” for so long. But just as he kept his knee jerk political obsessions—supporting, for example, any team that played football against a country, like Croatia, that had a fascist fellow-travelling past—so he remembered the Soviet Union, horrors and all, with an indulgence he could not feel for China.

Eric Hobsbawm, who died last month, was the last, and arguably the greatest, of an incredibly influential generation of British Marxist historians who cut their teeth in the Communist Party Historians’ Group (CPHG) after the Second World War. This group, which included Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Victor Kiernan, George Rudé, Raphael Samuel, John Saville, and Dorothy and EP Thompson, was an intellectual powerhouse whose members went on to make a frankly stunning collective contribution to the study of history. Yet even in this impressive company it was perhaps only Kiernan who equalled Hobsbawm’s range of knowledge.

Hobsbawm described his research focus as “the rise of modern capitalism and the transformation of the world since the end of the European Middle Ages”. But this already wide canvas doesn’t begin to capture the full scope of his work. In addition to seminal works in this area, he also made important contributions to the study of areas as diverse as jazz, Robin Hood myths, labour history, and American imperialism.

Hobsbawm’s mastery of these areas meant that his death prompted obituaries around the world and across the political spectrum. And though those in the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Mail amounted to little more than idiotic right wing rants, it is a measure of Hobsbawm’s significance that they felt unable to ignore his passing. What they hated was the fact that he never renounced his (entirely admirable) decision to join the Communist youth movement as a young Jewish anti-Nazi in Berlin in the months running up to Hitler’s seizure of power. As we shall see, Hobsbawm’s relationship to Stalinism was problematic, but not in the way his right wing critics would have their readers believe.

Hobsbawm clearly acknowledged Stalin’s crimes in his history of the 20th century. What he didn’t do was follow the logic of this assessment to make a root and branch criticism of Stalinist politics. Unlike most leading members of the CPHG he didn’t leave the Communist Party (CP) after the Russian suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. And though for the next couple of decades he was somewhat detached from the CP’s day to day activities, in the late 1970s and early 1980s he came to the fore as one of the most important voices justifying what he called its support of the Labour leadership’s “common sense” assault on the left within the Labour Party.

Hobsbawm was lucky enough to secure a university post in 1947, a year before the Cold War made it difficult for British Marxists to get a job in the academy. The subsequent anti-Marxist climate meant, as he told an interviewer for Radical History Review, that he “couldn’t get away with bullshit”. Nonetheless, he stood against the grain of academic history: whereas traditional empiricist historians like to think that simply by repeating the facts they tell history as it was, Hobsbawm followed Marx’s rejection of this “mere root-grubbing history” that attributed great events to “mean and petty causes”, to integrate his command of the facts into a bigger picture of historical development.

Indeed, it was his ability to interpret facts that made Hobsbawm a great historian. His four-volume history of the modern world – The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, and Age of Extremes – is, notwithstanding the criticisms I make below, arguably the best introduction to modern world history.

This is because Hobsbawm was both the master of his materials with a keen eye for a telling anecdote and a great synthesiser, who wove together a wonderful panorama from his broad and deep reading around each period in a way that linked the local and episodic into the total and universal without reducing the former to the latter. His approach to the study of history was much more than the dry accumulation of facts characteristic of so much academic history, or the eclecticism of interdisciplinary approaches that typically amounts to an agglomeration of disparate methods. Rather, as he wrote in How to Change the World, he aimed to “integrate all disciplines” into a total history.

It is easy to dismiss attempts to write total history as the unrealisable goal of writing a history of everything. But as Hobsbawm observed in his essay Marxist Historiography Today, total history is best understood as an approach which sees “history as an indivisible web in which all human activities are interconnected”. Understood in this way, total history should be the goal of any historian who seeks not only to understand the past, but also, as the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács put it, to grasp the present as a historical problem.

One example of how Hobsbawm related seemingly arcane issues to modern day concerns is his fascinating study of Robin Hood myths, Bandits. In this book he showed how these stories, which seem to be universal in peasant societies, reflect a general desire for justice. Simultaneously, he pointed out how their continued resonance illuminates the injustices at the heart of our own society.

The power of the links Hobsbawm drew between history and politics was reinforced by his wonderful style: he was an excellent writer and this was partly because he wrote for an audience that included those outside universities. I still remember my excitement on first reading The Age of Revolution. Hobsbawm integrated the seemingly disparate events of this period into a greater whole, explaining how they could be understood not merely as one damn thing after another, but rather in terms of the reshaping of the modern world by the “dual revolution”: England’s industrial revolution alongside France’s social revolution.

More generally, Hobsbawm made a creative application of Marxism in a way that realised Marx’s goal of showing how men and women make history, but “under given and inherited circumstances”. In a backhanded compliment, historian David Priestland praised Hobsbawm’s work because, “unlike some Marxists, he became increasingly aware of the importance of ideas and subjective experience.” This argument perversely assumes that Stalin’s caricature of Marxism as the story of the “development of the forces of production” with little or no room for human agency is the standard Marxist position. Hobsbawm’s work sits alongside the best of 20th century Marxist historiography in showing that this assumption is unfounded and that it is possible to write about ideas and subjective experience without losing sight of the broader patterns of history. This is exactly what he did, for instance, in The Age of Empire where he traced the logic that sent the world crashing to war in 1914, even as those who made the decisions couldn’t quite believe that they were starting a total war.

Nevertheless, there are some very real problems with Hobsbawm’s approach to the study of the past, and these stem from the way the Stalinist influence on his politics acted as a brake on his Marxism. Hobsbawm became a Communist in 1932 at the height of the absurdly ultra-left “third period” line through which Stalin neutralised the Communist movement by having it dismiss social democracy as “social fascism”. In the wake of the desire for anti-fascist unity that followed Hitler’s subsequent rise to power, there was pressure to change this line. Tragically, Stalin quickly subverted this positive movement into an attempt to build alliances with Britain and France.

It was this new “popular front” position that was the overwhelming influence on Hobsbawm’s subsequent political evolution. Among the consequences of this new policy CPs did their bit to foster alliances between Moscow, Paris and London by flip-flopping from their previous ultra-leftism to a renewed form of class collaboration. For all its superficial appeal this approach smacked of the politics that undermined the European left in the run up to 1914, and against which the CPs had originally been forged. In defending this general approach in the decades that followed, Hobsbawm argued not only that the split between the Communist and social democratic parties was mistaken but also that “like it or not the future of socialism is through the Labour Party”.

He justified this perspective through a tacit rejection of Marx’s vision of socialism. Whereas Marx argued that socialism could only come through working class self-emancipation, in The Age of Capital Hobsbawm was very disparaging about the key example Marx gave of a socialist revolution: the Paris Commune. By contrast, he tended to agree with the Stalinists and social democrats that state planning was the only systematic alternative to free markets. This perspective involved a complete misunderstanding of the relationship between states and markets, especially as this relationship developed in the 20th century. Markets need states, and as states and capital became increasingly intertwined in the 20th century, market competition increasingly morphed into military competition between state capitalisms.

In the London Review of Books Perry Anderson suggested that Hobsbawm was aware of this, but that this reading of 20th century history tended to be repressed within Age of Extremes. Superficially, this book tells the story of the confrontation between capitalism and Soviet Communism, which the latter lost to disastrous effect in 1991. However, there is also another story in which this conflict is reduced to mere illusion as both sides are revealed to be essentially similar beneath the heat of ideological posturing. Unfortunately, Hobsbawm’s conflation of socialism with state capitalist planning meant that the former, more pessimistic interpretation dominated his conclusion. But this interpretation is contradicted by the evidence of the crimes of the Stalinist regimes that he marshalled within the book; and this contradiction suggests that Hobsbawm’s pessimistic conclusion to Age of Extremes is much more controversial than he admitted.

The sense that Hobsbawm’s assessment of the situation at the end of the “short 20th century” is highly questionable also informed Chris Harman’s review of Age of Extremes for International Socialism. He argued that the key problem with this book was that it allowed no space for alternatives. This can be understood as the flipside of Hobsbawm’s belief that state planning was the only systematic alternative to capitalism, for this claim depends upon dismissing those workers’ movements that pointed to an alternative beyond the two sides of the Cold War.

Hobsbawm justified his dismissive approach to these movements on the basis that “history is what happened, not what might have happened”. This statement contains an important truth, but it also lends itself to an apologetic rationalisation of what happened as the only possible outcome of history. Indeed, the problem with Age of Extremes is not that Hobsbawm skirts over Stalin’s crimes, as his sillier right wing critics suggest, but that he skirts over moments when genuinely revolutionary movements pointed beyond the American and Russian poles of the Cold War.

This problem was illuminated, as Ian Birchall pointed out in his obituary of Hobsbawm in Socialist Worker, in an exchange in the London Review of Books about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 between Hobsbawm on the one hand and Birchall and Harman on the other. Not only did Hobsbawm fail to mention the workers’ councils in his original article, but in his reply to Birchall’s criticisms he explicitly dismissed their significance. By doing so, as Harman pointed out, he did damage to the facts. Unfortunately, this kind of distortion by omission is typical of Hobsbawm’s dismissive attitude to the revolutionary potential of just about every upsurge in working class militancy in the West after 1917.

This perspective also informed his attitude to anarchism and other forms of direct action (at least in the period since the formation of social democratic parties). Rather than recognise the positive side of these movements as reactions against not only oppression and exploitation but also the failure of social democracy to combat these evils, Hobsbawm tended to trivialise them as variations on the theme of “primitive rebellion”.

If this approach helped rationalise his decision to stay in the CP (which had essentially become a reformist party since the popular front period) in 1956 while many of the leading members of the CPHG played a role in the formation of the New Left, the corollary of Hobsbawm’s advocacy of a state capitalist alternative to free markets was his belief that the Labour Party was the potential agent of socialist change.

The key weakness with this perspective was that the Labour Party had been losing members and voters since 1951. Hobsbawm’s 1978 essay The Forward March of Labour Halted was both his attempt to answer this question and his most significant contribution to contemporary political debate. He argued that since the 1950s the weight of manual workers within the broader labour force had dramatically declined. Furthermore, British capitalism had changed through a combination of a technological revolution, increased standards of living for the majority, and an expansion of the public sector. These processes led to an increased sectionalism within the working class which undermined those traditional (that is post-1870) forms of solidarity out of which the mass parties of the working class had been born.

Whatever its strengths, this argument bypassed an assessment of the negative impact on its social base of the Labour Party’s actions in both local and national government. Consequently, Hobsbawm’s prescription for overcoming Labour’s decline amounted to more of what ails you: he provided a left veneer to those pushing the Labour Party and the unions to the right in the 1980s.

Hobsbawm’s dismissive attitude to movements from below is the most important reason why he contributed little of substance to a positive strategy for socialism. Nonetheless, through his broader historical writings he made an important contribution to the negative critique of capitalism. His explanation of the horrors of the modern world as a consequence not of human nature but of capitalist social relations is an invaluable counter to those who claim there is no alternative to the present system. For this reason, and despite the weaknesses stemming from his popular front politics, we remain enormously in his debt: his books should be required reading.