Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

been teaching for a semester a year since 1984), The Age of Extremes 1914–1991 (1994), was my most successful book, both in sales and critical reception. It was well received across the entire ideological spectrum of the globe – with the single exception of France – winning prizes in Canada as well as Taiwan, being translated both into Hebrew and Arabic, into Taiwan and Mainland Mandarin, into Croatian and Serbian editions of what my generation still thinks of as the Serbo-Croat language, and into both Albanian and Macedonian. By the second year of the new century it had been or was about to be published in thirty-seven languages.

And yet, in a field as steeped in politics, its own and the world’s, as the writing of history, it would be quite unrealistic to separate the two. Much as someone in my position resented being placed into a Marxist ghetto, my reputation as a historian (and certainly in the 1960s and 1970s my sales) undoubtedly benefited from my reputation as a Marxist. Paradoxically, it was in the world of ‘really existing socialism’ that my books were not published, outside Hungary and Slovenia. The local theologians did not know what to do about a historian who could not be published as an unbeliever (‘not of course, a marxist, but worth consulting in certain respects’), nor as a Marxist, since the only ‘marxist interpretation’ they recognized was a restatement of the officially recognized orthodoxy.

In the West, and even more in what was then called the Third World, the 1960s were a good time for my kind of history, or more exactly, for the alliance of historical modernizers whose fortunes I have discussed in the last chapter. Consider the three-volume Economic Historyof Britain which Penguin Books commissioned at that time, on the advice of Jack (later Sir John) Plumb, perhaps no longer the young radical of 1930s Cambridge, but not without memories of that era: the authors were M. M. Postan, Christopher Hill and myself. Marxists, no longer in the ghetto unless they wanted to be, were, for the time being, part of the historical mainstream. At the same time a new politico-intellectual left was emerging in the universities and schools of Europe and the USA, which actively sought out people with radical credentials. That is why E. P. Thompson’s marvellous Making of the English Working Class triumphed in the middle sixties, lifting its author, deservedly but to everyone’s surprise, to international fame practically overnight. For a while older teachers complained that the students read virtually no other book. I had neither Edward’s genius and charisma nor his sales, but I also wrote on the subjects, and with the sentiments, which attracted radicalized young student readers.

Nowhere were scholarship and politics more closely linked than in the so-called Third World, where, of course, Marxism, being anti-imperialist, was not just the label for a small academic minority, but the prevailing ideology among the younger intellectuals. Brazil may serve as an example. Even during the military regime (1964–85) which had forced out of public life virtually everyone known to have associations with the left who was not in jail or driven into emigration, people like me were consulted on the staffing of a new university. And, indeed, invited to lecture, as I was in 1975 at a vaguely defined conference on ‘History and Society’ at the new university about which I had been consulted, whose student body – perhaps not surprisingly – was passionately hostile to the regime. This was no accident. The press, which devoted quite disproportionate space to a provincial academic occasion, though otherwise approximate (the Estado de Sao Paulo described me as ‘Irish by birth’), went out of its way to stress my ‘marxist formation’. In fact, as I was told by friendly journalists, by the middle seventies the regime was beginning to relax a little, and the entire Campinas conference was part of an operation to test how much liberalization it was willing to tolerate. What more effective test than to announce the invitation of a known Marxist, and one whose non-academic ideas were likely to be loudly applauded by the students – as indeed they were² – and to give plenty of publicity to the occasion? This was a characteristic example of the admirable Brazilian combination of civic courage and intelligence, never accepting the dictatorship, never ceasing to press just beyond the limits of its tolerance. True the Brazilian generals were not quite so murderous as some others in Latin America but the regime was bloodstained enough, and the risks of jail and torture were real. As it happens, the opposition had calculated right: the regime was ready to cede.

It is perhaps no surprise that I may have subsequently benefited as a writer from my minimal and unconscious part in the struggle against the Brazilian military dictatorship. And indeed from the extraordinary fact, not commonly noticed by western liberals, that between 1960 and the mid-1980s, what the USA called ‘the free world’ passed through the most widespread phase of non-democratic government since the fall of fascism, typically in the form of military regimes. Intellectuals, and certainly students, were heavily in opposition to these, though sometimes silenced by sheer terror, whether in Greece, Spain, Turkey, among the usual suspects in Latin America, or in countries such as South Korea. Making available and reading oppositional literature was the obvious first step towards political democratization, as soon as these regimes gave even the slightest ground. Since the universities were the places where the non-business elite of these countries was educated – outside the USA the triumph of business schools and MBAs was still in the future – in those decades a very high proportion of those destined to go into politics, public service, academic life, journalism and the other media were made familiar with the names that stood for left-wing social and historical thought. Since the number of contemporaries with this reputation was small, our names became quite well known in reading circles, even though the actual circulation of our writings, legal or pirated, was modest. Naturally after democratization it could become much larger, though nowhere else quite as large as in Brazil, where more copies of the first edition of my history of the twentieth century were to be sold than in any other single country; though much of this was due to the help of a quite exceptional publisher, Luis Sczwarcz.

In this way the professional career of one author during and after the rise, slackening and fall of governments of the hard-line right in the west may throw light on the wider intellectual history of the ‘free world’ in the second half of the twentieth century, that is to say on the rise of the new generations of educated elites since the 1960s, brought up in the spirit of rebellion, even when they were soon to be ‘co-opted’ by (as the phrase then went), or co-opt themselves into the ‘Establishment’. That is not to overestimate the significance of reading these authors. Some were merely badges of temporary political or ideological fashion. For instance, in the years of the great student revolts of the late sixties the writings of the political philosopher Herbert Marcuse were displayed in every university bookshop of the western world – at least I saw them on the East and West coasts of the USA, in Paris, Stockholm, Mexico City and Buenos Aires. (Marcuse himself, a tanned outdoor type who might have been a retired ski instructor, did not look the part when I met him in the house of friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time.) Yet within a few years his writings had returned to the underworld in which aspiring Ph.D. candidates desperately seek thesis subjects.

Whether the authors who thus became political badges in a country were aware of what was happening to their names was largely irrelevant. There are countries in which I did not even know I had readers until I discovered, as on visiting South Korea in 1987, that five of my titles were in print in (pirated) local translations. But for an Iranian friend at the New School, I would not know at all that one Ali-Akbar Mehdian, not otherwise known, had translated and published The Age of Revolution in Tehran in the spring of 1995 adding ‘Europe’ to 1789–1848, ‘probably to be able to get permission for publication’. In Brazil and to a lesser extent in Argentina, countries I knew and where I had friends, I had a shrewd idea of how such names could become familiar, though, until much later, not of the extent of this potential readership.

This takes a Marxist autobiographer into the welcome territory of technology and culture, namely the explosion of photocopiers that accompanied the enormous expansion of higher education in the West since the 1960s. This gave the new masses of teachers and students access, mostly unpaid, to fiendishly expensive imported academic texts otherwise far beyond their modest budgets and the sparse resources of their libraries. It was the Buenos Aires office of my admirable Spanish publisher, Gonzalo Ponton of Critica, which consequently guessed that there was scope for a special local edition of my work, and I discovered the extent of my youthful readership, or at least of those who had a positive reaction to my name, on a 1998 visit to Buenos Aires to promote it. Conversely, it was the systematic absence of such devices in the communist world that long limited its dissident literature to what