drat fink
View current page
...more recent posts
Monday, Sep 22, 2003
deanosaur
1, 2 part dean profile in the boston globe.
fly like an eagle
"But a far more devastating criticism of theory can be launched. Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions."
past & present
"None of these historians, though, achieved greater worldwide prominence than Eric Hobsbawm, a co-founder of Past & Present. His subject—pursued in a series of books that traced social, economic, and political developments from the French Revolution to the late twentieth century—was modernity itself. Perhaps Great Man history was dead, but Hobsbawm himself acquired something of the aura of a great man. He never had a “school”—the Historians’ Group, in the decade following the Second World War, met upstairs at the Garibaldi Restaurant, on London’s Saffron Hill—but he did have notoriety. In the Historians’ Group painting, Hobsbawm appears farthest to the left, and his placement is entirely appropriate. After the Soviet invasion of Hungary, in 1956, the other prominent Marxist historians—like countless idealists of their generation—renounced the Party. But Hobsbawm stuck it out, refusing to repudiate the Communist dream. And so an obvious question arises: How could such a celebrated and accomplished historian have remained so oblivious of the lessons of recent history?"