WITH A CAST OF MILLIONS (2024)

This remarkable book demonstrates how foolish it is to assume that intellectual brilliance must inevitably be tarnished by political failure. In The Age of Extremes, his 14th book, Hobsbawm provides an interpretation of the recent past that makes mere retellings of events and profiles of famous leaders seem, in contrast, like so much potted journalism. Instead of letting the undeniable drama of wars, revolutions and the phantasmagoria of gushing culture (its music, art and intellectual currents) speak for themselves, he explains why and how they occurred, thus soaring over the predictable -- if vividly rendered -- narratives that fill the history sections of mall-hugging bookstores.

Calling Hobsbawm a Marxist is a bit like calling Proust a modern novelist; the drab term fails to evoke the lustrous insights and humanity of the man's work. For Hobsbawm, it is the rise and fall of successive world orders -- composed of intertwining forms of governance, ideology, cultural life and the production and distribution of goods -- that generate transformations in the lives of billions of people.

Still, he never forgets that any grand historical change arises from a myriad of individual stories -- like that of the gringa "country girl" who moved to Lima, Peru in the 1960s and started dancing the twist, proving that traditional societies with insular mores lasting for several millennia were no more. On nearly every page of The Age of Extremes, there is an observation about this over-reported era that is both deeply thoughtful and surprisingly new.

Hobsbawm divides the short century into three parts, weighted toward developments initiated in Europe and the United States. The first period he dubs "the age of catastrophe" (1914 to 1945). Two massive wars sandwiched around a long depression threatened the very survival of liberal thought and parliamentary democracy -- and took Western colonialism from its heyday to its final days. The second period is "the golden age" (1945 to the early '70s). The pleasures and pitfalls of consumer capitalism spread throughout the globe, making peasants into urbanites and child-laborers into full-time students -- even as the Cold War threatened periodically to reduce all the gains to ashes. The final period he calls "The Landslide." It was (and remains) an uncertain age in which big corporations threw off their national fetters, welfare states lost their solvency and much of their political support, and socialism died -- at least as a plausible alternative to the many forms of capitalism that exist from Singapore to South Africa to South-Central L.A.

This structure allows Hobsbawm to illuminate features of the short century whose significance is unlikely to dim through the decades of the next one. He details how dismal were the prospects for liberal government in the 1930s: Compared to the well-publicized advances made by the USSR and Nazi Germany, representative democracies could neither unify their citizens behind a common purpose nor keep them securely employed. Of all the capitalist powers, only the United States under Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed a stable center-left regime in the latter part of the decade. Then victory in World War II, impossible without the Red Army, resulted in a double deliverance for the West: Fascism was vanquished, and liberal rulers rushed to counter the appeal with generous social programs justified by the Keynesian idea that governments should "prime" the economic "pump." The Bolshevik revolution, writes Hobsbawm, thus "proved to be the saviour of liberal capitalism, both by enabling the West to win the Second World War . . . and by providing the incentive for capitalism to reform itself."

The florescence of welfare states helped make possible the great transformation of the third quarter of our century. What was so extraordinary about the post-war "golden age," Hobsbawm makes clear, was not just the diffusion of such technological marvels as television, refrigerators and automobiles to nearly every corner of the globe or the astounding rise in incomes or the leap in urbanization that brought a cosmopolitan flavor to poor nations like Jamaica and Algeria as well as to rich ones like Japan and Finland. Behind the escalating statistics lay a "sudden and seismic" shift in consciousness: "For 80 percent of humanity the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s; or better still, they were felt to end in the 1960s," he writes.

Around the world, people began to expect that they would soon taste the fruits of "development" which, thanks to the international media, they knew most residents of Western Europe and North America already enjoyed. When this did not occur, the allure of revolution -- whether inspired by secular doctrines or religious ones -- was enhanced. College students, their numbers swelled since World War II, often took the political lead in the Third World as well as the First. For the educated young, unlike their parents, "the new times" were the only ones they knew. Fueled by an angry optimism, "they felt things could be different and better, even when they did not quite know how." IRONICALLY, this hunger for rapid improvement -- and the conviction that it must happen -- helped undermine the only system whose rulers were dedicated, officially at least, to revolutionary change. What brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites, argues Hobsbawm, was a rising tide of expectations that an authoritarian elite could never satisfy.

Beginning in the 1960s, the USSR and the nations of Eastern Europe began to open up their command economies to trade with the capitalist world. Inevitably, their citizens started to compare their cramped apartments and dreary cultural life with the wondrous freedoms available in the West. Meanwhile, under cynical autocrats like Leonid Brezhnev, even card-carrying communists shed their hopes for a classless society. In the 1980s, when economic crisis battered the ramparts of the Soviet empire, its ideological arsenal was bare.

For Hobsbawm, that conclusion must have been painful to write. In an autobiographical aside, he remembers how, between the world wars, the Bolshevik promise of "universal emancipation" and social equality led him and many others of his generation to sympathize with or join a Leninist party. Now that the old dream is utterly smashed, he can only protest, rather unconvincingly, that "the failure of Soviet socialism does not reflect on the possibility of other kinds of socialism." It will take more than guarantees of political freedom and a sensitivity to consumer tastes to put the "Internationale" back on anyone's hit parade.

But then, the future is not the province of historians. As Hobsbawm quips, "The only horse-races they can claim to report and analyze are those already won or lost." It is enough that this 76-year-old scholar has produced an account of the world whose subtlety and complexity does not obscure his commitment to a life of minimal decency for all.

Near the end of the book, Hobsbawm spells out the price of the transnational "free market" both Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich unambiguously applaud. "To put it brutally," he concludes, "if the global economy could discard a minority of poor countries as economically uninteresting and irrelevant, it could also do so with the very poor within the borders of any and all its countries, so long as the number of potentially interesting consumers was sufficiently large." Most histories are written by victors; Eric Hobsbawm is a master for the losing classes. Michael Kazin teaches history at American University and is the author of the forthcoming "The Populist Persuasion: An American History." CAPTION: "Why should we take a stand about someone pushing someone else when it's all so far away?"