Lessons from the ancient world

By Charlotte Higgins

January 02 2011

When Natalie Haynes was a teenager, her head was turned. She read the second book of Virgil`s Aeneid, the Roman poet`s astonishing account of the fall of Troy. Instead of taking science exams and becoming a vet, she studied Latin, Greek and ancient history and took a degree in classics. Her passion for Virgil is still ardent [enthusiastic, zealous] . You should read Aeneid book four (the tale of Queen Dido`s fall) because, she exhorts [ to urge, advice, or caution earnestly] in The Ancient Guide to Modern Life, it “is the most brilliant book of verse ever written, and it`s your own time you`re wasting if you decide to read something else instead”.

But Haynes has more than enthusiasm to offer. As the title of her book implies [assume, include], she wants to show what the ancient world has to offer us as a guide to living now. This is tricky territory. The ancient world looks as if it is populated by people “just like us”, not least because it is the great minds of the classical world Virgil, Homer, Plato, Cicero and the rest who have informed so much of our intellectual inheritance from the humanists onwards. Read certain love poems by the Roman writer Catullus, and you can almost hear him breathing, so close and immediate do the emotions that flood out of those words appear to be. But the worlds of classical Greece and ancient Rome are also irretrievably alien, separated from us by thousands of years, utterly foreign by way of everything from religion and ritual to their universal acceptance of a slave-based economy (even Spartacus believed in slavery, he just didn`t want to be one).

Haynes gets this, and writes rather well about the trap of seeing “ancient Rome as a toga [in ancient Rome, the loose outer garment worn by citizens when appearing in public] party to which our invitation went astray”. Recalling the opening sentence of LP Hartley`s The Go-Between (“The past is a foreign country”), she writes: “We tend to view Rome as though it were topographically [detailed description, especially by means of surveying of particular localities as cities, towns, estates etc], rather than temporally [of or pertaining to time], separate from our world.”

Unfortunately her awareness of the trap does not stop her from tripping into it from time to time. Ancient Athenian democracy, for example, had very little to do with the modern political system in Britain: the problem is that we have inherited the Greek word (the original meaning is “grip of the people”, so it`s an idea with an inbuilt critique [criticism or critical comment on some problem, subject etc]). Haynes seems to me to be too enthusiastic about Athenian democracy, which even if it was retrospectively glorified in texts such as Pericles`s Funeral Oration began as a pragmatic [practical] solution to a very real set of political problems that just happened to work out rather well for the family of its founding father. (The statesman Pericles and the gorgeous [rich, superb, splendid] Alcibiades were both of the same family as Cleisthenes, the aristocrat credited with Athens`s democratic reforms.)

Sometimes the conclusions for modern life that Haynes draws from the ancient world can seem rather banal [devoid of freshness or originality]. Does the fact that Greek officials were paid a workman`s wage mean that modern politicians could usefully take a pay-cut? Will thinking about Plato`s theory of forms really make us hesitate when considering the purchase of a new electronic gadget? Does the fact that the emperor Caligula died at the hand of the head of the Praetorian Guard really teach us not to tease policemen? (Surely Haynes has her tongue in her cheek with that last one.)

For all that, as you`d expect from someone who made a career in stand-up comedy, Haynes is brilliant on writers such as Aristophanes and Juvenal. The Greek comic playwright`s most obvious successor, she reckons, is The Simpsons – “anarchic, satirical, parodic [having or of the nature of a parody (a humour or satirical imitation)] and political”. The Roman satirist she unpicks with ravenous [greedy, starved] enthusiasm, loving him though he`s “dyspeptic[gloomy and irritable], bigoted [a person who is utterly intolerant of any creed, belief or opinion that differs from his own] , racist and furious”. A compelling passage describes Juvenal`s third satire, in which he dramatises his friend Umbricius`s decision to leave Rome and embrace the rural life in Cumae (not far from the ultra-fashionable seaside resort of Baiae, on the bay of Naples). The savage, witty accusations against Rome pile up: it is expensive, dangerous, there`s no work, it`s full of crooks and immigrants. So, will Juvenal move to the country too? No fear. Rome, for all its confusion and discomforts, its mess and chaos, is where Juvenal will stay. The Rome of the mind, as Haynes demonstrates, is still the place to be.—Dawn/Guardian News Service

Where have all the thinkers gone?

By Gideon Rachman
Published by: Financial Times London on January 24 2011
Further Link: www.ft.com
www.ft.com/cms/s/0/42689dc4-27fd-11e0-8abc-00144feab49a.html#axzz1DoEWc0cx

A few weeks ago I was sitting in my office, reading Foreign Policy magazine, when I made a striking discovery. Sitting next door to me, separated only by a narrow partition, is one of the world’s leading thinkers. Every year, Foreign Policy lists the people it regards as the “Top 100 Global Thinkers”. And there, at number 37, was Martin Wolf.
I popped next door to congratulate my colleague. Under such circumstances, it is compulsory for any English person to make a self-deprecating [depreciate, belittle] remark and Martin did not fail me. The list of intellectuals from 2010, he suggested, looked pretty feeble [lacking in power, strength. Ineffective] compared with a similar list that could have been drawn up in the mid 19th century.
This was more than mere modesty. He has a point. Once you start the list-making exercise, it is difficult to avoid the impression that we are living in a trivial [insignificant, less important, inconsequential] age.
The Foreign Policy list for 2010, it has to be said, is slightly odd since the magazine’s top 10 thinkers are all more famous as doers. In joint first place come Bill Gates and Warren Buffett for their philanthropic efforts. Then come the likes of Barack Obama (at number three), Celso Amorim, the Brazilian foreign minister (sixth), and David Petraeus, the American general and also, apparently, the world’s eighth most significant thinker. It is not until you get down to number 12 on the list that you find somebody who is more famous for thinking than doing – Nouriel Roubini, the economist.
But, as the list goes on, genuine intellectuals begin to dominate. There are economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, journalists (Christopher Hitchens), philosophers (Martha Nussbaum), political scientists (Michael Mandelbaum), novelists (Maria Vargas Llosa) and theologians (Abdolkarim Soroush). Despite an inevitable bias to the English-speaking world, there are representatives from every continent including Hu Shuli, a Chinese editor, and Jacques Attali, carrying the banner for French intellectuals.
It is an impressive group of people. But now compare it with a similar list that could have been compiled 150 years ago. The 1861 rankings could have started with Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill – On the Origin of Species and On Liberty were both published in 1859. Then you could include Karl Marx and Charles Dickens. And that was just the people living in and around London. In Russia, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were both at work, although neither had yet published their greatest novels.
Even if, like Foreign Policy, you have a preference for politicians, the contrast between the giants of yesteryear and the relative pygmies [less effective] of today is alarming. In 1861 the list would have included Lincoln, Gladstone, Bismarck and Garibaldi. Their modern equivalents would be Mr Obama, Nick Clegg, Angela Merkel and Silvio Berlusconi.
Still, perhaps 1861 was a freak [abnormal product, or curiously an abnormal object] ? So let us repeat the exercise, and go back to the year when the second world war broke out. A list of significant intellectuals alive in 1939 would have included Einstein, Keynes, TS Eliot, Picasso, Freud, Gandhi, Orwell, Churchill, Hayek, Sartre.
So why does the current crop of thinkers seem so unimpressive? Here are a few possible explanations.
The first is that you might need a certain distance in order to judge greatness. Maybe it is only in retrospect [thinking about the past events] that we can identify the real giants. It is certainly true that some of the people I have listed were not widely known or respected at the time. Marx worked largely in obscurity [of little or no prominence, unknown]; Dickens was dismissed as a hack [a person as an artist or writer who exploits for money his creative ability or training in the production of dull, unimaginative work] by some of his contemporaries; and Orwell’s reputation has also grown hugely since his death. But most of the giants of 1861 and 1939 were recognised as great intellects during their lifetime and some – such as Einstein and Picasso – became much-admired celebrities.
A second possibility is that familiarity breeds contempt. Maybe we are surrounded by thinkers who are just as great as the giants of the past, but we cannot recognise the fact because they are still in our midst. The modern media culture may also lead to overexposure of intellectuals, who are encouraged to produce too much. If Mill had been constantly on television; or Gandhi had tweeted five times a day – they might have seemed less impressive people and been less profound thinkers.
Another theory is that the nature of intellectual life has changed and become more democratic. The lists of 1861 and 1939 are dominated by that notorious species – the “dead white male”. In fact, “dead, white British males” seem to predominate. Perhaps there are intellectual giants at work now, but they are based in China or India or Africa – and have yet to come to the notice of Foreign Policy or the Financial Times.
In the modern world more people have access to knowledge and the ability to publish. The internet also makes collaboration much easier and modern universities promote specialisation. So it could be that the way that knowledge advances these days is through networks of specialists working together, across the globe – rather than through a single, towering intellect pulling together a great theory in the reading room of the British Museum. It is a less romantic idea – but, perhaps, it is more efficient.
And then there is a final possibility. That, for all its wealth and its gadgets, our generation is not quite as smart as it thinks it is. Courtesy THE FINANCIAL TIMES www.ft.com
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/42689dc4-27fd-11e0-8abc-00144feab49a.html#axzz1DoEWc0cx

Varieties of Experience

Albert William Levi [1911-1918], Ph.D., University of Chicago, was the David May Distinguished University Professor of the Humanities at Washington University. Dr. Levi has taught previously at University of Chicago and abroad at the Universities of Graz, Zagreb, and Vienna. His major interests lie in the philosophy of the humanities and in the history of ideas.

The book Varieties of Experience was written by Albert William Levi. First edition was published by Ronald Press Company, New York in 1957.In this book he has selected articles of different scholars and philosophers on the subjects like Philosophy and the ways of knowing, Matter and Life, Mind and the Cosmos, Individual Decision, Social Living, The Arts, History, and Religion. He has selected articles from authors like Aristotle, Plato, Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, Henri Bergson, G.W. Leibniz, Leo Tolstoi, Benedict Spinoza, George Berkeley, David Hume, Oswald Spengler, Karl R. Popper, A.N. Whitehead, John Dewey, Arthur Schopenhauer, George Santayana, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, Morris R. Cohen, William James, Charles Sanders, Karl Pearson, Karl Marx, Alexander Meiklejohn and Paul Tillich. In the book he has included his explanations and comments about the articles. Following are extracts from his explanations about the subject of history.

History

All philosophizing about nature ends with some theory of the cosmos. All philosophizing about human experience ends with some theory about history. The one represents our attempt to unify the experiences of matter, life, and mind in terms of some wider doctrine of space. The other represents our attempt to unify the human experience of individual decision, social living, and the arts in terms of some wider doctrine of time…..

But is there a pattern in history taken as whole? Is it possible to say that there is some structure, or direction, or long-range trend which takes in all separate historical events and somehow gives them a unity and meaning? And if so what is the nature of this pattern or structure? To these questions there are several answers and these answers are the most influential alternative theories which the philosophy of history presents….. In a more sober language the alternatives are (1) a theory of progress with this achievable in two ways, (a) through evolution and (b) through revolution; (2) a theory of historical cycles, and (3) a theory which denies that there is any meaning to history at all.

The Theory of Progress

The theory of progress in history is the child of the eighteenth century but it grew into a real prominence in the nineteenth century and today it is perhaps the most commonly accepted of all of the philosophies of history. Its thesis is simple. It says that all historical change exhibits a direction and that that direction is toward the future. It says that the general course if change is in the direction of an increase of value, so that the present is better than the past, and the future will be better than the present. As the world continues, its value properties intensify. The question at once arises: What particular value properties? And of the world grows “better,” better in what sense? It is in answering this question that theories of progress divide into different theories of value…..

Kant’s Idea of a Universal History appeared in1784, and it summed up many ideas of progressive philosophy of history. The first and most important point is that history is purposive. History according to Kant, aims at unfolding to our view a regular stream of tendency. Even if, superficially, history seems but a senseless current of human actions, behind this lies an important natural purpose. Human nature contains certain seeds which finally bud and develop, so that in history one would expect to find a slow but steady development of certain aspects of our nature. And slow nations, as well as individuals, unconsciously follow the guidance of a great natural purpose….. [Kant and his immediate predecessor] find that what history expresses is not exactly God’s but nature’s purpose.

But in the case of society, what can nature’s ultimate purpose be? The answer is simple- an urge toward perfection. Thus history can be read as the unraveling of a hidden plan of nature for accomplishing a perfect state of civil constitution for society. But does our experience support this conclusion? Do we see society growing more perfect before our very eyes? A little, says Kant. Civil liberty is growing. Restrictions upon individuals recede more and more. The enlightenment of men is increasing. There is something in the nature of things which seems to be preparing for a great world state.

Comte’s law of three stages, the passage from theology to metaphysics and on to science is a law which applies to all the intellectual products of the human mind and it is a law of progress. Comte therefore sees the historical evolution of mankind as based also upon this law. All history demonstrates the progressive enlightenment of the human mind, the process whereby religious superstition is left behind and scientific clarity takes its place. But to this doctrine of merely intellectual progress, Comte adds two others, a moral and a social. Selfishness is the primitive ethics and it slowly turns into altruism [the principle or practice of unselfish concern for or devotion to the welfare of others, opposed to egoitism] and love for humanity. And, in the same way warfare is the occupation of primitive society and it slowly turns into peace and the development of industry. There is something enormously comforting in Comte’s account of social progress, for it sees all disvalue in the past. Superstition, selfishness, war are slowly changing into science, altruism, and peaceful industry. It was certainly enormously comforting for the nineteenth century. The only question is: Is it true?

A very different theory of progress (which also originated in the nineteenth century) is that of Karl Marx….. The progress of Comte comes about through slow enlightenment within the mind; the progress of Marx comes about through violent action in society. And this is because while for Comte the greatest of values is enlightenment, for Marx it is freedom…..

It is surely not necessary to point out the defects in this [Karl Marx] theory; how it originated in the nineteenth century and could not foresee certain basic changes in society which the twentieth century was to bring; how it grew out of a European situation and was therefore totally inapplicable to the New World how above all it underestimated the degree to which different social classes could share the same values. But this criticism is out of place here for we are not considering Marxism as a social theory, but as a philosophy of history. But, needless to say, among large population groups it is a philosophy of history which is believed to be true. it a revolutionary variant of the old eighteenth-century doctrine of progress.

The Theory of Cycles

[The theory of progress] has been supplanted by a cyclical theory of which substitutes for the unity of history in the west a plurality of diverse cultures each with its own historic importance and its own problems. The two names associated with this new cyclical philosophy of history are the German Oswald Spengler, who died in the early years of the Hitler regime, and the Englishman Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee’s massiveA study of History (ten volumes) was completed only a few years ago. Spengler’s work, The Decline of the West, was published at the end of the First World War… But, despite this difference, the ideas underlying their work are very similar. Toynbee’s volumes are full of digressions [departure from central topic] and are very pedantic [too concerned with formal rules and details] in their scholarship; Spengler’s are repetitious and oracular [wise and prophetic]. But despite Toynbee’s great popularity and the recent neglect of Spengler, it is Spengler who has undoubtedly the more brilliant and original mind and it is to his version of the cyclical philosophy of history that we will turn.

The shift from viewing history as a single line of development to viewing it as a series of successive great cultures is partly due to the increasing cosmopolitanism of the modern world. When remote parts of the earth are no longer isolated, when we are newly aware of the teeming [extremely large number of people] population of China and India, it is no longer possible to neglect their historical antecedents [earlier happenings]… He declares that the traditional scheme of western history, ancient, mediaeval, modern, is nonsense… Like the Ptolemaic astronomy, [the limited and provincial view of history held by western Christian culture] takes the West as the center of the universe and sees all else as satellites of its central fixity. Such an historical perspective is childishly naïve [simplicity of nature]. But a true view of history would view each culture in its own terms. The eight cultures (Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Greek, Arabian, Aztec, Western) are the basic materials for Spenglerian history.

It is from this analogy that both Spengler’s pessimism and his ideas on the decline of the Western World spring. For like the individual, the destiny of any culture is that it will someday die. Spengler already sees the west in the early winter of its decline, with all creative art a thing of the past, its originality gone, living out its last days amid gigantic wars, enormous city populations, a materialistic and money-oriented point of view.

The important moment for any culture, according to Spengler, is the moment when its mature vitality turns into something fixed and rigid, when artistic intuition becomes systematic philosophy, when the relation of peoples to the land and the countryside is lost and populations are concentrated more and more in enormous cities. Spengler holds that the western world is now in such a phase. Whatever our beliefs about a progressive future, we are, thinks Spengler, doomed. No culture, however powerful and optimistic, can escape its inevitable decay.

After the optimistic hopes of the progressive philosophy of history the pessimistic conclusions of Spengler’s theory of cycles are somewhat dampening. But worse is to come. It is not only that the West is doomed, but that the system of values by which it lives cannot be granted validity beyond its own cultural boundaries. One of the ideas which has sustained philosophers in Western culture is the belief that the values of truth, goodness,, and beauty to which it adheres are not just prejudices of Western man but hold universally for all men at all times and places. The idea of beauty as harmonious proportion should hold for the Taj Mahal, the great temple at Peking, the Parthenon, the temple of Luxor, and Chartres Cathedral equally well. The idea of mutual respect among men should be as applicable to Buddhists, Confucians, and Mohammedans as to Christians… But in a sense this is just what Spengler does deny. For between the great cultures there is no real relation. Each culture has its own values and its own experiences and it talks a separate language which no other culture really understands. This means that the Western philosophers are wrong in their strivings toward historical unity. You cannot formulate categories for all mankind or a system of values which can hold universally. There is no plan or aim for “Mankind.” There is only the separateness of great historical entities and a complete relativity of values.

Historical Skepticism

Many [historians] have been unable to discern in history “a plot, a rhythm, a pre-determined pattern.” They are accustomed to seeing history as toward the end Macbeth saw life:

….It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

The theory of historical skepticism denies that history has any pattern. And it denies this on two grounds; (1) that events simply happen and that any order which is discovered in them is not extracted from the facts but imposed upon the facts, and (2) that history is so much the record of “international crime and mass murder” that to find it orderly and moral is itself an act of the grossest immorality. These two arguments are combined in the work of Karl Popper.

If history has no meaning it is because “history” as most people speak of it simply does not exist. There is no history of the common life of mankind, no records of everyday existence passed on from generation to generation. The history that one learns in schools is the history of political power, of kings and queens, of generals and dictators, of wars and assassinations. It is the record of unjust taxation, brutal conquest, immoral annexation, war after war, in which the gains are a strip of land or a people bound in virtual slavery. And this history has perennial fascination precisely because men worship power.

History is not a work of art. It is not a play which God has written. It is a bloody tale which historians have written under the supervision of generals and dictators.

The result of Popper’s denial that history has a meaning is not complete skepticism, although it is skepticism about history. It does not deny values, although it denies that values naturally emerge from the pages of history. For unlike Hegel, Popper believes. Not that history is the judge, but that it is up to the individual to judge history. It remains the duty of statesmen to cure the evils of society and for teachers to stimulate an interest in values.

The philosophy of history is an interpretation of the passage of the human race through time. And, as such, it might be compared with the meditated course of any individual human life. A person viewing the long life of a friend recently dead might say of it: (1) “He grew constantly in wisdom and understanding as long as he lived”; or (2) “his whole life he repeated over and over again the same tragic mistake”; or (3) “there seems to have been no meaning and no purpose to his existence.” The first view is linear, the second cyclical, and the third skeptical.

The selection from Popper represents the view of historical skepticism which has been gaining ground among philosophers and historians alike.

[Following is the brief introduction of the authors of the article given in the book]

1. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Immanuel Kant, besides being one of the most original thinkers in modern philosophy, was also a typical product of the eighteenth century. He showed that century’s optimism and its faith in reason. Besides his interest in theory of knowledge and ethics, he was interested in social questions as well. Two of his little pamphlets in these fields have become classics, the Perpetual Peace and the Idea of a Universal History, from which the following selection is taken. In this essay Kant develops a theory of social progress, tries to identify a purposive element in history, and reads purpose as the slow approach to a perfect state of civil society.

2. Karl Marx (1813-1883)

Karl Marx, perhaps the most controversial figure of the nineteenth century, and the one who (for good or for evil) has perhaps had the profoundest effect upon the modern world was born in Treves, Germany. He studied at the universities of Bonn and Berlin and began his career as a radical journalist. Finally forced to flee from Germany, he lived for a few years in Paris and the migrated to England where he died in 1883. The middle years of his life were spent in writing and in active political incitement, his last years in the writing of his scholarly and original Capital. His most famous pamphlet, TheCommunist Manifesto is reprinted in part as the following selection. In this work Marx puts forward his doctrine of the class struggle, of the inevitable decay of capitalist society, and of the progressive revolution which will lead to the ascendancy of the proletariat.

3. Oswald Spengler (1880-1936)

Oswald Spengler was born in Germany and educated at Halle, Munich, and Berlin. He studied natural science, philosophy, and history and later taught in secondary schools until he retired to devote himself to writing. His great work, the Decline of the West, from which the following selection is taken, was published just after the First World War and brought his immediate fame. He received two calls to a university professorship, both of which he refused. He had hopes of being a spiritual leader in German politics, and it was believed at first that he would be sympathetic to Hitler. But this did not happen. He died three years later after the Nazis came to power. In this selection Spengler attacks the usual periodization of history, puts forward his theory of the succession of great cultures, and states his theory of the relativity of values.

4. Karl R. Popper (1902-1994 )

Karl Popper, an Austro British Philosopher was born in Vienna at the turn of the century and educated at the University of Vienna was Professor of Logic and Scientific Method at the University of London. His chief work is The Open Society and its Enemies, published in 1945, and it is from this work that the following selection is taken. In it Popper states the case for the belief that history has no meaning. His assumptions are positivistic, but unsympathetic to our giving a meaning to history, provided that we acknowledge ourselves rather than history as the source of value.

How to change the world

Saturday 22 January 2011

By Stefan Collini

“HITHERTO, philosophers have sought to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it.” Marx’s celebrated over-statement attempted to build what might now be called an “impact requirement” into the valuation of abstract [summary of a document or speech etc.] thought : the test of the validity of ideas was to be found in their capacity to transform the world.

This hubristic [excessive pride or self confidence, arrogance] declaration may in retrospect be seen as expressing a tension which ran through all of Marx’s own work and was at the root of the recurring identity crisis which plagued that diverse body of thinking and doing subsequently referred to as “Marxism”.

A quite extraordinarily rich and sophisticated body of ideas developed, and continues to develop, under this label, yet both adepts [very skilled, proficient, expert] and critics have been prone to insist that the standing and importance of these ideas is to be assessed in terms of their record in transforming the world.

The adepts often like to suggest that the jury is still out, but they have, sorrowfully, to acknowledge that the case is not looking good; the critics gleefully point to the millions of Stalin’s victims and to the unparalleled prosperity brought (to some) by capitalism, and then consider the case closed.

This dual character of Marxism imposes special burdens on anyone attempting to chart its history. The ideas themselves are complex and demanding: the historian should, ideally, be able to move confidently through the thickets of Hegelian metaphysics [a treatise (4^th century BC) by Aristotle dealing with first principles, the relation of universals to particulars and teleological (in vitalist philosophy, the doctrine that phenomena are guided not only by mechanical forces but they also move towards certain goals of self realization) doctrine of causation] as well as the intricacies [complexities] of the labour theory of value. But, in addition, an adequate history has to embrace the achievements of labour movements and the posturing of party factions, the building of planned economies and the repression of dissident opinion, and much else besides. The ideal historian of Marxism has to be part theoretician, part polymath; part believer, part sceptic [a person who maintains a doubting attitude as toward values, plans, statement or the character of others]; polylingual but not Pollyanna.

Eric Hobsbawm is often referred to as a “Marxist historian”, even though he might more accurately be seen as a historian of remarkable range and analytical power who has drawn more intellectual inspiration from Marx than from any other single source. But he is less often seen as a historian of Marxism. His major works have, after all, been focused on the analysis of the development of European society since the twin upheavals of the French and industrial revolutions at the end of the 18th century. If his contributions to the history of Marxism have been accorded less recognition that may partly be because they have taken the form of scattered essays and chapters, and partly because, true to his cosmopolitan leanings, they have often been published in languages other than English.

The publication of How To Change the World may help to set the record straight – and not before time: it is his 16th book and appears, impressively, in his 94th year. Although the book is largely made up of previously published material, much of it has never appeared in English and some of it has been revised and updated.

In the course of the past century or more, the status of Marx’s writings may be said to have oscillated [to swing or to move to and fro as a pendulum does, vibrate] between two poles. On the one hand, there is the once-orthodox communist position that Marx was the all-but-infallible [absolutely trustworthy, sure, certain] guide to political action and to the creation, via revolution, of the form of society that would succeed capitalism. And on the other, there is what we might call the “western” view, where Marx is treated, along with figures such as Nietzsche and Freud, as the author of an endlessly fascinating body of writing, writing that may be studied or simply enjoyed but that does not issue in action any more than does Mann’s The Magic Mountain or Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Hobsbawm, typically, avoids both these extremes: his attitude is more distanced than the first, but considerably more engaged than the second. He commends the history of Marxism to our attention because “for the past 130 years it has been a major theme in the intellectual music of the modern world, and, through its capacity to mobilise social forces, a crucial, at some periods a decisive, presence in the history of the twentieth century.”

But what of the 21st century? From its beginnings in the 1840s, Marxism has been subject to fits of premature speculation. Marx and Engels repeatedly persuaded themselves (and some others) that the end of bourgeois society was nigh [near in space, time or relation], and since Marx’s death there have been regular announcements of the “crisis of capitalism”. But each time the patient has somehow recovered and may even have grown stronger.

Perhaps even Hobsbawm, coolest and most judicious [wise, sensible or well-advised judgement] of analysts, is not wholly immune to [exempted from] this fever when he speculates that the financial collapse of 2008 may
signal the beginning of the end of capitalism as we have known it. — The Guardian, London , and www.guardian.co.uk

Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both. - John F. Kennedy (1917-1963). Speech before the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Naples, 3 July 1963

In the long run, I believe that communism will fail to captivate mankind because … communism has very little spiritual help or guidance to offer to men and women in the personal trials and troubles of their individual lives – Arnold J. Toynbee [British historian] (1889-1975) “Ten Basic Questions- and Answers,” New York Times Magazine, 20 February 1955.