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 could be laboriously typed and copied with carbon paper, or learned by heart.
No doubt there are authors – I am plainly not among them – who may trace the intellectual dimensions of the decline and collapse of communism and its consequences in a similar manner, through the fortunes of their works. It is obviously far harder to do so for two reasons. Before the fall of these regimes dissident or even heterodox literature was barely allowed above ground. There is no way to measure the impact of writings which were inaccessible in print to most readers, though this does not mean that such works might not become known in other ways. Since the end of communism the publication of serious writing about history and politics has depended on the subsidies of well-wishers such as the admirable George Soros. This tells the author little about his or her intended, potential or actual readers. Thanks to Soros, whose foundations and other benefactions have almost singlehandedly kept intellectual and scientific activities in the ex-USSR and much of Eastern Europe from being swept away by the forest fire of the so-called ‘free market’, at least two of my books, The Age of Extremes and Nations and Nationalism, have been published in a variety of the lesser East European languages, whose tiny public could never possibly have justified the enormous costs of translation. Moreover, one of them (Nations and Nationalism) is a critique of the very ethno-linguistic nationalism on which the small successor states are based, so that it is extremely unlikely that there was much pent-up demand for such critiques in the relevant bookshops of Tirana, Pristina and Skopje. However, since the world still lives in the shadow of the tower of Babel, how could I tell?
Nevertheless I have probably coped better with the Babel problem than most of my English-speaking colleagues, not least because my professional life has not only been peripatetic but multilingual. Historians, of course, need languages more than any scholars other than linguists and students of comparative literature, as very little except purely local history can be seriously studied entirely in a single language, even within most single states. Thanks to the advantage of a bilingual upbringing, a certain gift for picking up languages by talking rather than formal instruction, and the ancestral Jewish experience of moving from place to place among strangers, I have conducted my teaching, and to a modest extent my writing and radio or TV work, in various, not always well-mastered, languages. This has given my professional career a more cosmopolitan tinge than is common, not to mention a more recognized presence in countries whose radio and TV journalists can rely on a few words in their public’s language spoken into their outstretched microphone, or even a public lecture or TV conversation. Over the years the departmental office in Birkbeck grew accustomed to the multiple accents of foreigners asking for Professor Hobsbawm’s room, the non-Anglo-Saxon sounds round my table in the cafeteria, and the gradual adjustment of Peruvian, Mexican, Uruguayan, Bengali or Middle Eastern research students to London life. Not all these students were bona fide academics. In the past forty years English has become so much the universal idiom of global communication, and knowledge of French, the other international language, has declined so fast, that scholars like myself have lost much of their earlier function as interpreters and intellectual brokers. Yet that role remained important in Europe, at least during the lifetime of the generation of great monoglot French intellectuals who (with the rarest exceptions such as the brilliant and unhappy Raymond Aron) could neither speak nor understand English. I acted as translator for the great historian Ernest Labrousse at the early postwar conferences of the Economic History Society. (He warned me firmly against having anything to do with white Bordeaux, unworthy, he thought, of any self-respecting French drinker.) Except in French, I could not have established any relationship with Fernand Braudel. Even in the mid-1960s, when the next, less monoglot, generation reached maturity, it was far from fluent, as France’s premier historian, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, will confirm, if he recalls his first visit to London. Scholars from Eastern Europe once relied on French; in the 1990s their pupils at the New School had no difficulty in writing their term papers in English. And yet, even today the global village in which academics live must continue to rely on multilinguality, as any western intellectual can verify if he or she finds him or herself guideless on a street in Nanjing, Nagoya or Seoul – that is to say functionally deaf, dumb and illiterate. Someone there has to speak at least two languages.
Nevertheless, the global village is real, and since the limits of time and space have been virtually eliminated, the academic profession, having once again become what it was in the European Middle Ages, namely one of wandering, or rather nowadays airborne, scholars, lives in it. I suppose I have now lived in it for something like forty years. It is at this point that the line between professional career and private life becomes hazy, or disappears altogether. In memory the dinners for some visitor from abroad in the seasons of academic migration (as after the end of the summer term) merge with the memories of the Christmas dinners where the family was usually joined by friends, local or foreign, temporarily unattached or hostile to the seasonal spirit: Francis and Larissa Haskell, Arnaldo Momigliano, Yolanda Sonabend. Not that professors have friends only among other academics, though in the nature of things many of their friends are. Indeed one reason why Marlene and I have chosen to live in metropolitan milieus is that no university community is big enough in London or New York to dominate social life there. On the other hand, whether among academics, media people or in business, the global village is a place not so much of lives as of encounters. Each of its inhabitants has roots and most have permanence – either ‘here’ (wherever this may be, London, Cambridge, Manhattan) or elsewhere. Often, and this is new, they have multiple roots or at least multiple attachments, domestic or professional – my seasonal commute from London to Manhattan, the professional couples whose working weeks are separated by continents and oceans, united only at weekends or even more rarely.