Who was almost universally recognized as a great historian and exactly the sort of person I would encourage universities to hire, despite his apologetics for Soviet communism.
I don’t think that his Sovietism damaged him proportionately to its awfulness, in case you’re wondering. The explanation for that comes from him being a humanities professor in England from the Orwellian era.
The question I have is, do you have any nominees for fascist or Jim Crow-defending historians on par with Hobsbawn?
But since you asked, I think you’ll find that historians are pretty diverse in their politics. I don’t think you get anything more than a group-local bump for being a Marxist, and I don’t think that being a Marxist would help you get hired or advanced at many universities. (In England, this wasn’t always true.)
Edit: I floated the idea of Solzhenitsyn and a few others that have been well-loved here, particularly since he’s a counterexample to the idea that Sovietism is at fault for Hobsbawm’s eulogies. But Solzhenitsyn wasn’t an English or American professor, and while he was a religious and ethnic bigot, he wasn’t a fascist either.
This would be a good question for somebody who is well-read enough to confidently give political labels to dozens or hundreds of prominent historians off the cuff. I am not that somebody. I happen to suspect that the answer is yes, since it’s pretty easy to find nasty views amongst lionized figures from all over our intellectual history. It’s not hard to find well-praised sexists, racists, and etc. in academic history. But we need more recent history, and what I can’t do is name a fascist historian on par with Hobsbawn off the top of my head.
Who was almost universally recognized as a great historian and exactly the sort of person I would encourage universities to hire, despite his apologetics for Soviet communism.
So do you think if he had instead been an apologist for facism or apartide or Jim Crow he would have gotten the same recognition?
I don’t think that his Sovietism damaged him proportionately to its awfulness, in case you’re wondering. The explanation for that comes from him being a humanities professor in England from the Orwellian era.
The question I have is, do you have any nominees for fascist or Jim Crow-defending historians on par with Hobsbawn?
But since you asked, I think you’ll find that historians are pretty diverse in their politics. I don’t think you get anything more than a group-local bump for being a Marxist, and I don’t think that being a Marxist would help you get hired or advanced at many universities. (In England, this wasn’t always true.)
Edit: I floated the idea of Solzhenitsyn and a few others that have been well-loved here, particularly since he’s a counterexample to the idea that Sovietism is at fault for Hobsbawm’s eulogies. But Solzhenitsyn wasn’t an English or American professor, and while he was a religious and ethnic bigot, he wasn’t a fascist either.
This would be a good question for somebody who is well-read enough to confidently give political labels to dozens or hundreds of prominent historians off the cuff. I am not that somebody. I happen to suspect that the answer is yes, since it’s pretty easy to find nasty views amongst lionized figures from all over our intellectual history. It’s not hard to find well-praised sexists, racists, and etc. in academic history. But we need more recent history, and what I can’t do is name a fascist historian on par with Hobsbawn off the top of my head.