The present as history: writing the history of one’s own time

Eric Hobsbawm (1993)

Introduction

Virginia Berridge

I well remember attending this lecture in 1993 and was immediately able to retrieve my notes on it. As I sat in the Beveridge Hall, on the left-hand raised side adjacent to the stage, I thought back to the first time I had heard Eric Hobsbawm lecture. Then I had been sitting in exactly the same spot. I was an undergraduate at Westfield College in Hampstead. We students all used to come down to Senate House for the intercollegiate lectures on European history each Monday and that set of seats was our regular territory. The lecturers were the cream of the University – I remember Joel Hurstfield’s talk being greeted with a burst of applause, something which our students in this more demonstrative age often do now, but which was certainly not common then.

Eric’s lecture in that series had been quite different to the rest. He loped on to the stage and gave an incisive and wide-ranging performance which linked the events of the nineteenth century to contemporary issues such as Cuba and Vietnam. At the time, I thought this was just wonderful and exciting: it was the first time in my university career when anything I had been taught had seemed remotely relevant. I could not have been very organized because for some while afterwards I thought that the wonderful lecturer had been Douglas Dakin (in fact the previous week’s speaker), obviously a very different kettle of fish, although also from Birkbeck. Subsequently I became one of Eric’s postgraduate students and attended the seminars he ran at the Institute of Historical Research – but that is another story.

It was not just nostalgia that brought me to Senate House again in November 1993. Eric’s topic, writing the history of one’s own times, was very close to my heart. I wanted to hear what a master of the craft had to say about it. At that time, I was researching and writing the history of HIV/AIDS and policy-making, a subject which, in its immediacy (policy-making in the U.K. had really only begun in the mid nineteen-eighties, not even ten years before), many considered to be inappropriate for historical analysis. Eric stressed the importance of whether or not the historian has lived through the events under consideration, using his own experience of the rise of Nazism and the Second World War as a counterpoint to the recent reinterpretations by younger historians. This struck a chord with me which I noted at the time. I had found the same in a different way with interpretations of the initial response to HIV. These had been characterized by sociologists as ‘moral panic’ within that well-known framework. I had found myself in disagreement with this interpretation through personal experience. In 1986 I had been scientific secretary to a drug addiction research initiative and my experience then of the early response to HIV in the U.K. led me to interpret the policy response as a panic which was ‘real’ rather than ‘moral’, not homophobic (gay men in policy were among the key players), but a genuine period of ‘grande peur’ in elite governing circles. Living through history had formed an interpretation different from that of those who had not.

The need to escape from the assumptions of the time – which he stresses – is something which has to be borne in mind when one is researching and writing about events which still have current significance. In writing the contemporary history of controversial areas, it is better in my view to be a ‘policy cool’ rather than a ‘policy hot’.

And reference to the potentially unmanageable excess of sources for contemporary history was all too relevant – printed sources there were in abundance for HIV/AIDS. But at this time in the nineteen-nineties there was no Freedom of Information and Open Government had not produced very much on recent history. I had to rely for my archival sources on key players in the field who let me have unofficial access to the minutes of committees and on other sympathetic people with inside knowledge. Now, of course, it is different. More archives are theoretically available, although not all departments are able to produce them, as I have found with recent research. The home office’s record keeping leaves much to be desired. But technology, the ability to use digitized sources for example, is potentially transforming the modes of research, and not just for contemporary history.

In the nineteen-nineties, I also used oral history intensively and have continued to do so. Here I part company with Eric’s dismissal of it in the lecture. I do not agree that one needs to know more than the interviewee to get much out of the encounter or that memories are mostly ‘wrong’. The issue of memory has been much discussed by oral historians and would take a chapter on its own to debate. Knowing a lot can in fact be counterproductive: professing ignorance can be a good tactic in the interview, but clearly that was not Eric’s style in his Fabian oral histories.

The end of the lecture, delivered not so long after the end of the U.S.S.R. and the changes in eastern Europe, brought with it a recognition of the defeat of hopes and the political cause embodied in communism initiated by the October Revolution. But defeat was to bring a sharper historical perspective. Eric’s personal history against this backdrop has been much discussed subsequently, in particular since the publication of his autobiography. Both for the older historian delivering the lecture and for the younger one listening to him, the passage of time and the themes of the lecture came together in an ending which was as elegant as ever, yet charged with emotion. Now, fifteen years later, would this response still be the same? What Eric would call ‘short term movements of the historical weather’ might once more affect the perspective on such events.

The present as history: writing the history of one’s own time*

Eric Hobsbawm (1993)

It has been said that all history is contemporary history in fancy dress. As we all know, there is something in this. The great Theodor Mommsen was writing about the Roman empire as a German liberal of the ’48 vintage reflecting also on the new German empire. Behind Julius Caesar we discern the shadow of Bismarck. The same is even more plainly true of Ronald Syme. Behind his Caesar there is the shadow of the fascist dictators. And yet, it is one thing to write the history of classical antiquity, or the Crusades, or Tudor England as a child of the twentieth century, as all historians of these periods must do, and quite another to write the history of one’s own lifetime. The problems and possibilities of doing so are the subject of my lecture tonight. I shall consider mainly three of these problems: the problem of the historian’s own date of birth, or more generally, of generations; the problem of how one’s own perspective on the past can change as history proceeds; and the problem of how to escape the assumptions of the time which most of us share.

I speak to you as one who, for most of his career as an essentially nineteenth-century historian, deliberately kept away, at least in his professional writings, though not in his extracurricular ones, from the world after 1914. Like Sir Edward Grey’s lights of Europe, mine also went out after Sarajevo – or, as we must now learn to call it, the first Sarajevo crisis, the one of 1914, of which President Mitterand tried to remind the world by visiting that city on 28 June 1992, the anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Alas, so far as I can tell, not a single journalist picked up what, for all educated Europeans of my age, was an obvious reference.

Still, for various reasons I find myself finally writing about the history of the short twentieth century – the period which begins at Sarajevo and (as we can now sadly recognize) also ends at Sarajevo, or rather with the collapse of the socialist regimes of the Soviet Union and, consequently, of the eastern half of Europe. This is what has led me to reflect on writing about the history of one’s own lifetime, for as someone born in 1917 my own life virtually coincides with the period about which I am now trying to write.

Yet the very phrase ‘one’s own lifetime’ begs a major question. It assumes that an individual life experience is also a collective one. In some sense this is obviously true, though paradoxical. If most of us recognize the major landmarks of global or national history in our lifetime, it is not because all of us have experienced them, even though some of us may actually have done so or even been aware at the time that they were landmarks. It is because we accept the consensus that they are landmarks. But how is such a consensus formed? Is it really as general as we, from our British or European or Western perspective, assume? There are probably not more than a half dozen dates which are simultaneous landmarks in the separate histories of all regions of the world. The year 1914 is not among them, though the end of the Second World War and the Great Depression of 1929–33 probably are. There are others which, though not particularly prominent in this or that national history, would have to enter it simply because of their worldwide repercussions. The October Revolution is one such event. Insofar as there is such a consensus, how far is it permanent, how far subject to change, to erosion, to transformation and how or why? I shall try to look at some of these questions later.

Yet if we leave aside this framework of contemporary history which is constructed for us and into which we fit our own experiences, they are our own. Every historian has his or her own lifetime, a private perch from which to survey the world. Perhaps it is shared with others in a comparable situation, but, among the 6,000 million human beings at the end of the century, such peer groups are statistically insignificant. My own perch is constructed, among other materials, of a childhood in the Vienna of the nineteen-twenties, the years of Hitler’s rise in Berlin, which determined my politics and my interest in history, and the England, and especially the Cambridge, of the nineteen-thirties, which confirmed both. I know that, presumably largely because of these things, my angle of vision is different even from that of other historians who share or shared my brand of historical interpretation and worked in the same field – let’s say, nineteenth-century labour history – even when we came to the same conclusions about the same problems. In his or her own way every other historian with a taste for a little analytical introspection probably has the same feeling. And when one writes not about classical antiquity or the nineteenth century, but about one’s own time, inevitably the personal experience of these times shapes the way we see them, and even the way we assess the evidence to which all of us, irrespective of our views, must appeal and submit. If I were to write about the Second World War, through which I served as an entirely undistinguished serviceman who never fired a shot in anger, I must in some sense see things differently from my friends whose experience of war was different – for instance from the late E. P. Thompson who served as a tank commander in the Italian campaign, or from the Africanist Basil Davidson who fought with the partisans in the Voivodina and Liguria.

If this is so for historians of the same age and background, the difference between generations is enough to divide human beings profoundly. When I tell my American students that I can remember the day in Berlin on which Hitler became chancellor of Germany, they look at me as though I had told them that I was present in Ford’s Theatre when President Lincoln was assassinated in 1865: both events are equally prehistoric for them. But for me 30 January 1933 is a part of the past which is still part of my present. The schoolboy who walked home from school with his sister that day and saw the headline is still in me somewhere. I can still see the scene, as in a dream.

These divisions of age apply to historians also. The debate about John Charmley’s recent Churchill, the End of Glory: a Political Biography has illustrated this dramatically. The argument is not about the facts, even the facts of Churchill’s very poor record of judgement as a politician and a strategist. These have not been in serious dispute for a long time. Nor is it only about whether Neville Chamberlain was more right than those who wanted to resist Hitler’s Germany. It is also about the experience of living through 1940 in Britain, which men of Dr. Charmley’s age cannot have had. Very few of those who were lucky enough to live through that extraordinary moment in our history doubted then, or doubt now, that Churchill put into words what most British people – no, what the British people – then felt. Certainly I did not doubt it at the time, a sapper in a very working-class unit trying to build some patently inadequate defences against invasion on the coasts of East Anglia. What struck me then was the automatic, unthinking, absolute assumption of my mates in the 560 Field Company R.E., that we would go on fighting. Not that we had to or chose to or followed our leaders, but that the option of not going on was simply not considered. No doubt this was the reflex of men too ignorant and unthinking to recognize the desperate predicament in which Britain found herself after the fall of France, and which was obvious even to a displaced young intellectual who had only the newsagents of Norfolk to inform him. And yet, it was clear to me even then that there was an unassuming grandeur about this moment, whether or not we choose to call it ‘Britain’s finest hour’. C’était magnifique – et c’était la guerre: and Churchill put it into words. But then, I was there.

That does not mean that Charmley, Neville Chamberlain’s biographer, is not right to revive the case for the appeasers; something that is quite easy for a historian in his thirties, but almost impossible for historians of the war generation to envisage, let alone to do. The appeasers had a case, the force of which the young anti-fascists of the nineteen-thirties did not recognize, because our ends were not Chamberlain’s and Halifax’s. In their own terms, which were also Churchill’s – the preservation of the British empire – they had a better case than Churchill’s, except in one respect. Like his greater contemporary Charles de Gaulle, he knew that the loss of a people’s sense of dignity, pride and self respect may be worse for it than the loss of wars and empires. We can see this as we look around Britain today.

And yet, as our generation knows without having to go to archives, the appeasers were wrong, and Churchill, for once, was right, in recognizing that a deal with Hitler was not possible. In terms of rational politics it made sense, on the assumption that Hitler’s Germany was a ‘great power’ like any other, playing the game by the tested and cynical rules of power politics, as even Mussolini did. But it was not. Almost everybody in the nineteen-thirties at one time or another believed that such deals could be made, including Stalin. The grand alliance which eventually fought and beat the Axis, came into being not because the resisters won out over the appeasers, but because German aggression forced the future allies together between 1938 and the end of 1941. What faced Britain in 1940–1 was not the choice between a blind will to hold out without the slightest visible prospect of victory, and the search for a compromise peace ‘on reasonable conditions’, for even then the record suggested that such a peace was not possible with Hitler’s Germany. What was on offer was, or seemed at best to be, a slightly more face-saving version of Pétain’s France. And the fact that, whatever views to the contrary can be found in the archives, Churchill carried the government with him, speaks for itself. Few thought that a peace would be more than a euphemism for Nazi domination.

I do not wish to suggest that only those who can remember 1940 are likely to come to this conclusion. However, for a young historian to reach it requires an effort of the imagination, a willingness to suspend beliefs based on his or her own life experience, and a lot of hard research work. For us it does not. Nor, of course, do I wish to suggest that Dr. Charmley’s assessment of the consequences of going on fighting in 1940 are as mistaken as his assessment of the situation in 1940. Arguments about counterfactual alternatives cannot be settled by evidence, since evidence is about what happened and hypothetical situations did not happen. They belong to politics or ideology and not to history. I do not think Charmley is right, but that argument does not belong in this lecture.

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not just making a case for old historians of the twentieth century over young ones. I began my career as a young historian interviewing survivors of the pre-1914 Fabian Society about their times, and the first lesson I learned was that they were not even worth interviewing unless I had first found out more about the subject of the interview than they could remember. The second lesson was, that on any independently verifiable fact, their memory was likely to be wrong. The third lesson was, that it was pointless to get them to change their ideas which had been formed and set a very long time ago. Historians in their twenties and thirties no doubt have this experience still with their aged sources, which must, in principle, include historians who are also rather senior citizens. Nevertheless, we have some advantages. Not the least of them, for those who set out to write the history of the twentieth century, is the mere fact of knowing, without special effort, how much things have changed. The past thirty or forty years have been the most revolutionary era in recorded history. Never before has the world, that is to say the lives of the men and women who live on earth, been so profoundly, dramatically and extraordinarily transformed within such a brief period. This is difficult for generations to grasp intuitively, who have not seen what it was like before. A former member of the band of the Sicilian bandit Giuliano, returned after twenty years in jail to his native town near Palermo, once told me, lost and disoriented: ‘Where once there were vineyards, now there are palazzi’ (he meant the apartment blocks of the real estate developers). Indeed, he was right. The country of his birth had become unrecognizable.

Those who are old enough to remember do not take these changes for granted. They know, as very young historians cannot, without a special effort, that ‘the past is another country. They do things differently there’. This may have a direct bearing on our judgement of both past and present. For instance, as someone who lived through the rise of Hitler in Germany, I know that the old street corner Nazis behaved quite differently from the neo-Nazis of today. For one thing, I doubt whether in the early nineteen-thirties there is a recorded case of a Jewish house being attacked and burned down with its inhabitants by young Nazis acting without specific orders, as happens quite often now to Turkish and other immigrant houses. The young men who do this may use the symbols of the Hitler era, but they represent a different political phenomenon. Insofar as the beginning of historical understanding is an appreciation of the otherness of the past, and the worst sin of historians is anachronism, we have a built-in advantage to offset our numerous disadvantages.

However, whether or not we give old age the advantage over youth, in one respect the change in generations is patently central to both the writing and the practice of twentieth-century history. There is no country in which the passing of the political generation which had direct experience of the Second World War has not marked a major, if often silent, shift in that country’s politics, as well as in its historical perspective on the war and – as is evident in both France and Italy – the Resistance. This applies, more generally, to the memory of any of the great upheavals and traumas in national life. I do not think it is an accident that a history of Israel which is not dominated by nationalist mythology and polemic did not appear in that country until the mid nineteen-eighties – say forty years after the establishment of the state – or that Irish history written by the Irish did not really emancipate itself from the heritage of both Fenian myth and unionist counter-myth until the nineteen-sixties.

Let me now turn to the second of my observations, which is the reverse of the first. It deals not with the effect of the historian’s age or his perspective on the century, but with the effect of the passing years of the century on the historian’s perspective, whatever his or her age.

Let me begin with a conversation between Harold Macmillan and President Kennedy in 1961. Macmillan thought the Soviets had ‘a buoyant economy and will soon outmatch capitalist society in the race for material wealth’. However preposterous the statement now seems, there were plenty of well-informed people at the end of the nineteen-fifties who took, or at any rate did not dismiss, this view, especially after the Soviets demonstrated that they had beaten the U.S.A. in space technology. It would not have been absurd for a contemporary historian writing in the nineteen-sixties to have accepted it.

Our wisdom is not that we necessarily understand the mechanisms of the Soviet economy better than the economists of 1961, but that the passage of time has provided us with the historian’s ultimate weapon, hindsight. In this instance hindsight is correct, but it can also be misleading. For instance, since 1989 it has become common among many observers, especially economists with a better understanding of market theory than of historical reality, to think of the Soviet and similar economies as a complete field of ruins, because that is what they became after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union. But in fact, though by the nineteen-eighties plainly quite creaky and inferior to capitalist economies both in technology and the ability to provide their inhabitants with goods and services, and slowly running down, they were in their own way a working economic system. They were not on the verge of collapse. Indeed, my friend Ernest Gellner, a lifelong critic of communism, who spent a year in Moscow in the late nineteen-eighties, has recently suggested that, if the U.S.S.R. could have isolated itself totally from the rest of the world as a sort of small planet of its own, its inhabitants would almost certainly have agreed that they lived better and easier lives under Brezhnev than any earlier generation of Russians.

What is at issue here is not simply the historian’s or anyone else’s capacity to predict. It might well be worth discussing why so very few of the dramatic events in world history of the past forty years have been either predicted or even expected. I would even guess that the predictability of twentieth-century history has become distinctly lower since the Second World War. After 1918 the Second World War and even the world depression were quite often predicted. But, after the Second World War, did the economists predict the ‘thirty glorious years’ of the great world boom? No. They expected a post-war slump. Did they predict the end of the golden age at the start of the nineteen-seventies? The O.E.C.D. predicted continued, even accelerated, growth of five per cent per annum. Did they predict the present economic troubles, which are sufficiently serious to have broken the half-century’s taboo on the use of the word ‘depression’? Not much. Predictions were and are being made on the basis of far more advanced models than were available between the wars, and on the basis of enormous and unprecedented inputs of data, processed at the speed of light by the most complex and sophisticated machinery. The record of the political predictors, amateurs by comparison, is no better. However, I have not the time to consider the nature and the methodological implications of these failures here. The point I want to concentrate on is that even the recorded past changes in the light of subsequent history.

Let me illustrate. Very few people would deny that an epoch in world history ended with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union, whatever we read into the events of 1989–91. A page in history has been turned. The mere fact that this is so is enough to change the vision of every living historian of the twentieth century, for it turns a tract of time into a historic period with its own structure and coherence or incoherence – ‘the short twentieth century’ as my friend Ivan Berend calls it. Whoever we are, we cannot fail to see the century as a whole differently from the way we would have done before 1989–91 inserted its punctuation mark into its flow. It would be absurd to say that we can now stand back from it, as we can from the nineteenth century, but at least we can see it as a whole. In a word, the history of the twentieth century written in the nineteen-nineties must be qualitatively different from any such history written before.

Let me be even more concrete. When I was first asked to write a book on the twentieth century to round off or complement the three volumes I had written about the nineteenth, that is to say about five years ago, I thought I could see the short century as a sort of diptych. Its first half – from 1914 to the aftermath of the Second World War – was plainly an age of catastrophe, in which every aspect of nineteenth-century liberal capitalist society collapsed. It was an era of world wars, followed by social revolutions and the collapse of the old empires, of the world economy close to breakdown, of the collapse or defeat of liberal democratic institutions almost everywhere. The second half, from the late forties on, was the exact opposite: an era when, in one way or another, liberal capitalist society reformed and restored itself to flourish as never before. And the extraordinary, unprecedented and unparalleled ‘great leap forward’ of this world economy in the third quarter of the (long) twentieth century seemed to me – and still seems to me – to be the feature of the twentieth-century landscape which observers will see as central in the third millennium. It was possible, even then, to see the socialist sector of the world not as a global economic alternative to capitalism – by the nineteen-eighties its inferiority was evident – but as a product of capitalism’s age of catastrophe. In the nineteen-eighties it no longer looked like the global alternative to capitalism, as it had done to many in the nineteen-thirties. Though its future seemed problematic, it no longer looked central. Again, everyone was aware that the golden age of the world economy’s ‘great leap forward’ had come to an end in the early nineteen-seventies. Economic historians are quite familiar with these long swings of twenty to thirty years of economic boom followed by a much more problematic period of about the same length. They can be traced back to at least the eighteenth century; they are best known as the Kondratiev Long Waves, and so far quite inexplicable. Nevertheless, though these changes of, as it were, global pace, have usually had fairly substantial political and ideological consequences, these did not yet seem sufficiently dramatic to disturb the general picture. You will recall that the later nineteen-eighties were a period of substantial boom in the developed capitalist world.

Within a year or two it plainly became necessary to rethink this binary shape of the twentieth century. On the one hand, the Soviet world collapsed, with unpredicted but catastrophic economic consequences. On the other, it became increasingly evident that the Western world economy itself was in the most severe trouble it had known since the nineteen-thirties. By the early nineteen-nineties even Japan was shaky, and the economists once again began to worry about mass unemployment rather than inflation, as they had in the prehistoric days of the nineteen-forties. Governments of all shapes and sizes, though now advised by greater armies of economists than ever before, once again found themselves not knowing what to do, or helpless. The ghost of Kondratiev had, after all, struck again. It also now appeared that while the eastern political systems ceased to exist, the stability of the non-communist ones, in both the developed and the third worlds, could also no longer be taken for granted. To put it briefly, the history of the short twentieth century now looked much more like a triptych, or a sandwich: a comparatively brief golden age separating two periods of major crisis. We do not yet know the outcome of the second of these. That will have to be left to the historians of the next century.

When I first submitted an outline to my publishers, I did not see things this way. I could not have seen it this way, though perhaps a better historian might have. As I am fortunately a procrastinating author, by the time I began to write I did. What had changed was not the facts of world history since 1973 as I knew them, but the sudden conjunction of events in both East and West since 1989 which almost forced me to see the past twenty years in a new perspective. I cite my experience not because I want to persuade you to see the century in this perspective also, but simply to demonstrate what a difference living through two or three dramatic years can make to the way one historian can look at the past. Will a historian writing in fifty years time see our century in this light? Who knows? It does not matter whether I care. But he or she will almost certainly be less at the mercy of relatively short-term movements of the historical weather, as experienced by those who live through them. This is the predicament of the historian of his or her own times.

Let me now turn to the third problem of writing twentieth-century history. It affects historians of all generations and is, unfortunately, less subject to rapid revision in the light of historical events, although it is fortunately not immune to the erosion of historical change. It brings me back to the question of historical consensus which I mentioned earlier on. I mean the general pattern of our ideas about our times, which imposes itself on our observation. We have lived through a century of wars of religion and this has affected all of us, including the historians. It is not only the rhetoric of politicians which treats the events of the century as a struggle between good and evil, Christ and Antichrist. The German Historikerstreit, or ‘Battle of the Historians’, of the nineteen-eighties was not about whether the Nazi period should be seen as part of German history, rather than a strange nightmare parenthesis in it. There was no real disagreement about this. It was about whether any historical attitude to Nazi Germany other than total condemnation did not run the risk of rehabilitating an utterly infamous system, or at least of mitigating its crimes. At a lower level, many of us still find the behaviour of the sort of young men who become football hooligans more shocking and frightening when it is accompanied by swastikas and tattoos – and conversely, the subcultures which deliberately adopt these fashions do so as a declaration of total rejection of the conventional standards of a society which sees these symbols as, literally, the marks of hell. The strength of these feelings is such that while I am saying these sentences, I am uneasily aware that even today they may still be interpreted by some as a sign of being ‘soft on Nazism’, and so require some kind of disclaimer.

The danger of wars of religion is that we continue to see the world in terms of zero-sum games, of mutually incompatible binary divisions, even when the wars are over. Seventy-odd years of worldwide ideological conflict have made it almost second nature to divide the economies of the world into socialist and capitalist ones, state and privately based economies, and to see an either/or choice between the two. If we see conflict between the two as normal, the nineteen-thirties and forties when liberal capitalism and Stalinist communism found themselves making common cause against the danger of Nazi Germany will look anomalous. They still seem so to me, though they were clearly in some sense the central hinge of twentieth-century history. For it was both the sacrifice of the U.S.S.R., and the ideas of macro-economic planning and management pioneered there, that saved liberal capitalism and helped to reconstitute it. It was the salutary fear of revolution that provided much of the incentive to do so.

But will these central decades of the century seem so anomalous to the historian of 2093, who, looking back, will observe that actually the mutual declarations of hostility between capitalism and socialism never led to real war between them, though socialist countries launched military operations against one another, and so did non-socialist countries?

If the famous imaginary Martian observer were to look at our world, would he, she or it actually choose to make such a binary division? Would the Martian classify the social and political economies of the U.S.A., South Korea, Austria, Brazil, Singapore and Ireland under the same heading? Would the economy of the U.S.S.R. which collapsed under the stress of reform be fitted into the same pigeonhole as that of China, which plainly did not? If we put ourselves in the position of such an observer, we would have no trouble finding a dozen other patterns into which the economic structures of the world’s countries can be fitted more easily than into a binary bed of Procrustes. But we are once again at the mercy of time. If it is now possible at least to abandon the pattern of mutually exclusive binary opposites, it is as yet far from clear which of the thinkable alternatives can be most usefully substituted. Once again, we shall have to leave it to the twenty-first century to make its own decisions.

I have little to say about the most obvious limitation on the contemporary historian, namely the inaccessibility of certain sources, because this strikes me as among the least of his or her problems. Of course we can all think of cases where such sources are essential. Clearly much of the history of the Second World War had to be incomplete or even wrong until writing about Bletchley became permissible in the nineteen-seventies. Yet in this respect the historian of his own times is not worse off than the historian of the sixteenth century, but better off. At least we know what might, and in most cases sooner or later will, become available, whereas the gaps in the past record are almost certainly permanent. In any case the fundamental problem for the contemporary historian in our endlessly bureaucratized, documented and endlessly enquiring times, is an unmanageable excess of primary sources rather than a shortage of them. Today even the last great archival continent, the public records of the Soviet bloc, has been opened to exploration. Inadequacy of sources is the last thing we can complain about.

You will, perhaps, be relieved that at the end of a lecture devoted to the difficulties of writing the history of one’s own times, I seem to end on this note of modest encouragement. You may feel that it hardly compensates for the scepticism of my earlier remarks. But I would not want to be misunderstood. I speak as someone who is actually trying to write about the history of his own times and not as someone who tries to show how impossible it is to do so. However, the fundamental experience of everyone who has lived through much of this century is error and surprise. What has happened has been, far more often than not, quite unexpected. All of us have been mistaken more than once in our judgements and expectations. Some have found themselves agreeably surprised by the course of events, but probably more have been disappointed, their disappointment often sharpened by earlier hope, or even, as in 1989, euphoria. Whatever our reaction, the discovery that we were mistaken, that we cannot have understood it adequately, must be the starting point of our reflections on the history of our times.

There are cases – perhaps mine is among them – where this discovery can be particularly helpful. Much of my life, probably most of my conscious life, was devoted to a hope which has been plainly disappointed, and to a cause which has plainly failed: the communism initiated by the October Revolution. But there is nothing which can sharpen the historian’s mind like defeat. Let me conclude with a passage from an old friend of very different convictions, who has used this observation to explain the achievement of a whole range of historical innovators from Herodotus and Thucydides to Marx and Weber. This is what Professor Reinhard Koselleck writes:

The historian on the winning side is easily inclined to interpret short-term success in terms of a long-term ex-post teleology. Not so the defeated. Their primary experience is that everything happened otherwise than hoped or planned … They have a greater need to explain why something else occurred and not what they thought would happen. This may stimulate the search for middle-range and long-term causes which explain the … surprise … generating more lasting insights of, consequently, greater explanatory power. In the short run history may be made by the victors. In the long run the gains in historical understanding have come from the defeated.

Koselleck has a point, even if he stretches it. (In fairness to him I should add that, knowing German historiography of both the post-war periods, he does not suggest that the experience of defeat alone is enough to guarantee good history.) Still, if he is even partly right, the end of this millennium should inspire a lot of good and innovatory history. For as the century ends, the world is fuller of defeated thinkers wearing a very wide variety of ideological badges, than of triumphant ones. Especially among those old enough to have long memories.

Let us see whether he is right.

____________

* This article was first published by the University of London, 1993. The editors would like to thank Professor Hobsbawm for his kind permission to reproduce it here.