***THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION

BOOK REVIEW

THE AGE OF REVOLUTION, 1789-1848, E.J. HOBSBAWN, THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY, NEW YORK, 1962

The eminent British Marxist historian E.J. Hobsbawn has written, over an extended period, several books highlighting the key trends in the modern history since the English Revolution, particularly modern revolutionary history. The book under review is to this writer the best of the series. Why? The period from the French Revolution to the Revolutions of 1848 is the decisive period of the age of democratic revolution, the necessary precursor to all later socialist and communist movements. This is the period when, not without setbacks and dashed hopes for the laboring masses, those masses began their first definitive appearance on the world- historic stage, even if at that time only in the wake of the victorious bourgeoisie. Re-reading the book in 2013, however, makes one realize that the fight started in the ‘golden age of the democratic revolution’ has suffered some regression and many of the issues like religious toleration, meaningful political representation, the elimination of economic inequality, the right to national self-determination, the fight against imperialism, etc. that one would have thought had been decisively settled then are still in need of further struggle.

Professor Hobsbawn’s central theme is the intertwining of the spreading of political revolution unleashed by the great revolution in France in 1789 and the establishment of the rudiments of industrial society by the developments, primarily in England at that time, of the Industrial Revolution. The implications inherent in this form of thematic presentation cannot be underestimated in the development of modern society as we know it. It is, perhaps, hard to understand today the tremendous effect that the changing of individuals from subjects to an arbitrary sovereign to citizens of a messy democracy had on unleashing the energies of society. It is not unfair to state that that process is what changed people, at least in the European/ North American land masses, into individuals from a previously largely undifferentiated mass. Moreover, the rise and definitive victory of industrialization held out the promise, if only the promise, of taking the struggle against scarcity-the struggle for daily existence- off the agenda as the motive force of history to be replaced by more communal and cultural pursuits. Ah, but, unfortunately, that is still the music of the future.

Professor Hobsbawn is, however, not merely an ideologue for these two above-mentioned trends of history as they played out at the time but further does a masterful job of connecting all the conflicting tendencies of the period. If at the end of the day some attenuated form of democracy (or rather liberalism, which is not the same thing) triumphed and capitalism, very ugly warts and all, also was victorious those were not necessarily the only outcomes possible in this period. To that end, Hobsbawn analyzes the land question and the related question of the displacement of populations which created the urban proletariat and gave rise to great cities; the tensions between the liberalism of the middle- classes and the rough democratic spirit of the laboring masses; the critical role of science, particularly the applied sciences in giving a boost to industrial organization; the fight against religious obscurantism and the counter-attack by religious reaction; the unusually prominent role of the arts and artists as spokesmen for democratic causes during this period; and, the beginnings of the attempts by the laboring masses to exercise their own political program culminating in the revolutions of 1848. All these trends bring us to the age of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. If you want a thoughtful, incisive overview of an important period of the history of humankind this is your stop.