My Bookshelves, My Books: Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels

Tuesday's Child Is Full of Grace

I’m doing a half-credit directed reading this semester and this book ended up being the first thing we’re reading, along with a great retrospective analysis by Gavin Smith of Hobsbawm and the place of this book (Hobsbawm’s first) in his writing and in the history of 20th Century leftist thought.¹

I ended up echoing a lot of Smith’s thinking as I re-read the book myself. It’s been a long time since I looked at the book. I bought this copy in 1985 (used!) when I was working on an undergraduate thesis that focused on the historiography of escaped slave communities in the Americas in Jamaica, Brazil, Surinam and elsewhere, commonly referred to as maroon communities. I was fascinated then on the ways that Hobsbawm addressed movements that he felt were not fully revolutionary in ways that were both appreciative and dismissive all at once, and I wondered how marronage might fit into that appraisal.

Other historians of an earlier era on the left took a different approach—for Herbert Aptheker, for example, marronage generally was a vitally important rebuke to the woefully established claim by many American historians of an older era that slaves in the Americas passively accepted their enslavement. Since the 1980s, marronage’s complexity has become an important theoretical focus in thinking about the African diaspora and resistance to encompassing systems of domination generally, often re-rendered as the slightly more abstract concept of “fugitivity”.²

Reading Hobsbawm not only took me back to my work on that thesis, but to my reading of scholarship about banditry, millenarian religious movements, and anti-colonial resistances that did not seem to be aiming to establish formal political sovereignty, overthrow the social order created by imperialism and 19th/20th Century globalization, or to construct some form of national belonging. (In fact, re-reading reminded me that I’d worked to apply Hobsbawm to marronage rather than worked from his direct assessment of it, and then used Primitive Rebels for my first-year seminar paper in graduate school in order to discuss anti-colonial millenarian uprisings.)

In a way, my undergraduate engagement with marronage and my dissatisfaction with Hobsbawm’s need to characterize various forms of revolt and resistance as a kind of well-meaning but futile exercise grabbed hold of my entire thought process going forward into my academic career. Smith gets at a thought I can remember having early on and that has goaded me since, that Hobsbawm here and elsewhere was driven by the thought that “while individual agency might suit the bourgeoisie very well, it was only through collective agency that subaltern people had any leverage in history”.³ There was something about that thought that really annoyed me, especially when it led into the analysis of Primitive Rebels, which seems to further discount that kind of collective agency when it didn’t articulate the universal politics that Hobsbawm credited as properly transformative.

As Smith notes, I was hardly alone: a generation of left-oriented scholars in history, anthropology, cultural studies and so on were similarly disconcerted. Microhistory as a scholarly project has its genesis in that reaction—a sense that individual agency matters in some fashion for everyone at least in the sense that all lives have meaning—that they all matter—but also that discerning the purposes and understandings of what Smith calls “counter-politics”, of movements and groups and communities trying to imagine and inhabit a way of life and thought that might not be legible to either liberalism or radicalism in their dominant 20th Century manifestations, without immediately characterizing those as going nowhere or as interesting only for how they demonstrated resistance to domination and hegemony. It wasn’t merely Marxists who sometimes took that view—in an African context, the nationalists of the 1940s-1970s were especially prone to appropriating all histories of prior resistance and relabeling them as “proto-nationalist” or alternatively recasting them as enemies of the nation, as they did with existing millenarian and prophetic movements.

Smith’s re-reading was useful for conditioning my own engagement, particularly in how he points out that getting irritated with Hobsbawm for the relative crudity of his teleological perspective misses out on how engaged he is in the book by the subjectivity of bandits, anarchists, millenarians, and maroons, that a lot of the impetus behind it is to understand people who not only did not think as he does but who pursued collective action and took extraordinary risks in pursuit of their thought. While he predictably comes back to some form of extra-historical scolding of their failure to see the real revolutionary possibilities in each chapter—it’s about as predictable in that way as the patterning of Howard Zinn’s chapters in The People’s History of the United States, which tends to go ‘the people rose and challenged domination, the people briefly succeeded, the people were crushed, a luta continua’—you can feel something almost like envy in his appraisal—that these various kinds of rebellion were in fact militarily successful, persistent, deeply integrated into everyday life, and passionate.

To me this is what makes the book so interesting in its curation of examples, in fact—the kinds of movements he describes here are arguably more with us now than party-based Marxist revolutionary movements that sincerely aim to transform the social order rather than merely seize the state. Since so far even the revolutions that “won” have ended up becoming something quite different than what the first generation of revolutionaries imagined, a fact that Hobsbawm notoriously only processed late in his career, the urgent persistence of communal, local and “counter-political” forms of mobilization, meaning-making and practice is more important than it ever was.

All of this also explained to me yet again why it was that I found myself reading the work of James Scott around the same time and being powerfully drawn to it in a lasting way. But I did find myself really connecting with Gavin Smith’s sympathetic plea to read Primitive Rebels as doing more with its cases and its attention than Hobsbawm’s off-putting top-level arguments might imply. At the heart of it, in Smith’s reading, is a question about what kinds of alignments of sentiment, history, need and anger produce a politics that can sustain antagonism and revolt, and what does it take for those political formations to also develop a larger strategic awareness of the battlefield standing in the way of the world they want to live in?

That seems like an important question here in early 2025, even if Hobsbawm is ultimately no more helpful in answering it now than he was then.

1. Gavin Smith, “Counter-Politics as Inspiration without Organization: Re-Reading Eric Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels”, Dialectical Anthropology, vol. 48, no. 2, Springer Netherlands, 2024, pp. 249–67.

2. My favorite work along these lines is the underappreciated book by Neil Roberts. Freedom as Marronage. University of Chicago Press, 2015; more familiar to many on this score is Fred Moten’s work, particularly The Undercommons.

3. Smith, “Counter-Politics”, p. 257.