This is wonderful; it felt like a fresh breath. Hobsbawm, Hill, and Thompson (my personal favorite) all deserve some special re-introductions and re-considerations---just as you argue, Tim---because they were devoted to, fascinated by the unique circumstances of proto-'Revolutionary' popular movements against their times' monarchical, ecclesiastical, and mercantile 'system-builders' and oligarchs. What's the problem with this genius cohort of doctrinaire, mostly-English (I think Pierre Bourdieu fits in the tail-end) historians' assessment of proto-Marxist rebellion? ---It seems like it's the fact that they couldn't help but feel mingled triumph and regret that their subjects could never have developed the historians' own proudly doctrinaire Marxist consciousness. I think of Hill and Thompson avidly detailing the heterodox religious, philosophical convictions of anti-hegemonic 'saints' committed to defeating the 'satanic' usurpers of people's rights to dignity, equality, and equity that God confers on all True Believers---only for Hill and Thompson to sigh at the grave pity that these intellectual mavericks wasted so much of their energies on 'superstructures' of religious and aesthetic convictions. If only the Muggletonians had been able to embrace *genuine* class struggle, we United Peoples could be selling hotdogs on the moon---at cost! *Our* historical moment reveals these historians' weakness, that the promise of future vindication guaranteed by adherence to 'inevitable' historical developments meant so much to their certitude that they'd arrogantly or reluctantly 'diss the people they most admired. And yet, in our Age that's clearly *not* Post-History but utterly entrained in older historical trends than any Whig liberal would insist can't be relevant anymore, these great writers sometimes look as naively idealistic as the millenarians, regicides, Levellers, and working-class apostates they doted on. Well, Dr. Burke, I'll just toast them and their limited perspectives "'Till We have built Jerusalem. . .!" "Once I Redemption neither sought nor knew. . ." A luta continua.
Gavin Smith gets at this--but there is also no doubt that Primitive Rebels has to be read as a reply from the young Hobsbawm to E.P. Thompson, which is also something that I only understood much later myself, I read them in complete disconnection, which is sort of a hallmark of coming to the scene of a conversation much after it happened without a clear sense of why it happened.
Well, "coming to the scene of a conversation much after it happened without a clear sense of why it happened" sounds like an inspired epitome for, possibly, many things, but it could be the bumper sticker for serious historical scholarship. I mean that with admiration.
This is wonderful; it felt like a fresh breath. Hobsbawm, Hill, and Thompson (my personal favorite) all deserve some special re-introductions and re-considerations---just as you argue, Tim---because they were devoted to, fascinated by the unique circumstances of proto-'Revolutionary' popular movements against their times' monarchical, ecclesiastical, and mercantile 'system-builders' and oligarchs. What's the problem with this genius cohort of doctrinaire, mostly-English (I think Pierre Bourdieu fits in the tail-end) historians' assessment of proto-Marxist rebellion? ---It seems like it's the fact that they couldn't help but feel mingled triumph and regret that their subjects could never have developed the historians' own proudly doctrinaire Marxist consciousness. I think of Hill and Thompson avidly detailing the heterodox religious, philosophical convictions of anti-hegemonic 'saints' committed to defeating the 'satanic' usurpers of people's rights to dignity, equality, and equity that God confers on all True Believers---only for Hill and Thompson to sigh at the grave pity that these intellectual mavericks wasted so much of their energies on 'superstructures' of religious and aesthetic convictions. If only the Muggletonians had been able to embrace *genuine* class struggle, we United Peoples could be selling hotdogs on the moon---at cost! *Our* historical moment reveals these historians' weakness, that the promise of future vindication guaranteed by adherence to 'inevitable' historical developments meant so much to their certitude that they'd arrogantly or reluctantly 'diss the people they most admired. And yet, in our Age that's clearly *not* Post-History but utterly entrained in older historical trends than any Whig liberal would insist can't be relevant anymore, these great writers sometimes look as naively idealistic as the millenarians, regicides, Levellers, and working-class apostates they doted on. Well, Dr. Burke, I'll just toast them and their limited perspectives "'Till We have built Jerusalem. . .!" "Once I Redemption neither sought nor knew. . ." A luta continua.
Gavin Smith gets at this--but there is also no doubt that Primitive Rebels has to be read as a reply from the young Hobsbawm to E.P. Thompson, which is also something that I only understood much later myself, I read them in complete disconnection, which is sort of a hallmark of coming to the scene of a conversation much after it happened without a clear sense of why it happened.
Well, "coming to the scene of a conversation much after it happened without a clear sense of why it happened" sounds like an inspired epitome for, possibly, many things, but it could be the bumper sticker for serious historical scholarship. I mean that with admiration.