Great book review of Interesting Times by Eric Hobsbawm by Niall Ferguson: What a swell party it was. . . for him.
I read Hobsbawm in graduate school and I too was repulsed by his myopia. Ferguson gets it right:
The tragedy of Communism – and it was a tragedy that cost the lives of tens of millions – was that a man of Eric Hobsbawm’s intelligence could not see, and still cannot see, that Communism was the negation of both freedom and justice, for the sake of a spurious and ultimately bogus egalitarianism.
Read the whole thing it is worth it.
