Ayear or so ago, the journalist Nick Cohen, reviewing a book by the English Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, made the mistake of guessing what Hobsbawm's obituaries would look like. Those who shared Hobsbawm's political commitments would laud his work, Mr Cohen predicted. Those who did not would say "his loyalty to totalitarianism disfigured his writing". There would be little agreement between the two camps.
大约一年前，在点评英国马克思主义史学家埃里克?霍布斯鲍姆(Eric Hobsbawm)写的一本书时，记者尼克?科恩(Nick Cohen)曾猜测霍布斯鲍姆的讣告会是什么样子。科恩预言道，政治信仰与霍布斯鲍姆相同的人士会在讣告中赞美他的工作，而与霍布斯鲍姆持不同政见的人士可能会说，"他对极权主义的忠诚使他的作品变得丑陋"——这两个阵营对他的评价会非常不同。
Hobsbawm died last week at the age of 95 and Mr Cohen turns out to have been wrong. Whatever the view in recent years, there is today a remarkable consensus about Hobsbawm. Almost no one makes big claims for the communism that he professed, but almost no one dissents, either, from the view that places him among the great historians of his time.
上周，95岁的霍布斯鲍姆去世了，而事实也证明，科恩的预言是错误的。不管近些年来的思潮如何，今天人们对霍布斯鲍姆的评价却是惊人的一致。尽管几乎没什么人极力主张他所信仰的共产主义，但与此同时，也几乎没什么人反对将他列为他所处的那个时代的伟大史学家。
No matter how loudly Hobsbawm proclaimed the communist dogma, his cast of mind was independent. It was too independent for the Soviet Union, which translated none of his sweeping narratives on nationalism, industrialism, imperialism and globalism. Whether or not Hobsbawm is considered a radical communist, he was an impenitent communist. He clung to his party card through the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and past the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was sometimes biased. He blamed the liberal democracies for Stalin's decision to ally himself with Hitler.
不管霍布斯鲍姆曾经多么大声地宣扬共产主义教条，他的思想都称得上独立。而对苏联来说，霍布斯鲍姆的思想显得过于独立，因此，虽然他撰写了许多关于民族主义、工业主义、帝国主义以及全球主义的影响深远的论述，苏联却一篇也没有翻译。不管霍布斯鲍姆算不算得上是激进的共产主义者，他都肯定算得上是顽固的共产主义者。即便在苏联入侵捷克斯洛伐克和匈牙利的时候，即便在柏林墙倒塌之后，他也紧握他的党证不放。他的看法有时会有些偏激。比如斯大林(Stalin)决定与希特勒(Hitler)结盟一事，他就把这件事的责任记在自由民主国家头上。
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