A Theoretical Revolutionary: Eric J. Hobsbawm and the "Sociological" Trilogy of Deviance

Introduction

The historical interest by the British historian Eric J. Hobsbawm about social deviance can certainly be explained from his life experience that later led him to develop the so-called "sociological" trilogy of deviance (Primitive Rebels, Bandits, Revolutionaries) between 1959 and 1972.¹ As a Jew and Communist Party of Great Britain activist from his teens in the Europe of totalitarianism and World War II, Hobsbawm was always aware that he was a character belonging to a minority, rather than the English Anglican and monarchist majority.² His fascination with unconventionality at its most extreme degree, the revolution, is reflected in his diaries, which show us the autobiographical profile of the eighteen-year-old Hobsbawm: "Eric John Ernest Hobsbaum, a tall, angular, gangly, ugly, fair-haired fellow of eighteen and half. … He wants to be a revolutionary but, so far, shows no talent for organization. … He hasn't got the faith that will move the necessary mountains, only hope."³

Hobsbawm's "theoretical will" to change the world emerges through an innovative vision of history observed from the "bottom" of the underclass, with reference to the transitional periods relating to riots, uprisings, or civil wars. Hobsbawm began to develop the historical-Marxist idea that a society's value systems are modified according to the needs of the masses and therefore they take on a key role in the course of human events. Between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s, the Communist Party Historians Group (to which Hobsbawm belonged) had the merit of considering, for the first time, the history of crime as a branch of social history, namely of conceiving "a new form of social history that aimed to write 'history from below'"⁴ according to a Marxist view. So it was that Hobsbawm decided to take part of the so-called "Popular Frontism,"⁵ in which the analysis of historical times is seen from a "bottom-up" perspective. Hobsbawm developed the conviction that in the long term, economic and social changes weren't due to the will of political or religious authorities, but to the will of the working class that sometimes rises against them, thus promoting epochal reform processes.⁶ After about half a century, his work Uncommon People confirmed his Marxist historical methodologies, where in the preface he dedicated the book to those who "would leave no significant trace on the macro-historical narrative" and, despite that, had been "'as big as you and I'"⁷ (quoting the writer Joseph Mitchell): "My point is rather that, collectively, if not as individuals, such men and women are major historical actors."⁸

Therefore, this connects with the importance about the "bottom-up" perspective, which was already introduced in the mid-nineteenth century with the publication of The Condition of the Working Class in England by Marx's friend Friedrich Engels in 1845.⁹ The development of this historiographic theory took shape during 1970s with the founding of the Warwick School. In this case, the concept of the transformation in modern history led Hobsbawm to consider revolutions as creative–destructive moments between past and present. It is no coincidence that the periodization of a "long" nineteenth century and a "short" twentieth century start with the outbreak of French and Russian revolutions, respectively.¹⁰ For this reason, this article aims to look at banditry's analogies and differences as proposed by Hobsbawm in order to emphasize three main degrees of criminal extremes: economic banditry, social banditry, and political banditry. The first one does not seek conflict with established authority, but tries to exploit it in its favor; the second accepts the legitimacy of central institutions but conflicts with local enforcement; the third and the last fights the institutional system in order to overturn it and follow its own vision of the "ideal government."

Hobsbawm and His Times

Beginning in the mid-1950s, Hobsbawm developed a deep interest in the study of the dangerous classes as soon as they became the main players in the conflict against institutional arrangements. Inspired by his Zeitgeist, between 1954 and 1955 Hobsbawm started to...