New Left Review I/192, March-April 1992

Eric Hobsbawm

The Crisis of Today’s Ideologies

I have been asked to speak on ‘the crisis of ideology, culture and civilization’ today—an enormous subject, and one not easy to define. [*] This is the text of a lecture delivered at the Coloquio de Invierno, organized by unam and Nexos, at Los Grandes Cambios de Nuestro Tiempo, Mexico, 10–21 February 1992. Yet very few people will doubt that there is today such a crisis, even if they cannot say precisely in what it consists. So let me begin by trying to compare the present situation with earlier periods in the era which began with the great revolutions of the late eighteenth century, that is to say, in the era in which, one way or another, human beings have lived in a material world and in societies undergoing constant and unpredictable change. In some respects, at least for those who think and write about society, all times since the French and first Industrial Revolutions have been times of crisis, for every generation has been faced with experiences and developments that had no precedent, and for which past experience and theories based on it provided no guidance—or at least no adequate guidance. And yet it is also true that historical change in some periods has been so headlong and profound that it has been more than usually difficult to come to terms with or even to grasp, let alone understand, it. We are now living through such a moment, and we have been living through such a period for the past generation or two. I am thinking not only of the dramatic events in world politics that have been taking place before our eyes for the past two or three years—and I use the words ‘before our eyes’ literally, for the network of modern television has made it possible for us actually to see these events taking place almost as they happened; and modern communications technology has enabled us to participate in them, if we so wish. I am here thinking of a schoolteacher in the English provinces who was in constant contact, via electronic mail, with her colleagues in Moscow during the abortive coup of last August. She could actually inform them of the situation as it was reported on television in Staffordshire, but not, at the time, in Moscow. This was certainly the first occasion in history when time and distance were thus virtually eliminated.

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