Germany’s AFD

0:00This episode is brought to you by TickTack. Lay some and get your game on because the TickTack lineup just got a new teammate. Dr. Pepper TickTack. This new double threat puts two of your favorite flavors into one box of mince. And when two iconic flavors come together, the result can only be iconic. Score big. Try Dr. Pepper TickTack today. Hi and welcome to Ones and twos FPs, economics podcast every week. We take a couple data points to use them to try to explain the world. I'm Cameron of Audi FPs deputy editor with you in Berlin, Germany, joining us as always as FPs economics columnists and Columbia University professor Adam twos in New York. Hi Adam. Hi, Kevin. So two segments for you all today in the second half of the show. We're going to be talking about the historian Eric Hobb's bomb. A new biography of about him has just been released.

1:00So stick around to hear about his perspective on history and also on economics. But first, another data point that is 43.8. That is the share of the vote that the far right alternative foot, Deutschland party received this past weekend in the regional elections in the state of Saxony, unheard in Germany. Jubilation at the alternative for Germany party in a tight election that could change the face of German politics. If our right AFD party has sent shockwaves across Germany and the world by surging to a landslide victory in the state election in Saxony. For the first time since the end of World War II, a far right party could be a whisker away from coming to power in a state in Germany. The AFD or alternative for Germany in English has come out the strongest. Now Saxony unheard is one of the smaller German states, only in population of two million people.

2:02It's in Eastern Germany. But the fact that the AFD won such a large share of the vote, nearly winning a majority in the parliament in that state has been a veritable earthquake in German politics. It's been a historical event in the basic sense that a far right party has not won a majority in any German state since the Second World War. And yeah, in an even deeper sense, this is a constitutional challenge to the identity and the politics of the post-war German state. And its sense of itself, its sense of itself as a liberal constitutional order, the AFD does not think of itself as a party devoted to liberal democracy. And so yeah, one will soon know whether they will be in charge of the state government, but the implications for Germany in either case are profound.

3:02And yeah, Adam, to start off with, just to describe the AFD's program for Saxony unhired, the states in Germany do have a lot of power in terms of determining policies across a number of major portfolios from security, the education, the culture. So yeah, what exactly was the AFD's proposed program for the state and what was that platform exactly? Yeah, just to underline my agreement with you that this is something of an earthquake. It is a small state, it is in East Germany. But this is sort of, I don't know, it has the force of a chronicle of a deathful toll or something. Like we've seen this coming, and there has been a sort of sense of disbelief that this could actually happen, and now it has. And that in and of itself, I think the sort of sobering up from the realization that maybe people were just trying not to believe in the possibility of this is significant.

4:02It's worth saying that the AFD has many faces, and your question points us to the most respectable face of the AFD. So it's worth untillining also that the AFD has many regional branches, and this one in particular, Saxony Unhild has been labeled by the Fafassenstadt, so the German agency that's responsible for protecting the German constitution, the Germans have a very militant conception, West Germany developed this conception of the militant defense of the Constitution. So they're not afraid to label people as enemies of the Constitution, and the AFD in Saxony Unhild has been labeled as rest extreme, so right extremist. And you only have to go on Twitter or YouTube or your favorite social media channel to see videos of AFD in Saxony Unhild, which show it as a party of skinhead thugs of people blaring out openly racist, rap songs using the N word. It's a dirty party amongst the people elected to Parliament include well-known, far-right activists, porn producers, people with criminal records.

5:11It's playing at the dirty end of German society, but when you look online and you look at its party program, it's extraordinary. I mean, it's really night and day contrast, so if you look online and want to take the time reading their program, it would be, I would describe it as deeply dry conservative in terms of the old distinctions within British politics, wets and dries. This is a dry conservative version of German history and German politics. It's not populist, it's not plebeian, it's not magar. It isn't the crazy stuff that was coming out of Homeland Security in the US with super macho, powered up images of men defending the nation against alien invaders. The language is there, but the iconography, the style is very, very different. It reminds me of the tone. I can't help thinking of conservative high school teachers that I knew as a kid in West Germany.

6:16It's very sort of Gimnazial Professor sort of a lecture about restoring the core values of German national culture. So the argument is basically that the establishment parties are selling Germany out through climate policy, through migration policy, through a history of history, which is rejecting Germany's own history, through migration, which is of course welcoming above all Muslim. Men who undermine the basic cultural values of German society. And so the program is a sort of point by point effort and it says we're not even going to accuse mainstream parties of willfully trying to destroy the German nation. That will be polemics. What we're going to argue is somehow something's culturally wrong with them. They're victims of a declineist degenerate culture. And so therefore the project of the AFD starting in this first state, which we hope to govern, will be to restore the foundations of a national culture on the basis of which then you can actually have a reasonable conversation about politics.

7:20It's very multi-layered. They've had some intellectuals at work on this program. If you dig into the AFD podcast YouTube scene, you'll see there are people talking about Gramsci and Germany. It's about that. And then they have a hundred day program for their first hundred days in office, which is really pure culture war. It is immediate deportations as soon as we can get them organized. It is cutting funding for public broadcasting because they're systematically biased against us. It is re-evaluating the priorities of Saxon and Ann Halt's government. So part of Saxon and Ann Halt's claim to fame is it was home to one part of the Bauhaus modernist movement of Myanmar, Germany. And they want to replace a national state level program, which was called Think Modern, and modern Dengong by a program called Deutsche Dengong. Think German, which will involve raising the German flag outside schools and other public buildings, which in the US would be completely normal in Germany.

8:24And then it also includes things like a truth commission on the Covid era, which panders to another of the slightly more bonkers and unsavory elements of the AFD constituent, which is Covid skepticism. So it's a very weird amalgam of different policies, very little that actually amounts to anything serious on the socio-economic side. That's interesting. Yeah, because there has been a lot of discussion of the economic grievances that may have led to the rise of the AFD's popularity, Saxony and Halt. Just as an example, there are other states where the AFD is very popular, but this is one of the poor parts of Germany. It is a kind of classic left behind region of former Eastern Germany. So there is a lot of talk of the AFD's material policies to the extent that they exist. I mean, I was reading the program about, you know, again, maybe a marginal policy, but a discussion of cutting fees for daycare centers, right?

9:31I mean, that would then benefit families. Or, yeah, so other kinds of like marginal economic benefits along those lines. But I guess is it fair to say that this identitarian aspect of the party, this kind of rejection of liberal politics as Germany previously understood it with its sort of strenuous commitment to protecting minorities of all kinds and proceduralism. Is it that rejection that is sort of more important for its success? Yeah, I mean, on the point of family policy, one area where they do actually advocate for more government spending is in support of families with kids. But anyone who's ever had kids knows that having a kid is not a recipe for improving your family's real income standing, right? So like, and encouraging their average voter base, which in fact is lower income, self-identified working class, in many case people who identify as having financial problems. And the courage particularly that group to have more kids is like, that's not a strategy for improving people average welfare, right?

10:37So there's a real paradox here, which is that the data are quite unambiguous, the AFD voting. And this is true of far-right parties across Europe in the current moment. So the AFD voting is associated with self-identified working class status and people with who self-identifies having financial difficulties and it tends to correlate with areas of lower income. So within Saxon and Halt itself, like the Tony fancy parts of cities like Hala voted solidly for the green party, which is the main cultural antagonist of the AFD. The established parties, SPD, CDU, it's the greens that they're really after, the true kind of upper-middle class educated, ecologically-minded party that are fighting against. And so there is a really strong association between various types of measure of social disadvantage and AFD voting. And when you poll people who voted AFD whether they have economic worries, they'll tell you they have economic worries.

11:37But when you ask them why they voted AFD, not what their general view of problems is in the world, but why they specifically voted the party, they don't mention redistribution as their main reason, right? They mention dealing with foreigners, dealing with criminality and establishing security, Sisha Hight, which in Germany really doesn't have the connotation of social security in the United States, right? So they vote for the party because they think it's going to deliver a crack down on foreigners and going to restore some sort of sense of national pride. And he's basically going to put two fingers up to the establishment that they identify as having sold them out. And if you look at the AFD's program, no one with two brain cells who had any idea of what was going on at all would vote for the AFD instrumentally, so as to obtain from the AFD concrete material benefits. The AFD is more austere, more committed to the debt break, more committed to slashing public spending, more committed to reducing government debt than any party in the political spectrum.

12:41So it's to the right of the Autobahn liberal FDP that caused so much trouble in the previous government in Germany, that to the right of the CDU. And if you will wanting to vote for a party that would do redistribution that would promise you targeted welfare programs or even general welfare programs, of course there are delinquent the SPD who stand for that kind of policy. And voters did to a certain extent support delinquent but their social democrats support is crashed. So it just doesn't seem to me that you can construct a plausible hypothesis that this vote for the AFD is motivated instrumentally by the expectation that increasing the AFD's power. Certainly, if you think of them being a government is going to deliver is going to deliver outcomes. You might say that voters are playing five-dimensional chess in which they vote for the AFD as a protest vote and then expect the conventional parties to respond by playing the welfare social security card.

13:43But I just think that's an implausible construction of what's going on here. So it's a truly complicated messy kind of conjuncture which is after all not entirely unfamiliar from the United States as well. I mean we see similar patterns in the US. And one way of reading this is perspective. In other words, this isn't just about current misery, it's about anxiety about the future. And those fears about the future are projected onto foreigners and the AFD's promised deal with that problem quote unquote, then becomes your kind of substitute for a social policy. But I'm just finding it very difficult to reconcile the data and what we're seeing with any simple interpretation that way. Also, it's worth conveying to our audience which maybe hasn't spent a lot of time in East Germany, that though these are left behind regions, they're not left behind like chunks of the outback of Florida or Louisiana or Michigan where there's no clean water that you can drink.

14:51So I'm not talking about that level of deprivation. These are rough parts of the world, though doubt they have relatively higher levels of unemployment. But the overall structure of the most dangerous thing going on there are right wing thugs. The level of deprivation here is relative. It's real, it's experienced as real and also memories of the GDR are in the past now right the vast majority of their electric which is middle aged and young have no real adult memories of the GDR. And if you look at the age profile of the voters, it's actually older people who tend to vote against them. It's very interesting in Germany. The age profile of voters is quite different from that say of the US where we see a monotonous increase in Republican voting with age in Germany, the core constituency of the social Democrats, pensioners. And in East Germany, older people tend to vote against the AFD.

15:52Yeah, in terms of its connectedness to the rest of the country, it would be easy enough for anyone in Berlin to get on a regional train right that that heads directly to the state and you know the most popular regional train in Berlin as one of its terminal stops in Magdeborg, the capital of this particular state. So it is in fact very much connected in terms of its being networked with the rest of the country. I guess in terms of the material policies, I suppose it would only be fair to say that they also do emphasize wanting to cut aid to Ukraine as a material policy and redistributing the aid from Ukraine to German citizens. And of course one can't do that from the state house of Magdeborg and Saxony Unhide, that's a national policy that the state only has very indirect control over. But it is, I guess some again an indirect material policy, but yeah, certainly their emphasis otherwise is on this kind of emotional politics that is focused on identity and that gets expressed in terms of you know, re-migrating immigrants that are in the state forcing them to the return to their original home countries.

17:02For example, or emphasizing German identity in schools and refocusing historical education on pre 20th century German identity. This is something that they will have control over in the state and redistributing cultural funds to you know sort of properly German national cultural institutions for whatever that that could mean. It's worth it's worth underlining isn't it this distinctive profile of xenophobia and racism in the AFD which do it American audience. Will be different because anti black racism for obvious reasons is not essential. It's there emphatically and in really grotesque forms, but it's not the central motivator. The most manifest version is Islamophobia and the AFD owes its surge in popularity above all to the refugee crisis in Europe of 2015 and thus you know the perceived betrayal of German national interest by then chance langler Merkel who was supposedly of the right and from East Germany. And nevertheless pursued what is called like an open door policy. And then exactly as you quite rightly emphasize there is this in some ways surprising degree of resentment against the latest ways of refugees to come to Germany who are you know as white and blonde as you could possibly ask for.

18:16But they're from Ukraine and they are victims after all of a war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine and yet in the AFD's construction of recent political history. That is not seen in the common sense of the way that you might expect of these people just seen as being as victims but rather Berlin and the rest of the west is accused of essentially a policy of war mongering. This is a very kind of incoherent logic here. This isn't a coherent leftist critique of NATO or something like that. But there is a strong desire to push back against the standard narrative of the war as one in which Germany should squarely align with Ukraine against Russia and Ukrainian refugees are seen as as it representative of this misalignment of German policy. And if you look at the disposable element of German government funding, they're not wrong to say that that was a very large element of what remains a large element of what the German government has to freely spend beyond entitlements. But of course, as a share of the overall budget is relatively small. But this is one of the areas where they would want to redistribute.

19:22Yeah, and it does seem like the reason all of these ideas, you know, I almost hesitate to call them coherent policies, but these ideas stir up emotions as you were pointing out, I think because they are manifestly rejecting the parties of the system as it existed before. I mean, they're manifestly not treating everyone equally, manifestly not giving everyone the same legal rights. I should also add one other specific policy is that like new immigrants or refugees would be taught, their children would be taught in separate classrooms, the very sort of basic American definition of, you know, separate, but equal isn't equal is something that they have to really wants to pursue in earnest. And for me, I guess this raises a more general question because the emotion is real. It may be the center of the party's appeal. So what kind of lessons could progressive forces learn from this? I mean, can the left does it have the capacity to create emotional affective politics of this kind without rejecting the system they are a part of.

20:33And, you know, if not, does that kind of imply the progressive forces are actually sort of co-opted by the system that they preserve during crisis, whether it's the financial crisis, the euro crisis, COVID, all of these crises, progressive forces have, you know, been cooperative and useful in addressing and solving and maintaining the system. But is this ultimately cutting off this ability to create a kind of affective politics that they have these as pursued? I mean, this is a really fundamental question to which I don't know a simple answer and I'm not sure that anyone does accept that this has always been the argument after all of anyone from the true left wing, the collaborationist management of the co management of the system ultimately leaves you unable to address the profound grievances of populations of voters of classes that feel quite rightly that they are systematically victimized by the existing system. And that's one of the reasons why some people say that the idea of holding the AFD out of power is misguided because the easiest way if you like to contaminate them too with the appropriate of running the system is to give them a chance to try and run it.

21:46But thinking about this logic, I realized something from a different domain from New York City that I hadn't really fully understood before I think in these terms. But if you think about the way that Mamdani, you know, has emerged as this highly charismatic figure representative of a different kind of politics, he does this lazy sharp focus on cost of living issues, rental costs, childcare, public transport. But then he combined it with a powerful non-establishment value statement, which is above all anchored in his open speech and Frank speech about Gaza. And I hadn't really quite thought through the logic of that in electoral terms, but thinking about what the AFD does and the way in which they almost welcome their stigmatization by the mainstream, because it helps to establish their plausibility, their credibility, it's a commitment device. If you're willing to speak in a racist way and get labeled a racist, you have a kind of authenticity.

22:49And I think something quite similar is in play right now in the American left around Gaza. If you are willing to take on the Democratic Party establishment on this issue and challenge America's alignment with Israel and especially Israel's current government. And to speak frankly about the violence and the horror being inflicted on the Palestinian population. And you're willing to take the knocks for doing that. It establishes this bonafide is that nothing else really can. You can offer cheap childcare as much as you like, but it's the combination of the two things, especially of course in demographics and electrics like that of New York, which is massively diverse, where you're actually speaking to populations for whom this really means something, which is true also of the AFD's appear. The AFD's appeal to, you know, to be a dodge white Germans in East Germany. This gives you this, this gives you this element of credibility. And people like Jeremy Corbyn had it in the UK. And I think this move and it's clearly explosive. It's potentially dangerous. It can backfire. And of course, in the case of the AFD, it's absolutely obnoxious.

23:55But it just analytically speaking, it gives a second dimension or a third dimension to your politics. The, that is quite crucial. And to my mind, I mean, what's then interesting is to see how that particular issue is played out in Germany. And the linker, the Sarevagan Kness party of both reposition themselves on Israel, then it hasn't worked terribly much to the advantage. And you wouldn't expect it to in a place like Saxon and Berlin. It might have a rather different kind of, well, we know it already is. It's causing huge eruptions in Berlin politics. So I think that that's my kind of provisional thinking on this at this point. Yeah. I mean, all of this kind of reminds me of the think of Francis Fukuyama and his idea of the end of history and the era of the end of history that we entered. And so, basically, that's the center of many debates about whether that's an accurate description or not. But it does strike me that how we were earlier just talking about the way that material policies were relatively absent from the campaign day if you ran.

25:03Material policies themselves have become more administrative questions, perhaps, that are something that that the system has absorbed in that administrative framework. And that has left, I guess, backward looking emotional politics about identity as perhaps a greater source of appeal than future oriented politics, which are maybe essentially more material. But have we been robbed of that potential? Maybe because of this end of history era that we've entered. I mean, fairness to the AFT. I can't believe I'm saying that. But in fairness to the AFT, they, of course, would say, no, no, no, no, can you got this completely wrong way around? We're the people who believe in the future because we're the people who believe in the future of the German nation, the German families. We want more kids. We want more German kids. We want less subversion of German culture and German society by foreigners. We also believe in a dynamic energy policy. We're against all this, you know, non-ridiculous climate politics. And we're interested in the past because we believe without a past the country can't have a future.

26:08And so, you know, what you're describing is that kind of liberal consensus is in fact a doomsday mechanism that will ultimately lead to the destruction of German society. It just doesn't know it. It'll be a quiet, you know, and these are ties kind of euthanasia of the German nation. And so, of course, in the first instance, we can't do material policy because we're not in power yet and be deeper down the reason why the establishment parties have been following these self-destructive policies in the name of the end of history, which is actually genuinely the end of German history, is their culture is wrong. So we have to fix the culture first. That is how I understand the position of the Saxon-Anhalte program. I mean, that's tortured and it's their particular version of reality. But I think that will be their response. Thinking more generally, I think this is a very interesting question. And it's certainly true, I think that mainstream parties in Germany are having a really hard problem, a hard time with this. The CDU, nor the SPD, I think, can credibly represent. And their electric base is aging.

27:12And so if you think around the world, who else is really playing this big futures game, well, the obvious person to look at is, you know, the Elon Musk wing of Maga, the Millay Musk wing of Maga, which has a vision of the future, but it's a kind of, you know, ready or not, terrifying kind of, you know, break things and innovate quickly, it kind of a vision. And the other people are, of course, the CPC and China, the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, which, which resolutely believes in a national future, totally would not accept the end of history framing, even though, of course, it projects its own dominance in China into the endless future. So at that level, the question has been answered, but the challenge is facing the Communist Party, an endlessly new and endlessly have to be reinvented. And it doesn't believe that his power is due to the permanence of institutions, its power is due to its willingness to continuously innovate answers to new problems.

28:14So I would think of, I would, I think your question is a really powerful one, how we lost the future is a central issue. It was after all also how say the abundance, but the effort to try and reinvent the democratic party around the agenda. That's how that book starts, it's how did we lose, how did we lose the future? It's answer, I think it's quite banal, but that is the question it poses. And I would see the AFD is actually in their own terms answering this question, saying yes, you don't understand you liberals, what it's going to take to give us a future. We're the only people who are willing to actually say that out loud. Yeah, I guess that's sort of solving Fukuyama by way of like Heidegger, sort of something like that. Yeah, returning to ones of roots as the only possible salvation towards the future, which is a scary idea I think. But I guess a coherent one, you're right, fair to say, for all his fault Heidegger was coherent I think. But otherwise, yeah, I guess it does strike me in hearing your answer there that there is maybe something arbitrary about the tech overlords being associated with conservative forces.

29:25There is some alternative way that this could have developed or maybe still will develop in which the kind of tech forces become somehow associated with progressives. I guess what seems to me, certainly the cases that whatever progressive answer gets developed, there's going to have to be someone with a kind of like a foot outside the system to motivate some emotions behind these politics. Which is, which is after all Elon Musk understands right I mean he backed the AFT and he backed the AFT I think precisely because in his own world that step outside what are they call it blue pill I can't remember the pills but like you know you have to somehow attain access to a different view of the world to really understand what's going on. Yeah, that's a powerful, it's a powerful ploy. Well, I think that was pretty interesting discussion all from the spinning off the little state of Saxony on HUD but yeah, the issues here profound we should take a break though but we'll be back in a second to talk about Eric Hoppsfall.

30:28This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. So if you could wake up tomorrow and be better at one thing, what would it be? In my case, it would probably be getting better at finding time to exercise. I'm any given day, I feel torn between bringing my kids somewhere fixing dinner, doing work for foreign policy. What do I tend to let slip? Yeah, taking a jog or getting to an exercise class. Now you'll notice I said getting better at finding that time, you know on the show we like to talk about data measuring things but better is a feeling and it's defined by you and for BetterHelp it's a better help therapist who really gets you. It's a focus on global emotional well-being with thousands of therapists and millions of members in over 100 countries.

31:35It's progress and it's getting better at finding that time to take a jog. So sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash ones twos to O O Z E that's better help H L P dot com slash ones twos. This episode is brought to you by TicTac. Lay some and get your game on because the TicTac lineup just got a new teammate. Dr Pepper TicTac, this new double threat puts two of your favorite flavors into one box of mince and when two iconic flavors come together, the result can only be iconic. Score big, try Dr Pepper TicTac today. Welcome back. Our next data point is 30. That is the estimated number of books that Eric Hobbsbomb, the British historian, published over the course of his very long life.

32:36Eric Hobbsbomb lived from 1917 to 2012, dying at the age of 95 years old. He was a prolific historian writing about wide sweeps of history and was also famous for being an avowed Marxist throughout his life as well. This particular conversation is occasioned by the recent publication of a new biography written by Emil Chabal, the age of Hobbsbomb is the title of that book. But yeah, we thought we would dig into Hobbsbomb's life and career. And as we usually do when we discuss thinkers, Adam, I thought we could start by describing Hobbsbomb's biography and how that may have affected his thinking on history and economics. He is a fascinating character in that he comes from a world which to us now seems exotic and remote and then becomes a figure that I knew around the conventional academic scene in London in the 1990s, 2000s.

33:44So he is a kind of living link between the world of colonial or imperial era Egypt where he was born in the summer of 1917 just shortly before the Russian Revolution or the Bolsheviksija power in Petrograd. He comes from a mixed Russo Polish Jewish family. So his father was Russo Polish, his mother was Austrian, his parents meet, he is born in Egypt. He does actually have an North African phase briefly in his academic career which he doesn't really ever pursue. But what really does happen is they move to Vienna where he spends his early childhood becomes a fluent German speaker then as his family's immediate, his core family's material circumstances collapse, his father dies early, his mother dies shortly afterwards. He is taken in by relations who are in Berlin so he moves from Vienna to Berlin, he is in Berlin in the early 1930s and then he moves on to school in London, high school in London and from there to kings in Cambridge.

34:54And from there into a really quite mainstream English and not British English academic career that is centered on really Cambridge, London, the Communist Party of Great Britain because he's not just a Marxist, it's really important to emphasize that the thing about Hobbesburg is that he's a communist. So he remains in the British Communist Party for as long as there is a British Communist Party. So after the traumas of the 56 notably the suppression of the Hungarian uprising after the revelations about Stalin. So he's much more like a French intellectual than he is like his British counterparts. So he's very important to emphasize. But then he becomes he's blocked from having a career in Oxbridge, the heart of the system which I think left a quite permanent resentment, he's based at Berkbeck London, which is the night school adult education wing of the London University system becomes a very high status college within the London University system, spends his more or less his entire career there with increasing global celebrity he's traveling all over the world and he builds relationships above all in France and Italy.

36:01So at the one hand he comes from this world of Vyma Germany and the N.O. and on the other hand he becomes somebody I knew from seminars in London. Other people I know are much much much closer to him, Mark Mazar and my colleague at Columbia was his colleague at Berkbeck and also culturally I think close to the Hobbesburg and then I could ever claim to be. So then you ask about what is the influence of that on his thinking. His focus on economics first of all because history like he was so much that history that's a sort of disentangle and he writes about this is quite complicated but what does it do to his thinking about economics and I think I mean he's not an economist he's really a historian it's interesting that he like choose his history as a subject to study which after all in Cambridge in the 30s was incredibly honest. This is not where you would think you would go deeply conservative discipline which he amongst others helps to revolutionize and by the 50s 60s 70s British history has become a zone of radicalism in part both cause of his influence.

37:07But thinking about the economy I think what's really interesting is that he he grows up in a period of extreme crisis so he's interested all his life in in crises essentially seen through a Marxist lens and at Cambridge the there is biggest influences on him are Marxist intellectuals communist party intellectuals more restored in particular who's the leading figure of Marxist economics in Britain in Europe one of the leading figures in Europe is a Trinity college. And what I think is really interesting is the way in which this filters into Hobbes one thinking I mean he becomes famous for the books your rights about the 19th and the 20th centuries but one of the earliest the most influential articles that he writes or two articles appears in the journal past and present which he helps the co found in the 1950s which are actually on the earlier period of massive crisis in European history which before the 20th century was the early modern period and notably the 17th century. And if you think of Hobbes form of somebody who's a student of dog and dog is fundamentally concerned with the essential Marxist question of the transition so for medieval feudal economics to capitalism which someone like dog would locate at the end of the middle ages in the 13th 14th centuries where feudalism is beginning to disintegrate and something like a capitalist regime is uninstakably beginning to emerge in the 1500s the 14 the 1500s.

38:32Hobbes forms question is how did it take so long like why is it that the industrial revolution and fully fledged capitalism doesn't emerge until the late 18th and 19th centuries which will write about in his world famous you know age of revolution they've a revolution of capital age of empire sequence which all about the 19th century and the answer he gives in this series of profoundly influential articles from the 1950s so in the immediate aftermath of World War II he's thinking about this. In the midst of all of the crises within global politics he says that earlier epoch of crisis which was the 17th century with the last plague epidemic with climate change with the 30 years war the wars of religion this is a gear shift crisis in the development of global capitalism the relations of production the societal structures of Europe in that period of fundamentally out of sync with the underlying development of capitalism. Which was properly identified as happening at the end of the middle ages but we have centuries to account for and so this 17th century crisis which is his first truly influential historical intervention is an effort to make sense of that shift and that to me is where you see the emergence of Hobbes born was a truly powerful synthetic historian who is using Marx's framework to to phrase questions but is doing so also against the backdrop of his own experience.

40:01So the experience of crisis starting in World War I with the Russian Revolution with the upheavals in central Europe and out of that already in the early 50s so at a very early stage in his career is able to say well maybe what we're dealing with here is what then becomes known as the general crisis of the 17th century. If I was to write an intellectual biography of Hobbes born I think I would start there because that's where it that's where it already comes together and we see his his effort to think crisis as this recurring disastrous element of modern history out of which however also positive developments can come so wrestling with a question of the dialectic really. Yeah I mean Hobbes born goes on to write hugely popular series on the history of the modern world you know the first three volumes cover 1789 to 1914 those three books are the age of revolution the age of capital the age of empire so what exactly in that series in what sense is Hobbes born of a special era.

41:16So I mean I think it's quite manifest and if you're willing to sort of just you know read what he says it becomes I think starkly clear so first of all throughout his life he's interested in what Marxist theoreticians will call the relationship between base and so on the way he's going to be able to do that. I mean I think it's it's quite manifest and if you're willing to sort of just you know read what he says it becomes I think starkly clear so first of all throughout his life he's interested in what Marxist theoreticians will call the relationship between base and superstructure so by base we mean the forces of production and by superstructure we mean the relations or culture and political institutions pal on top of that and Hobbes born like so many other intellectuals of the 1930s you know I've been a bit obsessed with Thomas Mann look at people like that. That is first and foremost not a labor historian or economic historian he's a cultural historian he's actually interested in the literature so he's fundamentally concerned however with this this dialectic this relationship between the development of culture and the development of broader material forces in society and there's a double distinctively beyond that general framing which is a Marxist framing there are two further pointed moves

42:29which is his willingness to really exclude nothing from the superstructure so it is a move to the totality if you read Hobbes books part of their charm is you never know where he's going to go next it could be popular culture one of his big break out books was jazz he wasn't to my mind a great critic of jazz he was deeply conservative in his taste but nevertheless he was concerned with popular culture and its commercial aspects so this claim to the totality Lukash will say that the genuine core of the Marxist method is that it's a method that describes totality Jameson and famous literary critics in the Marxist mode will recuperate this claim and expand it in the later 20th century and those people are more associated with you know outlets like the new life review which Hobbes was at a distance from from their founding because he was closer to the to the communist party that was comfortable for those people so that's one element so it's the claim to understand the totality through a relationship between base and struper structure between economy society and culture and the third element which marks in very general terms his approach as Marxist is the way he understands the base so the economy

43:41which is that he was a man that focused on production and labor right so the again the distinctive Marxist approach to the economy is not to look at commerce or finance as the principal drivers this is where for instance Hobbes born differs from another famous contemporary the French historian Brudel who has an understanding of development of capitalism that's much more centered on markets Adam Smith what go in a similar direction but coming out of the factory capitalism of the 19th century Marx is focused above all on the mystery of what happens within the site of production and the labor process which generates the surplus value and a Hobbes born is completely true to this tradition in that a lot of his social historical work was about the labor process was about working men laboring men and again and again in your work you in his work you see him moving to the site of production this is the general frame of what makes him a Marxist. If you look at the books and the seat and the narrative they tell what's really striking is in fact how closely he cleaves not just to a Marxist construction of history but to a Leninist construction of history right so he distinguishes between the failed revolution or epoch of the middle century the installation of capital's dominance in the kind of middle third

44:59and then the age of imperialism an empire that comes at the end and this is of course where Lenin is essentially saying that there need to be fundamental innovations in Marxist thinking about the world because otherwise you can't account for the new age in which states in which governments are really central and which will lead to the catastrophe of world more one. And you know in his work say on the British working class that Hobbes born is for some people this is embarrassing I mean he's a straight down the line defender of Lenin's theory of the labor aristocracy Hobbes born in CIS he doesn't have quite the same political implications that Lenin believes in but if you read the if you read the stuff at face value what Hobbes born is is a loyal footsolder of the CPGB and in affirming that there is a labor aristocracy in other words a slice of the British working class that has been born in the past. And what's what's really fascinating is to see what then happens in the final work of this sequence which there's a trilogy about the 19th century and then there's this other book the age of extremes which many listeners may know about the 20th century and would always struck me about that is that here his Marxist framework always Marxian framework really just breaks down and it isn't because the economy doesn't matter but that the

46:17ordering of the logic the causal logic is just so deeply problematic in the 20th century. So the book is driven not by productive forces but by the means of violence it's driven by the book starts with an extraordinary powerful kind of enumeration of the violence of the 20th century and then things followed from that which is of course not the Marxian story it again is much closer to a Leninist story actually it's exactly the kind of story that Lenin will car and began to put together in World War One. Because what they're pointing to is the catastrophic deal, realment of 19th century historical prophecy by violence and Hobbes born in some sense reflects that but unlike you know more serious theoreticians in the Western Marxist tradition of the 20th century he never really tangles with the deep implications for understanding the dialect at the philosophy of history that might follow from that he's no adorno he's no adorno he's no Frankfurt school guy he avoids the

47:17real abyss that people like Walter Benjamin will see deriving from that insight about the role of violence and the state the possibility of barbarism ultimately as the trajectory of global development that I think is quite alien to Hobbes born when he doesn't have much he doesn't have much connection with that Western Marxist scene. Yeah I guess it's important to emphasize that last volume age of extremes was published after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Hobbes bomb nevertheless maintained his connection to communism and maintain that kind of general framework in addressing the 20th century. Even to the point I think interestingly of like as you're suggesting I'm not not focusing on the holocaust as as a sort of central fact of World War II and it seems inevitable to I guess ask about Hobbes bombs allegiance to communism in the way he maintained it throughout his life and I guess the question that comes to mind is what function did this communist ideal play for him politically we what accounts for

48:32him maintaining that allegiance in an intellectual sense and did this reveal a kind of moral blind spot in his in his work. Yeah I mean the those people who are interested there's an extraordinary BBC interview with the Canadian liberal historian a political thought Michael Ignacio predecessor of Mark Carney actually in the in the Canadian political scene less politically successful in Carney. Who puts hotsporn on the spot and challenges him about his adherence to the CPGB and a lot of people are kind of outraged by by Hobbes bombs response who are because he refuses to flinch from the conclusion that at the time he was willing to contemplate huge sacrifices the killing and millions of people for the purpose of making a better world. And refuses to sort of simply distance himself from this politics so the very least you can say is that there's an honesty there and there's a kind of there's a kind of bravery a kind of courage in the face of conventional moral opinion which of course would condemn this.

49:41I think it's important to understand what the logic is here and I think there's an element when Ignacio just doesn't get what Hobbes ball is saying and it goes back to this question of the future and it originates in the problem of World War I and the dead. And the disaster of the 20th century that originates in the violence of World War I because what Hobbes will start by saying in response to Ignacio is why was I committed to the communist party he says you didn't have the option you see either there was going to be a future or there wasn't going to be a future and this the communist party was the only thing that offered an acceptable future. And that is a statement which only makes sense if you put yourself in the position of someone thinking the way that Lenin and Bukkarin and other people on the left thought about the world and the way it was developing in the wake of World War I in that the trajectory was not just holocaustal as it were towards the destruction of European jury but more comprehensively apocalyptic right that the entire trajectory entire positive trajectory of history.

50:47The 19th century had promised was going to be derailed and the only force that understood this and was going to yank the world willy nilly back in a more constructive direction was the global communist movement and those are the that's the scale on which this claim is being is being made right now and as hospital mean cis this is a true statement about his contemporary view and it's a historian statement about why people hold that kind of view. And is it moral or immoral to hold that kind of you. I think this is a moment where one might ask where the good historians are good moralist generally speaking good historians don't distinguish themselves by being good moralist because there's something inherently relativistic about the business of being a historian which involves you in trying to get inside the heads of other people and genuinely get inside the heads of other people and that makes moral certainty is quite difficult to maintain I think it's quite difficult to be a good historian if you have deep moral certainty is the thing you have to be willing to contemplate that shift.

51:47Hobbesmore adds then I think a much less satisfactory rationalization which is to say oh well yes of course the Stalinist regime is violent but then everyone was being violent at the time that doesn't that doesn't that doesn't work as an argument because in fact hands down by a huge margin the Soviet regime in the 30s was the most violent like the Nazi regime doesn't even get going until the 1940s in terms of really grand murder. So that's I think a bad claim it makes sense only if you start from this Lenin's perspective which is that the catastrophe of World War One threatening the derailment of all positive progress legitimizes radical action. And then you have to ask of course okay if there are all these excuses that can be made for Hobbesborm at the time like why does he remain faithful to the party in the 1950s when the repression well either horrors of the Stalinist period are revealed in the Krushchev speech and then the Soviet regime. And then the Soviet Union represses the uprising in Hungary. And I think what then comes to the fund the chaparral's biography is commencing I think very commencing on this point is that for Hobbesborm the communist party was a profound source of personal identity it was what anchored him as a migrant as a multiple displaced refugee across the terrains that he had moved across.

53:06And it's what anchored him in Britain but outside Britain at the same time. And so to leave the party for him would not just have been a choice of political position and moral positioning it was to lose his world because his world was never just British academia at least in his own mind his world was always the global movement. And that global movement has a value in its own right and again you could you could claim and I think following on the original logic of his positioning you know given the trajectory of global capitalism the only thing that can answer it with any hope of success is a global movement. And this is the pessimism of the end of the age of extremes if if capitalism is faced only by you know nation states doing social democracy they don't have a chance. But a global movement anchored in a powerhouse like the Soviet Union whatever the toxicity of the Soviet Union's politics creates a counterweight to which there is no alternative right it's like a religion it's like a Christian opting for the Catholic church because it's the one that actually takes this project of global of global religiosity.

54:17And I think for him that is what the communist party did and and in a very real sense in other words he was never just the British academic with the leftist disposition he wasn't a Christopher Hill he wasn't an epitomps and both of whom had deep strands of notably Thompson of a kind of little local patriotism. He was a he was a Marxist intellectual on the on the scale at least of Europe and then in his later career he was a huge celebrity of Latin America and let's be in Brazil all over the world and I think that that key to understanding what for him the stakes were communist party membership. Yeah I did watch that interview with Michael Ignati of that you mentioned and it is a profound response that Hobbes bomb gives about the absence of any future as informing his commitment to communism you know in his youth I think he was also describing it but that did also make me think about what we discussed about Fukuyama in the first segment here in the in the sense that the absence of a future.

55:20Could also be defined in terms of yeah the end of history in the sense of the future becoming simply subject to kind of administrative or bureaucratic logic as being its own absence of a future orientation that yeah may have also been terrifying in its own way even if that's not what I was meant. Obviously in that sort of early 20th century apocalyptic sense but there is another way in which the absence of a future can be defined but yeah that that also I guess reminds me that Hobbes bomb also wrote a lot about nationalism and to some extent was a theorist about nationalism and talked about how nationalism is an invented tradition and I'm curious whether that analysis reveals its own kind of blind spot obviously now we are in a moment where we are in a sense of the same way. Where many nationalist parties are on the rise where the FD among others are beginning to take power in places where they were not previously in power so did Hobbes bomb not take nationalism seriously enough as a social and political force ultimately.

56:23I do I find that puzzling claim I mean I think he understood it as something I mean given his background this is hardly unsurprising as a force whose emergence has to be explained right. It can't just be taken for granted that doesn't believe that nations are nations because nations are nations and always have been nations right. That needs them therefore to be historicized and explained and it's the third or the fourth you know genuinely creative phase this six phase of Hobbes bomb career and it had a huge impact well beyond the left Marxist historiographical ghetto all the best selling global survey type writing in you know in the beginning of the year. In in deeply academic ivory tower history this question of the construction of the nation the invention of tradition the generation of historical narrative in history as itself therefore a productive change so really paradoxical position where supposedly timeless things are manufactured in real time.

57:28This was this was a profoundly important idea and was one of Hobbes bomb contributions also to making sense of contemporary realities in Britain because one of the common diagnosis of Margaret that show after all was that in the 80s and 90s she was taking Britain back to Victorian values and Britain was re configuring itself as a site of heritage and the heritage industry and history was becoming a business effectively one from which Hobbes more often also brought it handsomely. And while he was doing was trying to understand the political logic that I mean both here and I have a deep attachment to King's college in Cambridge and you know one of the most iconic images of King's college is the chap older and the choir service the Carol service at Christmas and now it's easy to imagine that as being a timeless tradition that goes back to the men you know the late middle ages and what he pointed out was that entire logic of the self presentation of this medieval version of England was the product of BBC radio. In the early 20th century which created this tradition of the ritual reconnection to the deep historical past and so I think of this as a this is not a dismissal of that culture it's not this is that that's precisely the kind of you know base at the cost of the superstructure the reduction of the superstructure to base that Hobbes bomb consistently resisted throughout his entire career.

58:53But it's a insistence that one can't take nationalism at face value we have to understand what pressures what modern pressures generate these desperate clingy kind of recursion to the past and the essential idea was that the more history speeds up the more we should expect this kind of move. And so coming out of that generation that was deeply influenced by that phase of helps born but also Benedict Anderson Perry Anderson's brother who wrote this extraordinary book called Imagine Communities that's my way of understanding she's in ping as well like she's in ping is self evidently that this is the most obviously homophobia thing you could possibly do you have the largest most dramatic transformation of a human society in history and what do you do you reinvent tradition you reinvent. You know legacies of continuity you real bill continuity so it seems to me away precisely of actually understanding whether to take seriously or not but of understanding.

59:53Logics of re-nationalization and the reassertion of imagined histories in moments of tumultuous change. Yeah point taken and fair enough I guess the question that I was wrestling with was whether he also then theorized the way of overcoming that nationalism which would seem to me in like a sense of Marxist sense one would have to overcome these nationalist commitments at some point whether I guess he completely synthesized all these thoughts into a single framework obviously maybe that's more than can be asked of anyone writer but clearly he. Captivated readers across the world with his many books I can recommend the biography that just came out age of Hobbes bomb but otherwise we will be back in a week with other data points. One's and twos is written and edited by Adam and me and produced by Claudia Tady the show is made possible through the support of foreign policy readers and ones and twos listeners as always we love getting listener feedback you can leave voice messages on the ones and twos homepage on foreign policy dot com or email us that's podcasts at foreign policy dot com or you can tweet us that's at ones and twos.

1:01:10I'm Cameron Abadi thank you very much for listening and we'll be back in your feed next week. The promises and perils of artificial intelligence are mythic if we keep developing these more and more powerful systems do we just have to sort of absorb this as a civilization this enormous this production like what are we going to do from foreign policy in collaboration with the future of life institute a new podcast where global leaders ask AI experts urgent questions about this transformative technology and how we can govern it together listen to pro human governing the global AI revolution wherever you get your podcasts.