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About this talk

Hobsbawm Memorial Lecture. As a Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm believed that the revolution led by the proletariat would resolve the dialectic produced by capital, and end the historical process of inevitable revolution. However, in the last two decades of his life the collapse of the Soviet Union and communist states saw a new philosophy of the 'end of history', propagated by the neoliberal economist Francis Fukuyama: with the defeat of communism, the organisation of political life around liberal democracy was now established and could not be challenged in the future. History has had the last laugh on that, but three decades later a new 'end of history' is on the horizon. The rise of Artificial Intelligence, the assault on reading and thought independent of computation, and on the other hand the production of endless deepfakes all challenge the future of a profession which relies on human subjects bringing a critical perspective to more-or-less reliable evidence. On a third hand, the death of scientific modes of historical analysis in the Marxist and liberal traditions has gone hand in hand with political attacks on the historical discipline itself. This lecture places this juncture of crisis within the historical frame of the last three decades. The expansion of mass inequalities, on national and global levels, has shaped a frame in which institutionalised history is inevitably now deemed a threat to the consolidation of these economic 'gains' in an era of reimperialisms of all kinds. The lecture will be followed by a reception for all attendees.

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