Interview: Eric Hobsbawm

Yesterday The Guardian carried this interesting interview with Eric Hobsbawm who, in addition to being an influential historian remains a pretty unrepentant Marxist. At the very end he offers this basic diagnosis of our contemporary situation:

"What I'm saying now is that the basic problems of the 21st century would require solutions that neither the pure market, nor pure liberal democracy can adequately deal with. And to that extent, a different combination, a different mix of public and private, of state action and control and freedom would have to be worked out. . . . What you will call that, I don't know. But it may well no longer be capitalism, certainly not in the sense in which we have known it in this country and the United States."

My own thinking about politics and culture (starting with my doctoral thesis) owes a considerable amount to Hobsbawm's historical essays on the "invention of tradition" - a conception of historical events that converges surprisingly with the work of Thomas Schelling. I will add that Hobsbawm also served pseudonymously for many years as the jazz critic for the New Statesman in Great Britain. You can find his reflections on that part of his career here.

There is an interview with Margaret Atwood . . .

Margaret Atwood. Photograph © Lluis Gene / AFP / Getty.

. . . here at The Guardian. In the course of the conversation Atwood nicely notes the central role of creativity and imagination in both art and science. She seems to have a clear-eyed view of political leaders, but it is perplexing to think about the opposition she seems to see between environmentalism and political protections for humans.

"It's become a race against time and we are not doing well. The trouble with politicians [at events like the Copenhagen summit of 2009] is that no one wants to go first, go skinny dipping and take the plunge. Oh, and then you have people arguing about fatuous things like the environment and human rights. Go three days without water and you don't have any human right. Why? Because you're dead. Physics and chemistry are things you just can't negotiate with. These, . . . these are the laws of the physical world."

The opposition cannot be anywhere near that stark, and Atwood herself knows it. Here is her view of the environmental problem:

"We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet'; we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here."

Just so. And the "viable conditions" necessary for human flourishing include matters like robust, enforceable rights and principles, claims that people can make - that they can use - in the face of feckless or predatory political leaders or of exploitative, oppressive political-economic conditions. It seems to me that the task of implementing (institutionalizing) such claims requires just the same sorts of imagination and creativity. Only this time the domain is politics. The fix that Atwood rightly calls for is not, in other words, going to be technological in the narrow sense. We don't need to save "viable conditions," we need to create and sustain them.

There is an Interview with Judith Butler ...

... here at Guernica; and while I sometimes find Butler pretty opaque, I often find her astute as well.

Interviews with . . .

. . . writer Rebecca Solnit here . . . Larry Clark here . . . and a baker's half-dozen photographers here.

There is an interview with Jürgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas
(Ink & Watercolour on Paper, 2007)
© Terje Nicolaisen.

. . . here at The Financial Times. Unfortunately, the relative number of column inches devoted to the introductory profile of Habermas and the too-short interview that follows is way out of balance. Nonetheless, Habermas is smart and influential. The piece is worth reading.

BBC Interview ~ Sebastião Salgado

There is an interesting, longish audio interview with Salgado here at the BBC.