ABSTRACT
After glancing at Revel's account of this French fencing, we shall see that the same parry and thrust are being deployed in English over communism's corpse, notably in the work of the veteran historian Eric Hobsbawm. The book was Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes which was enjoying some success in Britain and the United States and in numerous translations elsewhere, but which Parisian publishers en bloc rejected as unsellable in a country abreacting from its long infatuation with Stalinism. We need not rely on that book to show Hobsbawm as the very paragon of a mourner at communism's funeral, because he has recently produced another and up-to-the-minute exercise in apologetics, On the Edge of the New Century. Eric Hobsbawm was still arguing in 1990, when ethno-nationalism was about to rend the Soviet empire and the independent Balkans, that nations and nationalism were about to disappear.
