Windschuttle on Hobsbawm

There's a nice piece by the Australian, maverick historian Keith Windschuttle, on the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. Evidently, plenty of academics and politicians praised him on the news of his death on the 1st of October this year. The left were particularly fawning but some conservatives praised him, at least for his historical achievements. What raised the ire of some, however, was that he was not only an avowed Marxist, but he was also a supporter after word of the communist butchering of millions, in both the Soviet Union and China, got out.

Windschuttle is indignant on this, characterising Hobsbawm's historical work as little more than odes to Marxism dressed up as history. He was a slave to his ideology, his Marxist coloured glasses tainted everything he wrote:

"Once an historian adopts a model like this, his task is not all that difficult. He goes hunting for evidence to support the conclusion he has already decided. In newspapers and secondary sources he finds incidents and social trends, and interprets them within the same framework, thereby 'verifying' his model. Hobsbawm was able to write his 'great tetralogy' of European history because Marx had already given him its framework. He never had to study everything available on a topic and then comprehend it all within an original narrative. He simply took the theoretical colouring book provided by Marx, and filled it in. This is not how you should do history, and it is certainly not how you produce great history."

He also tells the story of the fascinating debate Hobsbawm lost on the benefits of the Industrial Revolution to working class wages.

"In what became one of the most gripping intellectual clashes of the Cold War, Hartwell crushed Hobsbawm completely, both in the way he conceptualised the question—it was quite implausible to argue that real wages fell, Hartwell argued, at a time when other indices showed rapid economic growth and rising labour productivity—and the wide range of data he produced to authenticate it. By 1968, Hobsbawm’s fellow Marxist historian E.P. Thompson, whose book The Making of the English Working Class devoted a chapter to the same debate, had withdrawn graciously in defeat: 'My comments on the exceedingly complex and developing research in demography are trivial: and the reader who wishes to inform himself on this, or the problems of health, housing, and urban growth, must on occasions turn to the work of those economic historians whose assumptions are, in this chapter, under criticism.' But Hobsbawm never found the courage or the decency to do the same. More recent analyses, especially by Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson in 1983, found that in the thirty-two years from 1819 to 1851, real wages in Britain actually doubled."

One last point Windschuttle makes is on the economic determinism of Leftism. One that continues to this day I might add (income inequality hurts the self-worth of the poor, crime and suicide bombing is caused by poverty and lack of jobs):

"Their position as wage earners purportedly determines how workers think, what they value and the kind of institutions they create; and their position as capitalists determines how employers think, what they value and the very different institutions they create. The notion that ideas might be autonomous, or even historically causative, is simply bourgeois naivety. Meanwhile, capitalist growth produces periodic crises and generates class conflicts that cripple the entire system."

But if economics determines the course of history then what explains the Marxist ideology? What economic situation caused Hobsbawm to adopt Marxism as opposed to some other ideological system