Public order in an age of violence: Eric Hobsbawm opens Birkbeck Lunchtime Lecture Series

Birkbeck is well-known for its provision of part-time undergraduate education to adult students. But it is also a centre of thriving intellectual activity, home to an extraordinary concentration of world-famous researchers and public intellectuals. The College aims to bring the benefit of this intellectual culture to a wider audience with the new Birkbeck Lunchtime Lecture Series, held in the heart of London and free to all comers.

Renowned historian and Birkbeck President, Eric Hobsbawm, launches the first series, on the theme of Violence, on 3 May, speaking on the rise of such phenomena as bullet-proof windows, crowd control specialists and the security guard sector.

“Two things have been happening,” says Professor Hobsbawm. “The first is the reversal of what Norbert Elias analysed in a work called ‘the process of civilisation’. This is the transformation of public behaviour in the West from the Middle Ages. It became less violent, more ‘polite’, more considerate, first within a restricted elite, then on a larger scale. No longer. We have got so used to such things as swearing in public and the public use of deliberately crude and offensive language, that it is hard to remember how comparatively recent this change is. It had barely started in the 1960s.”

He continues: “But public security, what people mean by ‘law and order’, is essentially safeguarded by the institutions and authorities of peacetime civil life, including the police. The institutions of war – i.e. mainly the armed forces – are mobilised only in situations of war and on the rarest of occasions when civilian services break down. Even in situations of partial warfare, as in Northern Ireland, long experience has taught us the political dangers of maintaining public order by soldiers, without a regular police force separate from the army. In spite of all the talk about terrorism, no country of the European Union is at war, or likely to be, nor do any EU countries have a social and political fabric sufficiently fragile to be seriously destabilised by small groups of activists.

“Terrorism requires special efforts, but it is important not to lose our heads about it. In theory, a country which never quite lost its cool during 30 years of Irish troubles should not lose it now. In practice, the real danger of terrorism lies not in the actual danger from anonymous handfuls of fanatics but from the unreasonable fear their activities provoke, and which both media and unwise governments encourage, at the risk to the “way of life” that is supposed to be protected.”

Having first joined Birkbeck as a lecturer in 1947, Professor Eric Hobsbawm is one of the most famous and influential of modern historians. His work has ranged across an extraordinarily broad area of subjects, from banditry to jazz, all informed however by his political commitment to socialism. Probably his most well-known are the quartet of studies of modernity, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes, and his most recent publication, his autobiography, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (Penguin, 2002).

The Master of Birkbeck, Professor David Latchman, says: “I am delighted that this new series will begin with a talk from our President, Eric Hobsbawm. He has made a major contribution to Birkbeck’s mission of bringing learning to all who can benefit, of which this new series of lunchtime lectures is the latest example.”

This lecture forms part of the public Birkbeck Lunchtime Lecture Series: Violence:

Wednesday 3 May, 1pm 
Historian, Eric Hobsbawm, President of Birkbeck
Public order in an age of violence

Wednesday 17 May, 1pm
Historian, Joanna Bourke, School of History, Classics and Archaeology
Reflections on the History of Sexual Violence

Wednesday 31 May, 1pm
Psychoanalyst and theorist, Slavoj Zizek, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
A Plea for Ethical Violence

Wednesday 14 June, 1pm
Political theorist, Sir Bernard Crick, Emeritus Professor and co-founder of the School of Politics and Sociology
When is Political Violence Justified?

Venue: Room B01, Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck, Torrington Square, WC1 
Contact: To book your place or for more information, phone 020 7631 6573 or email lunchlectures@bbk.ac.uk

For further details about the Lunchtime Lecture Series, click here

For more information about History and Politics at Birkbeck, visit the School of Politics and Sociology and the School of History, Classics and Archaeology

Media enquiries:
Catherine Stevens, Media and Publicity Officer
Tel: 020 7631 6569
Email: c.stevens@bbk.ac.uk

NOTE TO EDITORS:

Birkbeck, University of London:

Founded in 1823, Birkbeck, University of London has an unparalleled track record of successfully teaching part-time, adult students face-to-face in the evenings. Birkbeck enables 20,000 students from diverse social and educational backgrounds to participate in a broad range of higher education. It is the only multi-faculty institution specialising in part-time higher education where the quality of the teaching is fully underpinned by research; 90% of the academic staff are research active and 80% of all research carried out is rated as of international importance. In 2005 the College won a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher Education for research.