Uncommon People

Eric Hobsbawm, the eminent English labor historian, is concerned here with “the sort of people whose names are usually unknown to anyone outside their family and neighbors”–the machinists, grocers, bus conductors, and bartenders who make many small worlds go around. In a series of essays, he looks into the role of shoemakers in European politics (cobblers being a particularly left-leaning lot), the influence of Luddite machine breakers on the labor movement, the abortive union of students and trade unionists in the May 1968 uprising in France, and jazz music, which he considers to be an idiom of the laboring class. These unknown people, in Hobsbawm’s view, have made uncommon contributions to their times and are too little honored, even by the international celebration called May Day, the origins of which he traces in an especially fine essay. –Gregory MacNamee