Customer Reviews

Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz

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Its a very beautiful piece of work.It doesnt just follow the paces of some forgotten people, but it also paints their historic time. The chapters about the Vietnam war, the relationship between socialism and art and the one about the role of women in XIX century are brilliant. This book shows you things you wont find in a common history book.Its rich, honest and true.

The best essay in this collection is "Victorian Values", on the skilled-worker labor movement of England's 19th century.

The superficial contemporary story is that British workers were lazy and bloody-minded sods who built into British industry a variety of rules which they insisted upon while their country failed in the 1970s to compete.

There is some truth in this very shallow story, for by the late 1970s, it was true that many English workers had been driven crazy by the matching bloody-mindedness of the toffs in charge and their matching lack of imagination. One of Meg Thatcher's unsung accomplishments happens to be giving some of the most egregious examples of the upper class the boot.

But the real story is here, in Hobsbawm's essay Victorian Values.

Skilled men in Britain in the 19th century were justly proud of their status. They after all bent metal and other recalcitrant materials (in ways we no longer teach the young, allowing computers to do the job) and formed the railways which at first frightened the toffs (the Duke of Wellington himself was astonished that a thing could go so fast) and which the upper crust then took for granted.

Their "Victorian Values" weren't, on Hobsbawm's account, bloody-mindedness. They were part of being sober or teetotal, industrious, church-going and caring for their families.

That is: the man who thought it a natural law that he should have some of his employer's time, at the close of business, to properly care for his own tools was a man who could ask justly for this time because he also went to church and took care of his family.

Contrast the post-modern scene. Employers today refuse to get lured into time-consuming debate about natural justice, whether with unions or piecemeal.

Modern corporations, by encouraging personal experimentation, have liberated a lot of people, but Hobsbawm shows that perhaps conservatives are being disingenuous when they call upon working people to settle down, and return to Victorian Values.

For if a man returns to the moral law the 8 hour day may again be seen to be natural, and many other work rules which are said to hamper the overarching command to be "productive."