The Bourgeoisie and Why It Still Charms : THE AGE OF EMPIRE <i> by Eric Hobsbawm (Pantheon: $22.95; 403 pp.) </i>

To judge by the movies we flock to see, the television programs we support, the books we buy, and the fashions we revive, the 30 years before 1914 hold a privileged place in our collective memory. Why should this be so? Eric Hobsbawm thinks that it is because the decades before World War I constitute for us a “twilight zone,” by which he means that though we no longer live in this period, the period lives on in us through the powerful if shadowy images that continue to bind us to it.

All the more incentive, therefore, Hobsbawm feels, to “demystify” this era that the French (at least in its later stages) call nostalgically la belle epoque. In Hobsbawm’s view of history and the way that it should be written, however, demystification does not entail the chronologically ordered narration of events. Instead, he opts for a synchronic analysis of those aspects of the period that strike him as being important from the perspective of the late 20th Century, a decision that makes it possible for him to reach conclusions that may surprise some readers, such as the assertion that the real 20th-Century revolution in the arts took place not in Paris or Vienna but in Hollywood and Culver City.

History, with the events left out, even when written by a master, makes formidable demands upon the reader. But Hobsbawm’s special talent is for showing how seemingly unrelated phenomena can be pieced together to form a coherent whole. At a time when historians seem intent on subdividing and farming out to specialists our past, such an ambition is admirable. More admirable yet, however, is the extent to which Hobsbawm has achieved his goal of synthesis. “The Age of Empire” restores one’s faith in our ability to comprehend and master our recent history.

Central to Hobsbawm’s story is the fate of the European bourgeoisie, that much maligned, highly differentiated class or amalgam of social groups that lay between the very rich and the very poor. This middle stratum of society had benefited immensely from the developments of the 19th Century in almost every imaginable way. By 1890, they were richer, healthier, more powerful, and more cultured than they had been a half century earlier. Through their factories, their banks, their stores, and the practice of their professions, they accumulated the wealth that allowed them to develop a style of life that marked them off clearly from those below them. Through their parliaments, they shaped the national will. Through their empires, they controlled the world.

Yet they were also deeply troubled: by workers who threatened their political power and their social privileges; by the “new (and very bourgeois) woman” who was escaping, thanks to a combination of economic developments and technological innovations, from the duties and constraints of the male-dominated family; and, most of all perhaps, by the specter of national decline, a result (they worried) of internal social dissolution and the rise of other, more dynamic peoples whose successes implied their own failures and, perhaps, their ultimate demise. Oswald Spengler, a quintessential product of The Age of Empire, was later going to give them an elaborate historical demonstration of how this had happened.

Hobsbawm knows that for the great majority of the European middle classes, these concerns were only fleeting. In the balance sheet of optimism and dismay, it was in most European countries hope that dominated over gloom right up to the watershed of August, 1914. Progress was the ruling metaphor of the age. But in the European cultural elite, and especially among the artistic avant-garde, visions of apocalypse and despair were common and deeply felt. Though only small groups of European intellectuals knew it, the philosophical, scientific, and artistic foundations on which liberal bourgeois culture had rested had been completely demolished long before the war came.

Any history of this period must try to explain the paradox that an unprecedented era of peace, prosperity, and cultural achievement gave way, and must be said in some way to have produced an equally unprecedented age of war, revolution, genocide, whose center lay not in the periphery of the non-European world but in the heart of civilized Europe.

Hobsbawm does not shrink from this task. But here the sparkling insights that adorn his earlier chapters and give this book its diamondlike intellectual gleam pale into the dull Marxist commonplace that unbounded economic growth went hand in hand, and somehow became identified, with unbounded political ambition. The war and the upheavals that followed it then were, in his view, a product of industrial capitalism run amok and unable to channel into pacific uses its exploding and expanding energies.

To say that I find this argument unpersuasive is in no way to diminish my admiration for this history, which manages to be both provocative and judicious, wide-ranging in its generalizations and revealing in its details, witty and wise. Though Hobsbawm’s sympathies are clearly with the leaders of those working masses who sought to overthrow their capitalist and bourgeois oppressors, he cannot help but look back with grudging respect at a society whose idea of catastrophe was the sinking of an ocean liner and which was capable of mobilizing itself politically because of the unjust conviction of a single French Jew. And who among us today also will not marvel at the economics of a society that permitted the father of John Maynard Keynes to rear a family comfortably, save 40% of his income, and take monthlong vacations to Switzerland while earning the (by our standards) paltry sum of 1,000 pounds a year?