Dr. Frank's What's-it

It's hard to be sure from the text, but I didn't read the quote as a lament for those bygone ideological days - Aaronovitch himself says "the idea of a wholesale transformation in Britain or the West seems not only implausible, but undesirable" - as much as a recognition that those days are over. I think he's trying to lace it with mock-sympathy ("bad time for prophets," "subjects that were barely understood," etc.), and the use of "great advantages" is meant in this vein. The passage as you interpret it seems directly at odds to the rest of the piece, but yeah, who knows?

Not having read much Hobsbawm, I would've liked a bit more detail about his supposed congruities with Orwell. I welcome any effort to remind today's conservatives that Orwell was a left-wing radical. Nobody can put words in the mouths of the dead, but I have a feeling that if Orwell were working today he'd have at least a chapter in "Treason."

Jason, as you say, you can read "great advantage" in various ways, depending on the answer to the question "to whom?" I usually agree with Aaronovitch, and he is no ideologue, nor can I ever recall his evincing nostalgia for the ideological-totalitarian days of yore. I detect a tinge of mockery as well. However, mocking or not, it's pretty strange to read this paragraph in such an article, even if its intent was indeed to damn Hobsbawm with faint, ironic, preposterous praise. H. is the classic example of a brilliant mind corrupted by ideology, one of the "heroes" who endeavored to supply the ready-made, propagandistic answers while simultaneously attempting to prevent the asking of questions. His life's work was the disingenuous whitewashing of Stalin and Stalinism, and he remained a reliable apologist for Soviet totalitarianism right up to the end, and beyond. Throughout his career, he devoted himself to the relentless, reality-immune propagation of the Party line, through carefully-worded rhetorical sleight of hand, strategic omission and outright lies. (One thing you can say in his favor, though, is that he didn't write like a Marxist. He, like Orwell, was a gifted prose stylist.) A great advantage indeed, to those whose purposes it served, though it's hard to imagine how anyone could, in the end, have been more wrong about There and Here. Orwell is an intellectual and political hero largely because he rejected and attacked such swindles. The question isn't very meaningful, but for what it's worth, Hobsbawm is the anti-Orwell. Though calling him "honest" might be Orwellian in the other sense. (I don't know if Orwell ever commented on Hobsbawm, but I believe H. regarded O. with outright contempt.)

As for O. as left wing radical, you're quite right. They don't make 'em like that anymore, do they? Or do they?