Hobsbawm died last week at the age of 95 and Mr Cohen turns out to have been wrong. Whatever the view in recent years, there is today a remarkable consensus about Hobsbawm. Almost no one makes big claims for the communism that he professed, but almost no one dissents, either, from the view that places him among the great historians of his time.

No matter how loudly Hobsbawm proclaimed the communist dogma, his cast of mind was independent. It was too independent for the Soviet Union, which translated none of his sweeping narratives on nationalism, industrialism, imperialism and globalism. Whether or not Hobsbawm is considered a radical communist, he was an impenitent communist. He clung to his party card through the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and past the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was sometimes biased. He blamed the liberal democracies for Stalin's decision to ally himself with Hitler.

That Hobsbawm "whitewashed" the crimes of communism is largely a canard. In The Age of Extremes, he suggested that the deaths due to Stalinist terror are more likely "measured in eight rather than seven digits. In these circumstances it does not much matter whether we opt for a ‘conservative' estimate nearer to 10 than to 20 millions or a larger figure: none can be anything but shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification". Short of abandoning history for autobiography, he could hardly go further.

People can differ on whether Hobsbawm's Marxism should matter to his reputation. He thought it should. "Without Marx I would not have developed any special interest in history," Hobsbawm wrote in 1997. He refused to apologise for his politics or to couch them in any kind of soft-minded evasion about "good intentions". That he defended a cruel and misguided project did not mean he was misguided about everything.

Hobsbawm's assertion in Nations and Nationalism (1990) that traditional nationalism was losing its hold on the loyalty of citizens was much ridiculed when the war in Yugoslavia began months later. But today he looks more right than wrong.

His scepticism about democracy was not to most official tastes, but only by ignoring the data could one dispute his contention that both Colombia and the US were countries with well-functioning democracies and high murder rates. "Even as an alternative to other systems," he wrote of democracy, "it can be defended only with a sigh." That elegant, 19th-century-style sentence gives us a clue to why Hobsbawm is beloved even of those who do not share his politics.

That a historian subscribes to a political ideology does not make him a politician, any more than a historian who professes a religion is necessarily a priest. If there is a mystery here it is why so many artists and writers should have been drawn to the materialistic, mechanistic doctrines of Marxism rather than to more individualistic creeds. How did Victor Jara or Gabriel García Márquez wind up thinking it worthwhile to fight for collectivism? Hobsbawm himself was interested in such questions. He wondered, for instance, about his own enthusiasm for detective stories, for instance, which he considered a "deeply conservative genre". More than most historians, Hobsbawm cared about culture. He wrote excellent jazz criticism, never stopped reading novels and made occasional observations in print about high fashion. Hobsbawm had a clear idea of where his appeal lay. "I try out my books first as student lecture courses," he wrote in 2003, "because lecturing is a good way of testing whether a historian holds his audience."

History is a branch of literature, not of science, although, like all literature, it draws much of its strength from the "scientific" ability to perceive patterns, discard falsehoods and draw conclusions. The Marxist historian may believe devoutly in what Marx said of philosophy: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." But in practice history is often more like poetry as W.H. Auden describes it, a discipline that "makes nothing happen". Both world views characterise Hobsbawm, who wrote in the preface to his 1997 essay collection On History that facts provide "the point from which historians must start, however far from it they may end".