Eric Hobsbawm
Eric Hobsbawm
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm CH FRSL FBAwas a British Marxist historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. His best-known works include his trilogy about what he called the "long 19th century", The Age of Extremes on the short 20th century, and an edited volume that introduced the influential idea of "invented traditions"...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth8 June 1917
xenophobia looks becoming
Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle .
decision routine justified
The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessity.
believe past people
Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.
surprise certain
The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it.
raw-materials pakistan poppies
Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.
past people contradiction
Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.
book writing printed-word
It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.
war october-revolution world
It is one of the ironies of this strange century that the most lasting results of the October revolution, whose object was the global overthrow of capitalism, was to save its antagonist, both in war and in peace - that is to say, by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War, and, by establishing the popularity of economic planning, furnishing it with some of the procedures for its reform