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
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.
surprise certain
The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it.
xenophobia people racism
As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.
political too-much serious
[N]o serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.
xenophobia looks becoming
Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle .
capitalist humans human-beings
Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.
groups outcast american-patriotism
It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans.
metrics revolution metric-system
The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system
groups scientist individual
There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences of their activities.