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
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.
army past men
(Carmine Crocco) A farm-labourer and cowherd, had joined the Bourbon army, killed a comrade in a brawl, deserted and lived as an outlaw for ten years. He joined the liberal insurgents in 1860 in the hope of an amnesty for his past offences, and subsequently became the most formidable guerilla chief and leader of men on the Bourbon side.
boys years peaceful
N. S. Khrushchev established his supremacy in the U.S.S.R. after post-Stalinist alarums and excursions (1958-64). This admirable rough diamond, a believer in reform and peaceful coexistence, who incidentally emptied Stalin's concentration camps, dominated the international scene in the next few years. He was also perhaps the only peasant boy ever to rule a major state
communication mean men
Telephone and telegraph were better means of communication than the holy man's telepathy
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.
dream country memories
He[Napoleon] had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in its majesty to shake off oppression. It was a more powerful myth than his, for after his fall it was this, and not his memory, which inspired the revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his own country.
metrics revolution metric-system
The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system
capitalist humans human-beings
Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.
effort revolution social
Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.
conservative communism paradox
The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.
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.
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
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.
xenophobia people racism
As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.