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Powell's Books - Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life by Hobsbawm is celebrated for his histories of the 19th and 20th centuries, and known for his staunch Marxism. Eric Hobsbawm was born in 1917 and educated in Vienna, Berlin, London and Cambridge. From 1947-1982 Hobsbawm was Professor of Economic and Social History at Birbeck College, University of London. www.powells.com /cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=1-037542234x-0   (506 words)

Reviews in History: The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 Hobsbawm has confined himself to the `short Twentieth Century' marked by the start of the first world war and concluding with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the start of the 1990's. Hobsbawm fears a free-market capitalism that no longer faces a stiff ideological challenge from the left (or the right) and is thus under no obligation to control its excesses. This book exudes an added melancholy because Hobsbawm came late to appreciating the shortcomings of one of these ideologies and has yet to appreciate the quality of the one ideology that has shown itself thus far to be best able to reflect human aspirations and adapt to changing circumstances. www.history.ac.uk /reviews/paper/eric.html   (1629 words)

Eric Hobsbawm - Das Gesicht des 21. Jahrhunderts Hobsbawms Interesse gilt auch der Arbeiterbewegung, (Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labor), den verschiedenen Ausprägungen der Sozialrevolte (Rebels; Bandits; Revolutionaries), sowie dem Aufkommen der nationalistischen Ideologien (The Invention of Tradition, Nations and Nationalism: Echoes of the Marseillaise - Nationen und Nationalismus: Mythos und Realität seit 1780). Hobsbawm erhielt 2000 den Ernst-Bloch-Preis und 2003 den Balzan-Preis. Hobsbawm begibt sich hier auf unsicheres Terrain, er prognostiert, aber nie "doktrinär oder rechthaberisch", meint Walther, sondern "vorsichtig abwägend und die Möglichkeit eines Irrtums einräumend". www.perlentaucher.de /buch/1156.html   (818 words)

Green Left - Eric Hobsbawm: a revolutionary pulse still beats Hobsbawm was born in 1917 in Egypt to middle-class parents, a British father and Austrian-Jewish mother. Hobsbawm was a typical 1930s Western communist — an idealistic fighter for a better world, but also totally dedicated to “the Party” (“we always thought of it in capital letters”) and to Stalin, his admiration “sincere, unforced and unsullied by knowledge” of Stalin's terror. Hobsbawm took part in an illegal sit-down protest in Trafalgar Square in 1961 during an anti-nuclear protest, and his chance presence in Paris in May 1968 (for a UNESCO conference on “Marx and contemporary scientific thought”) lobbed him in the midst of a full-scale student rebellion with a regime-crippling nation-wide general strike just days away. www.greenleft.org.au /2003/523/31043   (1382 words)

E. J. Hobsbawm - Penguin UK Authors - Penguin UK Eric J. Hobsbawm was born on 9 June 1917. He was Professor of Economic and Social History at Birkbeck College, University of London from 1970 to 1982, having also taught at Stanford and M.I.T. He has been Emeritus Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of London since 1982 and teaches at the New School for social Research in new York. Professor Hobsbawm, who lives in London, is married, with two children. www.penguin.co.uk /nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,0_1000014886,00.html   (546 words)

[No title] It was from this vantage-point that Hobsbawm applauded the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. Hobsbawm suggests that his openly declared Communism delayed his academic preferment, but in fact a telephone call to a colleague at King's was enough to gain him a fellowship there. For Hobsbawm, Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 was a horror that sullied the October revolution and its dream. www.discoverthenetwork.org /individualProfile.asp?indid=1588   (815 words)

Eric Hobsbawm: lying to the credulous by David Pryce-Jones Hobsbawm was a contemporary at King’s of James Klugmann, already then a Communist, and later a member of the British party’s Politburo. Hobsbawm’s final judgment on Klugmann is: “He knew what was right, but shied away from saying it in public.” That “shied away” is also worth a moment’s pause. Hobsbawm shows the consistent Communist animus against Zionism and Israel, losing no chance to sneer on that score about “the small, militarist, culturally disappointing and politically aggressive nation-state which asks for my solidarity on racial grounds.” He boasts of a visit to Bir Zeit University on the West Bank to display solidarity with the Palestinians. www.newcriterion.com /archive/21/jan03/hobsbawm.htm   (2801 words)

Profile: Eric Hobsbawm | Arts & Humanities | EducationGuardian.co.uk Interesting Times, Hobsbawm's autobiography, also out this month, offers an insight into the adherence to communism of many of the brightest of his generation, from an "unrepentant communist": Hobsbawm, who joined the party in 1936, remained in it until he let his membership lapse not long before the party's dissolution in 1991. Hobsbawm had a son, Joshua, by a married woman, who opted to remain with her husband. Hobsbawm was a member of the Communist party historians' group of 1946-56, which included EP Thompson and Christopher Hill, and in 1952 he co-founded the influential journal, Past and Present, whose contributors included many non-Marxists. education.guardian.co.uk /higher/artsandhumanities/story/0,12241,791760,00.html   (3555 words)

Carlin/Birchall: Eric Hobsbawm and the working class (1983) It was this, and not a belief in the self-activity of the working-class, that drew Hobsbawm to Marxism. Hobsbawm, however, shrewdly recognised that, in the period after 1956, a new and as yet non-Party left – in many cases to the left of the CP itself – was emerging, and that it would have some part to play in the left’s eventual re-alignment. Hobsbawm himself frequently evokes the power of this sense of belonging to a mass international movement, not without a certain romanticism, as when he recalls ‘that sense of total devotion which made the party in Auschwitz make its members pay their dues in cigarettes (inconceivably precious and almost impossible to obtain in an extermination camp)’. www.marxists.de /workmvmt/birchcarl/hobsbawm.htm   (9904 words)

Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes Hobsbawm wants the October Revolution to have provided "[Capitalism] with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War." But "capitalism" is not a live, breathing, intelligent creature that feels fear and thus undertakes to reform itself. Hobsbawm would have served himself and his readers infinitely better if he had cut by three-quarters the space devoted to Communism and its struggles, and devoted it to the central theme of twentieth century history. Hobsbawm's past political commitments lead him to believe both that (a) Kim Il Sung was a megalomaniac tyrant, and that (b) U.S. intervention to stop his extending his empire by conquest was a backward step for humanity. www.j-bradford-delong.net /Econ_Articles/hobsbawmsageofextremes.html   (5282 words)

Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes Hobsbawm wants the October Revolution to have provided "[Capitalism] with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War." But "capitalism" is not a live, breathing, intelligent creature that feels fear and thus undertakes to reform itself. Hobsbawm would have served himself and his readers infinitely better if he had cut by three-quarters the space devoted to Communism and its struggles, and devoted it to the central theme of twentieth century history. Hobsbawm's past political commitments lead him to believe both that (a) Kim Il Sung was a megalomaniac tyrant, and that (b) U.S. intervention to stop his extending his empire by conquest was a backward step for humanity. econ161.berkeley.edu /Econ_Articles/hobsbawmsageofextremes.html   (5282 words)

[No title] It was from this vantage-point that Hobsbawm applauded the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. Hobsbawm suggests that his openly declared Communism delayed his academic preferment, but in fact a telephone call to a colleague at King's was enough to gain him a fellowship there. For Hobsbawm, Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 was a horror that sullied the October revolution and its dream. www.discoverthenetworks.org /individualProfile.asp?indid=1588   (815 words)

Green Left - Hobsbawm's fourth age Hobsbawm's trilogy had taken his readers from the French Revolution to England's swaggering imperial dominance of the globe prior to the outbreak of imperialist war in 1914. Hobsbawm's organising theme is that Cold War, real war, fascism, even liberal welfare states like Australia, were all direct responses to, or owed some indirect but essential legacy to, the main motif of 20th century politics -- the “struggle by the old order against social revolution”. Hobsbawm's disorientation stems from a certain discouragement at the break-up of the old Soviet bloc. www.greenleft.org.au /1995/172/12797   (956 words)

The lion of the Left | News | Guardian Unlimited Books Hobsbawm's parents both died during the Depression and he and his sister were taken in by his uncle, who worked for a Hollywood firm in Berlin. Hobsbawm has defined and explained the progress of the last century as mankind learning to 'live in expectation of apocalypse'. In some ways, Hobsbawm still views the world as the semi-detached, cold warrior he was then, or at least the legacy of that rhetoric continues to inflect his memories. books.guardian.co.uk /news/articles/0,6109,425863,00.html   (1505 words)

Eric Hobsbawm on the Spanish Civil War: an anti-historical tirade From Hobsbawm, however, we have not new reflections on the material that is now available from both the Soviet and Western archives, nor a re-examination of his youthful experiences in the light of new evidence and mature judgement, but a savage rear guard action that aims to defend the old Kremlin orthodoxies. For Hobsbawm, the Spanish Civil War was a war of intellectuals, poets, writers and artists, who flocked to the anti-fascist cause, only to be badly let down by the workers and peasants of Europe, who refused to respond to the appeal of the left. Hobsbawm’s instinct for order and the antipathy to revolution that had drawn him to the politics of the Popular Front came into their own decades later, when the right wing of the Labour Party were struggling to expel the Militant Tendency. www.wsws.org /articles/2007/mar2007/hobs-m16.shtml   (2369 words)

NPR : A History Both Global and Personal But for Hobsbawm, the very act of being able to see oneself as a figure in history -- as opposed to an historical figure, with the self-importance that inevitably accompanies that term -- is an essential resource for building a humane society. Certainly, Hobsbawm is too sympathetic to what used to be called "the Soviet experiment" -- the decidedly unscientific order that had a mostly deleterious impact on the history of the 20th century, particularly the history of those nations ruled by a party which modeled itself on the Leninist model. In Britain, Hobsbawm was a notable defender of Tony Blair's successful attempt to wean Labour away from its identity as a party rooted mostly among the unionized working class in declining industries and to become, instead, a mass "party of the people." Hobsbawm has also written in praise of the American reform tradition. www.npr.org /templates/story/story.php?storyId=5739209   (1763 words)

The Telegraph - Calcutta : Opinion Hobsbawm has had an interesting life even though it is doubtful if his memories and reflections would arouse any interest among those who do not share his commitments and interests. Hobsbawm refers in passing to the “landscape of material and moral ruin” produced by the collapse of the USSR. Large parts of Hobsbawm’s autobiography is an elaborate justification of why he, despite many reservations, remained loyal to the Soviet Union and even to the CPGB when all his comrades in the Historians’ Group had left after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. www.telegraphindia.com /1021020/asp/opinion/story_1305942.asp   (1197 words)

Interests Hobsbawm's parents both died during the Depression and he and his sister were taken in by his uncle, who worked for a Berlin branch of a Hollywood, USA, based firm. According to Hobsbawm the historian's task, "is not simply to discover the past but to explain it, and in doing so to provide a link with the present." For Hobsbawm, history is a cumulative, collective enterprise to uncover "the patterns and mechanisms" that have transformed the world. Hobsbawm's later writings display a general pessimism and estrangement, arising from his sense of how far humanity had slipped from the nineteenth century and its expectations of civility and human progress. home.uchicago.edu /~moon/hobsbawm.htm   (1009 words)

Eric Hobsbawm historian Age of Revolution Capital Empire Extremes Hobsbawm applied for a series of Oxbridge jobs, and was 'turned down right, left and centre' He fetched up instead, happily, at Birkbeck where the student body was part-time, lectures were held in the evenings and the challenge among the faculty was to keep its audience awake in the graveyard slot between eight and nine. Hobsbawm, by all accounts, achieved this effortlessly and sustained his intellectual energy after hours. If Marxism no longer supplies Hobsbawm with a political vision, neither is it for him simply a theory of historical development, the best tool to be found for making sense of the past. www.age-of-the-sage.org /history/historian/Eric_Hobsbawm.html   (1057 words)

Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker Hobsbawm’s goal seems to be to explain the world we live in now as a consequence of the dual revolutions, and he’s spinning out his tale slowly and carefully. Hobsbawm’s argument is clear and convincing, and does an excellent job synthesizing all of European history during a 59-year-period into a 300-page book. Hobsbawm’s point seems to be just that if history had turned out a little differently — if Lenin and Stalin hadn’t turned the USSR into a police state — we’d be singing a completely different tune right now. laniels.org /weblog/books/hobsbawm_eric/age_of_revolution_1789-1848/finished.html?seemore=y   (1441 words)

FIRST THINGS: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life Among Hobsbawm’s best-known works is a trilogy on the "long nineteenth century," his term for the period from 1789 to 1914 during which European influence reached seemingly unassailable heights. The result, Hobsbawm argues, is that the world in which democratic capitalism has triumphed is, in fact, a world on the brink of profound crisis. Hobsbawm is on to something: with regard to the problems confronting mankind today, there is something different, larger, and particularly frightening. www.firstthings.com /article.php3?id_article=4095   (959 words)

New Statesman - Did France censor Hobsbawm? Hobsbawm's latest work, Age of Extremes, his grand rundown on the 20th century, was published in Britain five years ago. Hobsbawm, though, is no Henry Miller or Vladimir Nabokov out to administer carnal shock. Nora contends that Hobsbawm's attachment to Marxism is a point of pride, a conceit, and he acknowledges it does not govern the book. www.newstatesman.com /199910110015   (1240 words)

UCLA CEES: Eric Hobsbawm Speaks on His New Memoir Hobsbawm doesn't just know more than other historians, he writes better, too." I want to risk a personal remark, that Eric made the greatest impact on my work. Hobsbawm: Well, the first thing to say is that in my life I wasn't committed to the British Communist Party. Hobsbawm: The central fact, I think, of twentieth century history is that at a crucial stage in the early forties liberal capitalism and communism made common cause against Hitler Germany and its allies, against fascism. www.international.ucla.edu /euro/article.asp?parentid=7315   (8464 words)

Eric Hobsbawm's Stalinist Homage to Catalonia | Jewcy.com In the first instance, Hobsbawm is but one among a vast assortment of commentators on the Spanish war who know little of the Spanish language, much less Catalan, which is the language of some of the most important historical documentation on the conflict. Of course the Stalinist Hobsbawm despised the anarchosyndicalists; of course he did not comprehend that Casas Viejas was a moment in Spain’s march toward civil war comparable in notoriety to the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941, and that he therefore trod on risky ground in improvising a version of it for consumption by gullible English-speakers. Hobsbawm recalls, “Anyone entering the rooms of Cambridge socialist and communist students in those days was almost certain to find in them the photograph of John Cornford, intellectual, poet and leader of the student Communist Party, who had fallen in battle in Spain on his 21st birthday, in December 1936. www.jewcy.com /daily_shvitz/the_spanish_prisoner_hoax_eric_hobsbawms_stalinist_homage_to_catalonia   (5555 words)

The Hindu : New Delhi News : Hobsbawm takes up cudgels for facts Hobsbawm said Marxist historians were not merely interested in describing the past, but explaining the past. Hobsbawm said Marxists have had to change their stance about issues, such as the transition from Capitalism to Socialism or from a non-secular to a secular order. Hobsbawm said it was not until the 1970s that European affairs became a matter of mass politics. www.hindu.com /2004/12/16/stories/2004121604560300.htm   (595 words)

Books In Review: The Age of Extremes Among Hobsbawm's best-known works is a trilogy on the "long nineteenth century," his term for the period from 1789 to 1914 during which European influence reached seemingly unassailable heights. The result, Hobsbawm argues, is that the world in which democratic capitalism has triumphed is, in fact, a world on the brink of profound crisis. Hobsbawm is on to something: with regard to the problems confronting mankind today, there is something different, larger, and particularly frightening. www.leaderu.com /ftissues/ft9511/reviews/bacevich.html   (920 words)

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