Eric Hobsbawm quotes

Eric Hobsbawm was a British historian and author, renowned for his analysis of the social and economic history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His trilogy on the “Age of” – the Age of Revolution, Age of Capital, and Age of Empire – is considered a foundational work in modern history. He became one of the most influential Marxist historians, shaping historical debates worldwide. Here are 69 of his quotes:

As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.

Eric Hobsbawm

[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.

Eric Hobsbawm

Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.

Eric Hobsbawm

The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.

Eric Hobsbawm

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.

Eric Hobsbawm

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.

Eric Hobsbawm

Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.

Eric Hobsbawm

Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle.

Eric Hobsbawm

It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.

Eric Hobsbawm

'Crocco' (Carmine Donatelli), 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.

Eric Hobsbawm

Unlike the word 'communist', which always signified a programme, the word 'socialist' was primarily analytical and critical.

Eric Hobsbawm

Nothing is easier than to see the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount as 'the first socialist' or communist, and though the majority of early socialist theorists were not Christians, many later members of socialists movements have found this reflection useful.

Eric Hobsbawm

Though the web of history cannot be unravelled into separate threads without destroying it, a certain amount of subdivision of the subject is, for practical purposes, essential.

Eric Hobsbawm

The world that went to pieces at the end of the 1980's was the world shaped by the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Eric Hobsbawm

The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century.

Eric Hobsbawm

The past is therefore a permanent dimension of the human consciousness, an inevitable component of the institutions, values and other patterns of human society. The problem for historians is to analyse the nature of this 'sense of the past' in society and to trace its changes and transformations.

Eric Hobsbawm

Liberalism was failing. If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see how they'd become passionate about saving the nation. It was a time when you didn't believe there was a future unless the world was fundamentally transformed.

Eric Hobsbawm

Bourgeois triumph thus imbued the French Revolution with the agnostic or secular-moral ideology of the eighteenth century enlightenment, and since the idiom of that revolution became the general language of all subsequent social revolutionary movements, it transmitted this secularism...

Eric Hobsbawm

Telephone and telegraph were better means of communication than the holy man's telepathy.

Eric Hobsbawm

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.

Eric Hobsbawm

Surrealism was a genuine addition to the repertoire of avant-garde arts, its novelty attested by the ability to produce shock, incomprehension, or what amounted to the same thing, a sometimes, embarrassed laughter, even among the older avant-garde.

Eric Hobsbawm

Nevertheless it is evident - if only from the Greek example just cited - that proto-nationalism, where it existed, made the task of nationalism easier, however great the differences between the two, insofar as existing symbols and sentiments of proto-national community could he mobilized behind a modern cause or a modern state. But this is far from saying that the two were the same, or even that one must logically or inevitably lead into the other. For it is evident that proto-nationalism alone is clearly not enough to form nationalities, nations, let alone states.

Eric Hobsbawm