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:

First, utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved. (Eric Hobsbawm)
As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports. View quote
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. View quote
Eric Hobsbawm
Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production. View quote
Eric Hobsbawm
The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Eric Hobsbawm
Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market. View quote
Eric Hobsbawm
Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle. View quote
Eric Hobsbawm
It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does. View quote
Eric Hobsbawm
In the simplest terms the question who or what caused the Second World War can be answered in two words: Adolf Hitler. (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. View quote
Eric Hobsbawm
Unlike the word 'communist', which always signified a programme, the word 'socialist' was primarily analytical and critical. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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... View quote
Eric Hobsbawm
The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it. (Eric Hobsbawm)
Telephone and telegraph were better means of communication than the holy man's telepathy. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Eric Hobsbawm