Eric Hobsbawm

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Eric Hobsbawm

Western history
Notable works
Spouse
  • Muriel Seaman
    (m. 1943; div. 1951)
  • Marlene Schwartz
    (m. 1962)
Children3, including Julia and Andy

Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm

invented traditions". A life-long Marxist, his socio-political convictions influenced the character of his work.[1]

Hobsbawm was born in

European History
since 1900, "for his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of 20th century Europe and for his ability to combine in-depth historical research with great literary talent."

Early life and education

Eric Hobsbawm was born in 1917 in

German-speaking countries, he grew up speaking English as his first language.[6]

In 1929, when Hobsbawm was 12, his father died, and he started contributing to his family's support by working as an au pair and English tutor. Upon the death of their mother in 1931, he and his sister Nancy were adopted by their maternal aunt, Gretl, and paternal uncle, Sidney, who married and had a son named Peter. Hobsbawm was a student at the Prinz Heinrich-Gymnasium Berlin (today Friedrich-List-School) when the Nazi Party came to power in 1933. That year the family moved to London, where Hobsbawm enrolled in St Marylebone Grammar School.[5] His migration from Germany created the false belief that Hobsbawm was a refugee, which persisted throughout his life, while he was actually British by birth because of his father's nationality.[6][7]

Hobsbawm attended

Second Front, which was a demand made by the Communist Party of Great Britain at the time. He applied to return to Cambridge as a research student, and was released from the military in 1946.[4]

Academia

emeritus professor of history in 1982. He was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, from 1949 to 1955.[5] Hobsbawm said there was a weaker version of McCarthyism that took hold in Britain and affected Marxist academics: "you didn't get promotion for 10 years, but nobody threw you out".[9] Hobsbawm was denied a lectureship at Cambridge by political enemies, and, given that he was also blocked for a time from a professorship at Birkbeck for the same reasons, spoke of his good fortune at having got a post at Birkbeck in 1948 before the Cold War really started to take off.[9] Conservative commentator David Pryce-Jones has questioned the existence of such career obstacles.[10]

Hobsbawm helped found the academic journal Past & Present in 1952.[9] He was a visiting professor at Stanford University in the 1960s. In 1970s, he was appointed professor and in 1976 he became a Fellow of the British Academy.[11] He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.[12]

Hobsbawm formally retired from Birkbeck in 1982, becoming Emeritus Professor of History, and was appointed as president of Birkbeck in 2002.

Political Science Department. A polyglot, he spoke English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian fluently, and read Dutch, Portuguese, and Catalan.[5]

Works

Hobsbawm wrote extensively on many subjects as one of Britain's most prominent historians. As a

social banditry, which Hobsbawm placed in a social and historical context, thus countering the traditional view of it being a spontaneous and unpredictable form of primitive rebellion.[5][13][14][15][16][17][18] He coined the term "long nineteenth century", which begins with the French Revolution in 1789 and ends with the start of World War I
in 1914.

He published numerous essays in various intellectual journals, dealing with subjects such as

modern age, the troubles of labour movements, and the conflict between anarchism
and communism. Among his final publications were Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism (2007), On Empire (2008) and the collection of essays How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840–2011 (2011).

Outside his academic historical writing, Hobsbawm wrote a regular column about jazz for the New Statesman (under the pseudonym Francis Newton, taken from the name of Billie Holiday's communist trumpet player, Frankie Newton). He had become interested in jazz during the 1930s when it was frowned upon by the Communist Party.[6] Hobsbawm occasionally wrote about other forms of popular music, such as in his 1963 article "Beatles and before", in which he predicts that the Beatles "are probably just about to begin their slow descent" and that "[i]n 29 years' time nothing of them will survive."[19]

Politics

Hobsbawm joined the Sozialistischer Schülerbund (Association of Socialist Pupils), an offshoot of the Young Communist League of Germany, in Berlin in 1931,[9] and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1936. He was a member of the Communist Party Historians Group from 1946 until its demise and subsequently president of its successor, the Socialist History Society, until his death. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 led thousands of its members to leave the British Communist Party – but Hobsbawm, unique among his colleagues, remained in the party but was mistrusted by its leadership and ceased political work by the end of the 1950s.[7] Hobsbawm maintained some ties to former colleagues such as E. P. Thompson and John Saville, who had left the CPGB at this time and became leading lights of the New Left in Britain, occasionally contributing to New Left publications but also providing intelligence reports on the dissidents to CPGB headquarters. He later described the New Left as "a half-remembered footnote".[4] He signed a historians' letter of protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary and was firmly in favour of the Prague Spring.[5]

Hobsbawm was a leading light of the

Third Way, New Labour, and Tony Blair,[20] whom Hobsbawm later derisively referred to as "Thatcher in trousers".[22] Until the cessation of publication in 1991, he contributed to the magazine Marxism Today. A third of the 30 reprints of Marxism Today's feature articles that appeared in The Guardian during the 1980s were articles or interviews by or with Hobsbawm, making him by far the most popular of all contributors.[20]

In addition to his association with the CPGB, Hobsbawm developed close ties to the largest Communist Party in the western world, the Italian Communist Party (PCI), of which he declared himself a "spiritual member". He developed contacts with Italian left-wing academics and intellectuals in the early 1950s, which led to him encountering the work of Antonio Gramsci, whose writings were a key influence on Hobsbawm's work on the history of subaltern groups, emphasising their agency as well as structural factors. Hobsbawm spoke favourably about PCI general secretary Enrico Berlinguer's strategy of Historic Compromise in the 1970s, seeking rapprochement with the Catholic Church and the Christian Democrats, providing passive support to the latter in government in order to bring the Communists into the political mainstream by accepting Italy's position as a member of NATO, thus being able to build broader alliances and convince wider sections of society of its legitimacy as a potential governing force.[23]

From the 1960s, his politics took a more moderate turn, as Hobsbawm came to recognise that his hopes were unlikely to be realised, and no longer advocated "socialist systems of the Soviet type".[24] Until the day of his death, however, he remained firmly entrenched on the Left, maintaining that the long-term outlooks for humanity were 'bleak'.[25][26][27][28][29] "I think we ought to get out of that 20th-century habit of thinking of systems as mutually exclusive: you're either socialist or you're capitalist, or whatever", Hobsbawm stated in 2009 in regards to the emergence of a new historical system. "There are plenty of people who still think so. I think very few attempts have been made to build a system on the total assumption of social ownership and social management. At its peak the Soviet system tried it. And in the past 20 or 30 years, the capitalist system has also tried it. In both cases, the results demonstrate that it won't work. So it seems to me the problem isn't whether this market system disappears, but exactly what the nature of the mixture between market economy and public economy is and, above all, in my view, what the social objectives of that economy are. One of the worst things about the politics of the past 30 years is that the rich have forgotten to be afraid of the poor – of most of the people in the world."[30]

Communism and Russia

Hobsbawm stressed that since communism was not created, the sacrifices were in fact not justified—a point he emphasised in Age of Extremes:

Still, whatever assumptions are made, the number of direct and indirect victims must be measured in eight rather than seven digits. In these circumstances it does not much matter whether we opt for a "conservative" estimate nearer to ten than to twenty million or a larger figure: none can be anything but shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification. I add, without comment, that the total population of the USSR in 1937 was said to have been 164 millions, or 16.7 millions less than the demographic forecasts of the Second Five-Year Plan (1933–38).[31]

Elsewhere he insisted:

I have never tried to diminish the appalling things that happened in Russia, though the sheer extent of the massacres we didn't realise ... In the early days we knew a new world was being born amid blood and tears and horror: revolution, civil war, famine—we knew of the

the early '30s. Thanks to the breakdown of the west, we had the illusion that even this brutal, experimental, system was going to work better than the west. It was that or nothing.[5]

With regard to the 1930s, he wrote that

It is impossible to understand the reluctance of men and women on the left to criticise, or even often to admit to themselves, what was happening in the USSR in those years, or the isolation of the USSR's critics on the left, without this sense that in the fight against fascism, communism and liberalism were, in a profound sense, fighting for the same cause. Not to mention the more obvious fact ... that, in the conditions of the 1930s, what Stalin did was a Russian problem, however shocking, whereas what Hitler did was a threat everywhere.[32]

He claimed that the demise of the USSR was "traumatic not only for communists but for socialists everywhere".[33]

Other views

Regarding Queen Elizabeth II, Hobsbawm stated that constitutional monarchy in general has "proved a reliable framework for liberal-democratic regimes" and "is likely to remain useful".[34] On the nuclear attacks on Japan in World War II, he adhered to the view that "there was even less sign of a crack in Japan's determination to fight to the end [compared with that of Nazi Germany], which is why nuclear arms were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ensure a rapid Japanese surrender".[35] He believed there was an ancillary political, non-military reason for the bombings: "perhaps the thought that it would prevent America's ally the USSR from establishing a claim to a major part in Japan's defeat was not absent from the minds of the US government either."[36] Hobsbawm is quoted as saying that, next to sex, there is nothing so physically intense as 'participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation'.[8]

Reception

In 1994,

USSR, communist states and communism in general, and his tendency to disparage any nationalist movement as passing and irrational, weakened his grasp of parts of the 20th century.[43]

With regard to the impact of his Marxist outlook and sympathies on his scholarship, Ben Pimlott saw it as "a tool not a straitjacket; he's not dialectical or following a party line", although Judt argued that it has "prevented his achieving the analytical distance he does on the 19th century: he isn't as interesting on the Russian revolution because he can't free himself completely from the optimistic vision of earlier years. For the same reason, he's not that good on fascism".[5] In a 2011 poll by History Today magazine, he was named the third most important historian of the previous 60 years.[44]

After reading Age of Extremes, Kremlinologist Robert Conquest concluded that Hobsbawm suffers from a "massive reality denial" regarding the USSR,[39] and John Gray, though praising his work on the nineteenth century, has described Hobsbawm's writings on the post-1914 period as "banal in the extreme. They are also highly evasive. A vast silence surrounds the realities of communism, a refusal to engage which led the late Tony Judt to conclude that Hobsbawm had 'provincialised himself'. It is a damning judgement".[45]

In a 1994 interview on BBC television with Canadian academic

Stalin would have been worth it if a genuinely communist society had been the result.[3][46][47] Hobsbawm argued that, "In a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing" but, unfortunately, "the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the World Revolution".[46][48] The following year, when asked the same question on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, if "the sacrifice of millions of lives" would have been worth the future communist society, he replied: "That's what we felt when we fought the Second World War".[5] He repeated what he had already said to Ignatieff, when he asked the rhetorical question, "Do people now say we shouldn't have had World War II, because more people died in World War II than died in Stalin's terror?".[46]

Tony Judt was of the opinion that Hobsbawm "clings to a pernicious illusion of the late Enlightenment: that if one can promise a benevolent outcome it would be worth the human cost. But one of the great lessons of the 20th century is that it's not true. For such a clear-headed writer, he appears blind to the sheer scale of the price paid. I find it tragic, rather than disgraceful."[5] Neil Ascherson believes that, "Eric is not a man for apologising or feeling guilty. He does feel bad about the appalling waste of lives in Soviet communism. But he refuses to acknowledge that he regrets anything. He's not that kind of person."[5] Hobsbawm himself, in his autobiography, wrote that he desires "historical understanding ... not agreement, approval or sympathy".[49]

The 1930s aside, Hobsbawm was criticised for never relinquishing his Communist Party membership. Whereas people like Arthur Koestler left the Party after seeing the friendly reception of Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Moscow during the years of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939–1941),[50] Hobsbawm stood firm even after the Soviet interventions of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Prague Spring.[5][39] In his review of Hobsbawm's 2002 memoirs, Interesting Times, Niall Ferguson wrote:

The essence of Communism is the abnegation of individual freedom, as Hobsbawm admits in a chilling passage: "The Party ... had the first, or more precisely the only real claim on our lives. Its demands had absolute priority. We accepted its discipline and hierarchy. We accepted the absolute obligation to follow 'the lines' it proposed to us, even when we disagreed with it ... We did what it ordered us to do ... Whatever it had ordered, we would have obeyed ... If the Party ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did so."

Consider some of the "lines" our historian dutifully toed. He accepted the order to side with the Nazis against the

excommunication of Tito. He condoned the show trials of men like László Rajk in Hungary
.

In 1954, just after Stalin's death, he visited Moscow as one of the honoured members of the Historians' Group of the British Communist Party. He admits to having been dismayed when, two years later, Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. When Khrushchev himself ordered the tanks into Budapest, Hungary, Hobsbawm finally spoke up, publishing a letter of protest. But he did not leave the Party.[38]

Hobsbawm let his membership lapse not long before the party's dissolution in 1991.[5]

In his memoirs, Hobsbawm wrote: "The dream of the

collectivisation, the false confessions, the terror within the Party, the massive forced labour of the gulag? As Orwell himself documented, a great deal of evidence was reliably knowable even before 1939, but Hobsbawm pleads that much of it was not reliably knowable until Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956."[37]

Reviewing Hobsbawm's 2011 How to Change the World in

Stalinist Russia, which shocked many former communist sympathizers into lives of anticommunism, Mr. Hobsbawm dismisses the "zig-zags and turns of Comintern and Soviet policy," specifically the "about-turn of 1939–41," which "need not detain us here." In one sense, Mr. Hobsbawm's admirers are right about his erudition: He possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of Marxist thought, specifically Italian communism and pre-Soviet socialist movements. But that knowledge is wasted when used to write untrustworthy history.[39]

Reviewing the same book, Francis Wheen argued in a similar vein: "When writing about how the anti-fascist campaigns of the 1930s brought new recruits to the communist cause, he cannot even bring himself to mention the Hitler-Stalin pact, referring only to 'temporary episodes such as 1939–41'. The Soviet invasion of Hungary and the crushing of the Prague Spring are skipped over."[52] An alternative conservative assessment of Hobsbawm came from Matthew Walther in National Review. While critical of Hobsbawm for his communist sympathies and his purported views about Israel, Walther wrote that "There is no denying his [Hobsbawm's] intelligence and erudition" and concluded that "if Hobsbawm is read 50 or 100 years from now, it will probably be despite rather than because of his politics."[53]

In 2008, the historian Tony Judt summed up Hobsbawm's career thus: "Eric J. Hobsbawm was a brilliant historian in the great English tradition of narrative history. On everything he touched he wrote much better, had usually read much more, and had a broader and subtler understanding than his more fashionable emulators. If he had not been a lifelong Communist he would be remembered simply as one of the great historians of the 20th century".[3]

Personal life

Hobsbawm's friend, historian Donald Sassoon, wrote that: "Hobsbawm was not a Jewish historian; he was an historian who happened to be Jewish."[54] His first marriage was to Muriel Seaman in 1943. They divorced in 1951.[3] His second marriage was to Marlene Schwarz (in 1962), with whom he had two children, Julia Hobsbawm and Andy Hobsbawm. He had an out-of-wedlock son, Joshua Bennathan, who was born in 1958[55] and died in November 2014.[3][56]

Death

Hobsbawm's grave in Highgate Cemetery

Hobsbawm died from complications of pneumonia and leukemia at the Royal Free Hospital in London on 1 October 2012, aged 95.[57] His daughter, Julia, said "He'd been quietly fighting leukemia for a number of years without fuss or fanfare. Right up until the end he was keeping up what he did best, he was keeping up with current affairs, there was a stack of newspapers by his bed".[58]

Following Hobsbawm's death reactions included praise for his "sheer academic productivity and prowess" and "tough reasoning" in The Guardian.[59] Reacting to news of Hobsbawm's death, Ed Miliband called him "an extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics ... He brought history out of the ivory tower and into people's lives".[57]

He was

New School in October 2013.[53]

Impact

Owing to his status as a widely read and prominent Communist historian, and the fact that his ideology had influenced his work, Hobsbawm has been credited with spreading Marxist thought around the globe.

Aeon, wrote: "In the period from the early 1960s to the late '80s, Marxists in noncommunist countries were increasingly able to participate in a transnational discussion over the past and future of capitalism, and the most promising agents of revolutionary change. Hobsbawm played a starring role in these discussions – and, occasionally, set the agenda."[1]

Partial publication list

A complete list of Eric Hobsbawm's publications, private papers and other unpublished material can be found in the Eric Hobsbawm Bibliography Archived 22 December 2020 at the Wayback Machine.

Book Date Publisher ISBN Notes Cites
Labour's Turning Point: Extracts from Contemporary Sources 1948 Lawrence & Wishart
Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries
1959, 1963, 1971 Manchester University Press in the US: Social Bandits and Primitive Rebels, Free Press, 1960 [60][61]
The Jazz Scene 1959 Weidenfeld & Nicolson as Francis Newton [3]
The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 1962
Abacus (UK)
Vintage Books
(U.S.)
Labouring Men: studies in the history of labour 1964 Weidenfeld & Nicolson [61]
Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations 1965 Lawrence & Wishart editor; essays by Karl Marx
Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day 1968 Pelican
Bandits 1969,
1981
Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
Pantheon Books
Captain Swing 1969 Lawrence & Wishart with George Rudé
Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays 1973 Weidenfeld & Nicolson
The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 1975 Weidenfeld & Nicolson [61]
Italian Road to Socialism: An Interview by Eric Hobsbawm with Giorgio Napolitano 1977 Lawrence Hill and Co
The History of Marxism: Marxism in Marx's day, Vol. 1 1982 Harvester Press editor
The Invention of Tradition 1983 Cambridge University Press editor, with Terence Ranger [61]
Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour 1984 Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the US as Workers: Worlds of Labor, Pantheon Books, 1984 [61]
The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 1987 Weidenfeld & Nicolson (First Edition) [61]
Politics for a Rational Left: Political Writing, 1977–1988 1989 Verso
Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution
1990 Verso
Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality 1991 Cambridge University Press [61]
The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 1994 Michael Joseph (UK)
Vintage Books (U.S.)
along with its three prequels: The Making of the Modern World,
The Folio Society
, London, 2005
Art and Power: Europe Under the Dictators exhibition catalogue[62] 1995 Hayward Gallery editor, with Dawn Ades, David Elliott, Boyd Whyte Iain and Tim Benton
On History 1997 Weidenfeld & Nicolson [61]
1968 Magnum Throughout the World 1998 Hazan editor, with Marc Weitzmann
Behind the Times: Decline and Fall of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Gardes 1998
Thames and Hudson
Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz 1998 Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition 1998 Verso editor
The New Century: In Conversation with Antonio Polito 2000
Little, Brown
in the US: On the Edge of the New Century, The New Press, 2001
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century life 2002 Allen Lane autobiography
Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism 2007 Little, Brown a part of it in the US: On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy, Pantheon, 2008
How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism 2011 Little, Brown [63]
Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the 20th Century 2013 Little, Brown
Viva la Revolucion: Hobsbawm on Latin America 2016 Little, Brown Collected political and historical essays on the history of Latin America
On Nationalism 2021 Little, Brown Collected essays on Nationalism

Honours and awards

Insignia of a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d "How Eric Hobsbawm helped shape the global Marxist imagination – Emile Chabal | Aeon Essays". Aeon. Retrieved 17 January 2019.
  2. ^ a b "Eric Hobsbawm 1917-2012: Magnificent Historian and Colleague". Birkbeck, University of London. 1 October 2012. Retrieved 25 March 2020.
  3. ^ a b c d e f William Grimes (1 October 2012). "Eric J. Hobsbawm, Marxist Historian, Dies at 95". The New York Times. Retrieved 4 October 2012.
  4. ^
    Catalyst
    . 4 (1). Retrieved 8 July 2020.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Maya Jaggi (14 September 2002). "A question of faith". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
  6. ^ a b c d e Evans, Richard J. (17 January 2019). "Eric Hobsbawm's dangerous reputation". The Guardian. Retrieved 25 March 2020.
  7. ^ a b c d Saunders, Frances Stonor (9 April 2015). "Stuck on the Flypaper". London Review of Books. Vol. 37, no. 7. Retrieved 25 March 2020.
  8. ^ a b The Economist, 6 October 2012, p. 108.
  9. ^ a b c d e Ascherson, Neil (2 October 1994). "Profile: The age of Hobsbawm". The Independent on Sunday. Retrieved 24 May 2012.
  10. ^ Pryce-Jones, David (2003). "Eric Hobsbawm: lying to the credulous". The New Criterion. Vol. 21, no. 5. Retrieved 24 May 2012.
  11. ^ "Professor Eric Hobsbawm". The British Academy. Retrieved 17 January 2019.
  12. ^ "Book of Members, 1780–2011: Chapter H" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. p. 277. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
  13. ^ "Eric Hobsbawm (1990): Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (excerpt)". The Nationalism Project. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
  14. ^ Brad DeLong (9 March 2007) [1995]. "Low Marx: A Review of Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes". DeLong's personal blog. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
  15. ^ "Eric Hobsbawm Speaks on His New Memoir". UCLA International Institute. 29 January 2004. Archived from the original on 2 March 2004. Retrieved 9 January 2012.
  16. ^ Perry Anderson (3 October 2002). "The Age of EJH". London Review of Books. Vol. 24, no. 19. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
  17. ^ Danny Yee. "Book Reviews: Eric Hobsbawm". DannyReviews.com. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
  18. ^ "Author profile: Eric Hobsbawm". Random House. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
  19. ^ "New Statesman - Beatles and before". web.archive.org. 30 March 2012. Archived from the original on 30 March 2012. Retrieved 7 March 2024.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  20. ^ a b c d e Pimlott, Herbert (2005). "From "Old Left" to "New Labour"? Eric Hobsbawm and the rhetoric of "realistic Marxism"". Labour/Le Travail. 56: 175–197. Retrieved 24 May 2012.
  21. ^ Hobsbawm, Eric. "The Forward March of Labour Halted?" (PDF). Marxism Today. No. September 1978. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
  22. ^ Hunt, Tristram (22 September 2002). "Man of the extreme century". The Observer. Retrieved 24 May 2012.
  23. ^ Broder, David (18 November 2018). "Hobsbawm in Italy". Jacobin. Retrieved 21 November 2018.
  24. ^ Eric Hobsbawm (10 April 2009). "Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next?". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
  25. ^ John Crace (Summer 2007). "Interview with Eric Hobsbawm on his 90th birthday". BBK Magazine. Birkbeck. Archived from the original on 26 June 2012. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
  26. ^ "Eric Hobsbawm: Observer special". The Observer. 22 September 2002. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
  27. ^ Carlin, Norah; Birchall, Ian (Autumn 1983). "Eric Hobsbawm and the working class". International Socialism Journal. Vol. 2, no. 21. pp. 88–116. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
  28. ^ Tim Adams (21 January 2001). "The lion of the Left". The Observer. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
  29. ^ Eric Hobsbawm (24 January 2008). "Diary". London Review of Books. Vol. 30, no. 2. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
  30. ^ "Eric Hobsbawm". 032c. Retrieved 17 December 2013.
  31. ^ The Age of Extremes. p. 393.
  32. ^ How to Change the World. p. 268.
  33. ^ How to Change the World. p. 386.
  34. ^ "Long live the Queen?". Prospect. No. 181. 23 March 2011. Archived from the original on 3 July 2011. Retrieved 6 March 2012.
  35. ^ The Age of Extremes, p. 42.
  36. ^ The Age of Extremes, p. 27.
  37. ^ a b David Caute (19 October 2002). "Great helmsman or mad wrecker". The Spectator. Archived from the original on 14 January 2013. Retrieved 9 January 2012.
  38. ^ a b Ferguson, Niall (22 September 2002), "What a swell party it was ... for him", The Daily Telegraph, archived from the original on 12 January 2022, retrieved 24 May 2012
  39. ^ a b c d Michael Moynihan (20 August 2011). "How a True Believer Keeps the Faith". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 9 January 2012.
  40. ^ Quoted on the dust jacket of The Age of Extremes.
  41. ISSN 0261-3077
    . Retrieved 17 January 2019.
  42. ^ Kershaw 2001, p. 597, note 1.
  43. ^ Tony Judt (20 November 2003). "The Last Romantic". The New York Review of Books. Vol. 50, no. 18. Retrieved 9 January 2012.
  44. ^ "Top Historians: The Results | History Today". History Today. 16 November 2011. Retrieved 6 November 2020.
  45. ^ John Gray (20 January 2011). "The piety and provincialism of Eric Hobsbawm: Following a false prophet". New Statesman. Retrieved 10 January 2012.
  46. ^
    YouTube
    .
  47. ^ Oliver Kamm (23 July 2004). "It takes an intellectual to find excuses for Stalinism". The Times. Retrieved 8 January 2012.
  48. .
  49. ^ Interesting Times. p. xii.
  50. ^ Snyder 2010, p. 116.
  51. ^ Interesting Times. p. 56.
  52. ^ Wheen, Francis (21 January 2011). "Review: How to Change the World". Financial Times. Retrieved 24 May 2012.
  53. ^ a b Walther, Matthew (25 November 2013). "Eric the Red". National Review. pp. 27–28.
  54. ^ "Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) - In Constant Struggle With His Jewish Identity". Haaretz. 1 October 2012. Retrieved 5 December 2019.
  55. ISSN 0261-3077
    . Retrieved 27 May 2023.
  56. ^ Nathan, John (14 January 2010). "Interview: Joss Bennathan". The Jewish Chronicle. Archived from [thejc.com/arts/arts-interviews/26016/interview-joss-bennathan the original] on 24 February 2010. Retrieved 27 December 2021. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
  57. ^ a b "Historian Eric Hobsbawm dies, aged 95". BBC News. 1 October 2012. Retrieved 3 October 2012.
  58. ^ Barr, Robert (6 October 2012). "British historian Eric Hobsbawm dies at 95". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 7 April 2022.
  59. ^ "Eric Hobsbawm 1917–2012: not the end of history". The Guardian. 1 October 2012. Retrieved 3 October 2012.
  60. .
  61. ^ a b c d e f g h Kelly Boyd, Encyclopedia of Historians & Historical Writing, Volume 14, Issue 1, p. 547.
  62. Deutsches Historisches Museum
    . 1996. Retrieved 26 January 2012.
  63. ^ Terry Eagleton (3 March 2011). "Indomitable". London Review of Books. Vol. 33, no. 5. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
  64. ^ "Companions of Honour". The Official Website of the British Monarchy. Archived from the original on 23 December 2011. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
  65. ^ "Royal Society of Literature All Fellows". Royal Society of Literature. Archived from the original on 5 March 2010. Retrieved 9 August 2010.

References

External links

Awards
Preceded by Deutscher Memorial Prize
1995
Succeeded by
Donald Sassoon