Eric Hobsbawm - RIP

The terrific Marxist historian. The Age of Extremes is a classic.

which one is that? the 20C one (from 1911 to the 70s or something...?)

cuz I think I have that one, though I never read it all the way through. What I had read was really good though.

all those Age Of volumes are stellar

yeah that is the one I have. RIP

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/01/eric_hobsbawm_in_quotes/

RIP dude.

cd never get with Hobsbawm's millenarian Marxism and don't find him the most congenial of writers either but he was a big hitter and when he was right he was otm

Telegraph hatchet job:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9579092/Eric-Hobsbawm-A-believer-in-the-Red-utopia-to-the-very-end.html
(hat tip to our very own DL on Twitter)

such evanescent charlatans as Michel Foucault

bailed here

it's the kind of thing someone who has never read any Foucault enjoys saying. The good old post-modern strawman.

thing is, Hobsbawm's politics were often horrible imo, but that argument wd be better carried out by somebody who didn't hate ideas or people

Burleigh strikes me as a self-satisfied know-nothing, which is a pretty impressive feat for a professional historian.

Perry Anderson can be pompous (something Hobsbawm couldn't be accused of IMO) but this is a great review of EJH's autobiography:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n19/perry-anderson/the-age-of-ejh

I wasn't conscious of his apologizing for the Soviet Union in the two later Age Of books, only a wistfulness for what Might Have Been.

xp Yes, there are ways of taking issue with Hobsbawm re: USSR without sounding vicious, bitter and mad. When even Niall Ferguson is being decent about Hobsbawm, Burleigh looks like a crank.

i don't think you can ignore the prism he's looking thru as a historian, tho tbf all historians have a prism. as a human being his adherence to the Communist Party gets less attractive as the century wears on. what impacts most on his work for me is less the defence of the 20th century communist regimes and more his Marxian sense of the inevitability of dialectical materialism. for me Marx's thinking is a hundred times more useful as a tool for analysing the past than as a crystal ball. Hobsbawm often doesn't see a difference imo.

from Ferguson's obit:

It may surprise readers of the Guardian to know that Eric Hobsbawm and I were friends.

We were poles apart politically, of course. I still remember the disappointment I felt when I read his autobiography, Interesting Times, which I had hoped would contain some expression of remorse for his decision to remain a member of the Communist party even after the exposure of Stalin's crimes. Indeed, we disagreed about most contemporary political questions.

But his politics did not prevent Hobsbawm from being a truly great historian. I continue to believe that his great tetralogy – The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Industry (1975), The Age of Empire (1987) and The Age of Extremes (1994) – remains the best introduction to modern world history in the English language.

Nice to see Ferguson moving the spotlight away from himself for a change.

for me Marx's thinking is a hundred times more useful as a tool for analysing the past than as a crystal ball.

OTM. Synchronic Marxist analysis >>>> Diachronic Marxist analysis.

i've owned a copy of 'industry and empire' for years; this might be a good excuse to finally tackle it.

anyone else find that british historians tend to write better than american historians?

on our side we've got: Adams, Parrington, William Appleman Williams, Hofstadter, Wilson (not a historian per se but he wrote long narrative history).

Eric Foner and Sean Willentz are excellent stylists.

A couple of good Brad DeLong posts on Hobsbawm:

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/10/eric-hobsbawm-rip.html
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/10/brad-delong-eric-hobsbawms-age-of-extremes-hoisted-from-the-archives.html

adams yes, hofstadter's good but seems strangely dated now in many ways (especially bad on populism), appleman williams a bit too much of a marxist for my taste, though a fine stylist. foner's excellent, wilentz i find completely infuriating (tho i haven't read 'rise of american democracy' yet).

i'm not as well versed in brit history as i should be but i've read and enjoyed jh plumb, cv wedgwood, and ajp taylor. maybe the trouble is that not enough american historians go by their initials?

from DeLong:

A thousand years from now people are likely to still read The Age of Revolution and The Age of Capital. I have tried to write reviews of those two books, and so far I have failed--I have been unable to write anything that conveys just how good they are.

the new republic reposted this genuinely bizarre review of 'age of extremes,' from eugene genovese:

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/107966/eugene-genovese-eric-hobsbawm-age-of-extremes

another initialed brit historian:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_English_Working_Class

much more likely to be read in a thousand years imo.

have been meaning to read that forever, but don't feel quite confident enough about my grasp of the background knowledge (i assume would be) necessary to understand it.

picked up a copy of "the age of revolutions" yesterday. this guy is a really, really fantastic writer imo, his style is killing me i can't stop reading

The labour movement was an organization of self-defence, of protest, of revolution. But for the labouring poor it was more than a tool of struggle: it was a way of life. The liberal bourgeoisie offered them nothing; history took them away from the traditional life which conservatives offered vainly to maintain or to restore. Neither had much to do with the sort of life into which they were increasingly drawn. But the movement had-- or rather, the way of life which they hammered out for themselves, collective, communal, combative, idealist and isolated, implied the movement, for struggle was its very essence. And in return the movement gave it coherence and purpose.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/eric-hobsbawm-the-communist-who-explained-history

Richard Evans is one of my most regretted Twitter follows, neck and neck with David Simon.

that's too bad; found his nazi trilogy incredibly clarifying.