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Eric Hobsbawm

100 quotes

“The love affair between intellectuals and Marxism which is so characteristic of our age developed relatively late in western Europe, though in Russia itself it began in Marx's own lifetime.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Intellectuals and Communism" (1964), published in Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays (1973)
“First, utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (1971), p. 60.
“[H]istorians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to the heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market. 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. So my profession, which has always been mixed up in politics, becomes an essential component of nationalism.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today" (February 1992). Anthropology Today.
“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 (1917–2012) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted by Eric Hobsbawm, in “A Question of Faith,” Maya Jaggi, The Guardian (Sept. 14, 2002)
“Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Divided Europeans: Understanding Ethnicities in Conflict (1999), p. 41.
“As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mapping the Nation (Mappings Series) (13 November 2012), p. 263.
“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 (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Words are witnesses which often speak louder than documents. Let us consider a few English words, which were invented or gained their modern meanings, substantially in the period of sixty years with which this volume deals. They are such words as 'industry', 'industrialist', 'factory,' middle class,' 'working class,' and 'socialism.' They include 'aristocracy,' as well as 'railway,' 'liberal' and 'conservative' as political terms, 'nationality,' 'scientist,' and 'engineer,' 'proletariat,' and (economic) 'crisis'.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fundamental fact about Britain in the first two generations of the Industrial Revolution was, that the comfortable and rich classes accumulated income so fast and in such vast quantities as to exceed all available possibilities of spending and investment.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“France provided the codes of law, the model of scientific and technical organization, the metric system of measurement for most countries. The ideology of the modern world first penetrated the ancient civilizations which had hitherto resisted European ideas through French influence. This was the work of the French Revolution.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In terms of political geography, The French Revolution ended the European Middle Ages.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The really frightening risk of war was neglect, filth, poor organization, defective medical services, and hygenic ignorance, which conditions (as in the troops) practically everybody.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing like nationalism is discoverable elsewhere, for the social conditions for it did not exist. In fact, if anything the forces which were later to produce nationalism were at this stage opposed to the alliance of tradition, religion and mass poverty which produced the most powerful resistance to the encroachment of western conquerors and exploiters.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These three factors—the influence of the French Revolution, the rational economic argument of civil servants, and the greed of the nobility, determined the emancipation of the peasants in Prussia between 1807 and 1816.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of all the economic consequences of the age of dual revolution this division between the ‘advanced’ and the ‘underdeveloped’ countries proved to be the most profound and the most lasting.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No groups of the population welcomed the opening of the career to talent to whatever kind more passionately than those minorities who had hitherto been debarred from eminence not merely because they were not well-born, but because they suffered official and collective discrimination.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The alternative to escape or defeat was rebellion. And such was the situation of the labouring poor, and especially the industrial proletariat which became their nucleus, that rebellion was not merely possible, but virtually compulsory. Nothing was more inevitable in the first half of the nineteenth century than the appearance of labour and socialist movements, and indeed of mass social revolutionary unrest.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For most of history and over most of the world (China being perhaps the main exception) the terms in which all but a handful of educated and emancipated men thought about the world were those of traditional religion, so much so that there are countries in which the word ‘Christian’ is simply a synonym for ‘peasant’ or even ‘man’.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Religion, from being something like the sky, from which no man can escape and which contains all that is above the earth, became something like a bank of clouds, a large but limited and changing feature of the human firmament. Of all the ideological changes this is by far the most profound, though its practical consequences were more ambiguous and undetermined than was then supposed. At all events, it is the most unprecedented.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Except perhaps for such irreducible sexual groups as parents and their children, the ‘man’ of classical liberalism (whose literary symbol was Robinson Crusoe) was a social animal only insofar as he co-existed in large numbers. Social aims were therefore the arithmetical sum of individual aims. Happiness (a term which caused its definers almost as much trouble as its pursuers) was each individual’s supreme object; the greatest happiness of the greatest number, was plainly the aim of society.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But even the arts of a small minority in society can still echo the thunder of the earthquakes which shake all humanity. The literature and arts of our period did so, and the result was ‘Romanticism’. As a style, a school, an era in the arts, nothing is harder to define or even to describe in terms of formal analysis; not even ‘classicism’ against which ‘romanticism’ claimed to raise the banner of revolt. The romantics themselves hardly help us, for though their own descriptions of what they were after were firm and decided, they were also often quite devoid of rational content.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To draw a parallelism between the arts and the sciences is always dangerous, for the relationships between either and the society in which they flourish is quite different. Yet the sciences too in their way reflected the dual revolution, partly because it made specific new demands on them, partly because it opened new possibilities for them and faced them with new problems, partly because its very existence suggested new patterns of thought.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The progress of science is not a simple linear advance, each stage marking the solution of posing of problems previously implicit or explicit in it, and in turn posing new problems.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In 1831 Victor Hugo had written that he already heard 'the full sound of revolution, still deep down in the earth, pushing out under the kingdom in Europe to its subterranean galleries from the central shaft of the mine which is Paris. 1847 the sound was loud and close. In 1848 the explosion burst.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) first seen 1848 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chap. 16 : Conclusion: Towards 1848
“People may not like to meet bandits, especially on a dark night, but a taste for reading about them seems to be universal.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The point about social bandits is that they are peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported. This relation between the ordinary peasant and the rebel, outlaw and robber is what makes social banditry interesting and significant.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'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 (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Banditry is freedom, but in a peasant society few can be free. most are shackled by double chains of lordship and labour, one reinforcing the other. For what makes peasants the victim of authority is not as much their economic vulnerability - indeed they are as often as not virtually self sufficient - as their mobility.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Still the dualism of the revolution of 1789 to 1848 gives the history of that period both unity and symmetry. It is in a sense easy to write and read about, because it appears to possess a clear theme and a clear shape, and its chronological limits are as clearly defined as we have any right to expect in human affairs.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Above all, history – social and economic structure – and politics divided the revolutionary zone into two parts, whose extremes appeared to have little in common. Their social structure differed fundamentally, except for the substantial and pretty universal prevalence of countrymen over townsmen, of small towns over big cities; a fact easily overlooked, because the urban population and especially the large cities were disproportionately prominent in politics.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The defenders of the social order had to learn the politics of the people. This was the major innovation brought about by the 1848 revolutions. Even the most arch-reactionary Prussian junkers discovered during that year that they required a newspaper capable of influencing ‘public opinion’ – in itself a concept linked with liberalism and incompatible with traditional hierarchy.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we write the ‘world history’ of earlier periods, we are in fact making an addition of the histories of the various parts of the globe, but which, in so far as they had knowledge of one another, had only marginal and superficial contacts, unless the inhabitants of some region had conquered or colonized another, as the west Europeans did the Americas.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are today more familiar than the men of the mid-nineteenth century with this drawing together of all parts of the globe into a single world. Yet there is a substantial difference between the process as we experience it today and that in the period of this book. What is most striking about it in the later twentieth century is an international standardization which goes far beyond the purely economic and technological. In this respect our world is more massively standardized than Phileas Fogg’s, but only because there are more machines, productive installations and businesses.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Increasingly, therefore, the formal international structure came to diverge from the real one. International politics became global politics, in which at least two non-European powers were to intervene effectively, though this was not evident until the twentieth century. Furthermore, it became a sort of oligopoly of capitalist-industrial powers, jointly exercising a monopoly over the world, but competing among themselves; though this did not become evident until the era of ‘imperialism’ after the end of our period.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As capitalism and bourgeois society triumphed, the prospects of alternatives to it receded, in spite of the emergence of popular politics and labour movements. These prospects could hardly have seemed less promising in, say 1872–3. And yet within a very few years the future of the society that had triumphed so spectacularly once again seemed uncertain and obscure, and movements to replace it or to overthrow it had once again to be taken seriously. We must therefore consider these movements for radical social and political change as they existed in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The era of liberal triumph began with a defeated revolution and ended in a prolonged depression. The first forms a more convenient signpost for marking the beginning or end of a historical period than the second, but history does not consult the convenience of historians, though some of them are not always aware of it.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A world economy whose pace was set by its developed or developing capitalist core was extremely likely to turn into a world in which the ‘advanced’ dominated the ‘backward’; in short into a world of empire. But, paradoxically, the era from 1875 to 1914 may be called the Age of Empire not only because it developed a new kind of imperialism, but also for a much more old-fashioned reason. It was probably the period of modern world history in which the number of rulers officially calling themselves, or regarded by western diplomats as deserving the title of, ‘emperors’ was at its maximum.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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 (1917–2012) first seen 1780 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 2012), p. 12.
“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 (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the simplest terms the question who or what caused the Second World War can be answered in two words: Adolf Hitler.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why brilliant fashion-designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed,sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, is one of the most obscure questions in history; and, for the historian of culture, one of the most central.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chapter Six, The Arts 1914-1945
“The best approach to this cultural revolution is therefore through family and household, i.e. through the structure of relations between the secondhand generations. In most societies this had been impressively resistant to sudden change, though this does not mean that such structures were static.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The tragedy of the October revolution was precisely that it could only produce its kind of ruthless, brutal, command socialism.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As I think back, I ask myself, again and again: was there an alternative to the indiscriminate , brutal, basically unplanned rush forward of the Five-Year Plan? I wish I could say there was, but I cannot. I cannot find a answer.”
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1917–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source