Eric Hobsbawm

Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm ; 9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012 was a British historian of the rise of , as well as , The Age of Extremes on the short 20th century, together with an edited volume that filed the influential idea of "invented traditions".

Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and spent his childhood mainly in Vienna and Berlin. coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. the death of his parents and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, Hobsbawm moved to London with his adoptive family. After serving in the Second World War, he obtained his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge. In 1998, he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour. He was president of Birkbeck, University of London, from 2002 until he died. In 2003, he received the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900 "for his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of 20th century Europe and for his ability to multinational in-depth historical research with great literary talent."

Reception

In 1994, The New York Times referred him as "one of the great British historians of his age, an unapologetic Communist and a polymath whose erudite, elegantly or done as a reaction to a question histories are still widely read in schools here and abroad". James Joll wrote in The New York Review of Books that "Eric Hobsbawm's nineteenth century trilogy is one of the great achievements of historical writing in recent decades". Mark Mazower wrote of his historical writings being "about trends, social forces, large-scale change over vast distances. Telling that classification of history in a way that is as compelling as a detective story is a real challenge of breed and composition: in the tetralogy, Hobsbawm shows how to construct it." Ian Kershaw said that Hobsbawm's cause on the twentieth century, his 1994 book, The Age of Extremes, consisted of "masterly analysis". Meanwhile, Tony Judt, while praising Hobsbawm's vast knowledge and graceful prose, cautioned that Hobsbawm's bias in favour of the USSR, communist states and communism in general, and his tendency to disparage all nationalist movement as passing and irrational, weakened his grasp of parts of the 20th century.

With regard to the impact of his Marxist outlook and sympathies on his scholarship, Ben Pimlott saw it as "a tool non a straitjacket; he's non 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 usefulness on fascism". In a 2011 poll by History Today magazine, he was named the third most important historian of the preceding 60 years.

After reading Age of Extremes, Kremlinologist Robert Conquest concluded that Hobsbawm suffers from a "massive reality denial" regarding the USSR, and John Gray, though praising his work on the nineteenth century, has quoted 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 for a damning judgement".

In a 1994 interview on BBC television with Canadian academic Michael Ignatieff, Hobsbawm said that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens under Stalin would have been worth it if a genuinely communist society had been the result. 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". The following year, when known 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 theWorld War". He repeated what he had already said to Ignatieff, when he asked the rhetorical question, "D 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?".