20+ Eric Hobsbawm Quotes On History

Eric Hobsbawm was a British Marxist historian and author. He wrote extensively on world history, specializing in the 19th and 20th centuries. He was a professor at Birkbeck, University of London, and wrote numerous books, including The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, and The Age of Empire. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Eric Hobsbawm on history.

Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle. — Eric Hobsbawm

No 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

It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans. — Eric Hobsbawm

The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people. — Eric Hobsbawm

Many years later, another Marxian rephrased this as the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question which the twenty-first century must be left to answer. — Eric Hobsbawm

Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved. — Eric Hobsbawm

Telephone and telegraph were better means of communication than the holy man's telepathy — Eric Hobsbawm

(Carmine Crocco) 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

The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system — Eric Hobsbawm

It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does. — Eric Hobsbawm

N. S. Khrushchev established his supremacy in the U.S.S.R. after post-Stalinist alarums and excursions (1958-64). This admirable rough diamond, a believer in reform and peaceful coexistence, who incidentally emptied Stalin's concentration camps, dominated the international scene in the next few years. He was also perhaps the only peasant boy ever to rule a major state — Eric Hobsbawm

All professionals, whether physicists, economists or musicians, live by and for peer judgment, even when they are being paid by people who cannot tell the difference. — Eric Hobsbawm

Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production. — Eric Hobsbawm

It is one of the ironies of this strange century that the most lasting results of the October revolution, whose object was the global overthrow of capitalism, was to save its antagonist, both in war and in peace - that is to say, by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War, and, by establishing the popularity of economic planning, furnishing it with some of the procedures for its reform — Eric Hobsbawm

Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market. — 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. — Eric Hobsbawm

The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative. — Eric Hobsbawm

The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it. — 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. — Eric Hobsbawm

He[Napoleon] had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in its majesty to shake off oppression. It was a more powerful myth than his, for after his fall it was this, and not his memory, which inspired the revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his own country. — Eric Hobsbawm

Life Lessons by Eric Hobsbawm

1. Eric Hobsbawm's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the past in order to better understand the present. He believed that by studying history, we can learn from the mistakes of the past and avoid repeating them in the future.
2. Hobsbawm's work also emphasizes the importance of understanding the interconnectedness of different societies and cultures and how they have shaped each other over time.
3. He also believed that by understanding the past, we can gain insight into the causes of social and political change, and how to best respond to them in the present.