Eric Hobsbawm Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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
However, mass expulsion and even genocide began to make their appearance on the southern margins of Europe during and after World War I, as the Turks set about the mass extirpation of the Armenians in 1915 and, after the Greco Turkish war of 1911, expelled between 1.3 and 1.5 millions of Greeks from Asia Minor, where they had lived since the days of Homer.1 Subsequently Adolph Hitler, who was in this respect a logical Wilsonian nationalist, arranged to transfer Germans not living on the territory of the fatherland, such as those of Italian South Tyrol, to Germany itself, as he also arranged for the permanent elimination of the Jews.

Eric Hobsbawm
This was the kind of war which existed in order to produce victory parades.
Of the Falklands War

Eric Hobsbawm
For 80 per cent of humanity the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s; or perhaps better still, they were felt to end in the 1960s.

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

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
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
A farm-laborer 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 guerrilla chief and leader of men on the Bourbon side.

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

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
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.

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

Eric Hobsbawm
As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.

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

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
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
All of us thought that the crisis of the 1930s was the final crisis of capitalism. it was not.

Eric Hobsbawm
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-nacional 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
First, utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.

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
Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners.

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

Eric Hobsbawm