Eric J. Hobsbawm > Quotes

“Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.”
― Eric Hobsbawn

“The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy—not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.”
― 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, How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism

“Memory is life. It is always carried by groups of living people, and therefore it is in permanent evolution.”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age Of Empire 1875-1914

“As one would expect of tourists, they tried to find poverty colourful,”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition

“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 J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991

“Human mental identities are not like shoes, of which we can only wear one pair at a time. We are all multi-dimensional beings. Whether a Mr. Patel in London will think of himself primarily as an Indian, a British citizen, a Hindu, a Gujarati-speaker, an ex-colonist from Kenya, a member of a specific caste or kin-group, or in some other capacity depends on whether he faces an immigration officer, a Pakistani, a Sikh or Moslem, a Bengali-speaker, and so on. There is no single platonic essence of Patel. He is all these and more at the same time.”
― 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

“As a means of alleviating poverty, Christian charity was worse than useless, as could be seen in the Papal states, which abounded in it. But it was popular not only among the traditionalist rich, who cherished it as a safeguard against the evil of equal rights... but also among the traditionalist poor, who were profoundly convinced that they had a right to crumbs from the rich man's table.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848

“Most young men and women (...) grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in. This makes historians, whose business it is to remember what others forgot, more essential (...) than ever before.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991

“There is a patent conflict between the need to reverse or at least to control the impact of our economy on the biosphere and the imperatives of a capitalist market: maximum continuing growth in the search for profit.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism

“And yet, something has changed for the better. We have rediscovered that capitalism is not the answer, but the question.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism

“But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. 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

“Seventy years after Marx’s death, one third of the human race lived under regimes ruled by communist parties which claimed to represent his ideas and realise his aspirations.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism

“Denied a Lenin and deprived of Napoleon, France retreated into the last and, we must hope, indestructible redoubt, the world of Astérix. The postwar vogue for Parisian thinkers barely concealed their collective retreat into Hexagonal introversion and into the ultimate fortress of French intellectuality, Cartesian theory and puns.”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm

“If physical mobility is an essential condition of freedom, the bicycle has probably been the greatest single device for achieving what Marx called the full realization of the possibilities of being human invented since Gutenberg, and the only one without obvious drawbacks.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

“Like Machiavelli himself, he [Edward Luttwak] enjoys truth not only because it is true but also because it shocks the naive”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm

“Economists who
simply advised leaving the economy alone, governments whose first
instincts, apart from protecting the gold standard by deflationary policies,
was to stick to financial orthodoxy, balance budgets and cut costs, were
visibly not making the situation better. Indeed, as the depression continued,
it was argued with considerable force not least by J.M. Keynes who
consequently became the most influential economist of the next forty
years - that they were making the depression worse. Those of us who
lived through the years of the Great Slump still find it almost impossible
to understand how the orthodoxies of the pure free market, then so
obviously discredited, once again came to preside over a global period of
depression in the late 1980s and 1990s, which, once again, they were
equally unable to understand or to deal with. Still, this strange phenomenon
should remind us of the major characteristic of history which it
exemplifies: the incredible shortness of memory of both the theorists and
practitioners of economics. It also provides a vivid illustration of society's
need for historians, who are the professional remembrancers of what their
fellow-citizens wish to forget.”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm

“The bourgeoisie of the third quarter of the nineteenth century was overwhelmingly ‘liberal’, not necessarily in a party sense (though as we have seen Liberal parties were prevalent), as in an ideological sense. They believed in capitalism, in competitive private enterprise, technology, science and reason. They believed in progress, in a certain amount of representative government, a certain amount of civil rights and liberties, so long as these were compatible with the rule of law and with the kind of order which kept the poor in their place. They believed in culture rather than religion, in extreme cases substituting the ritual attendance at opera, theatre or concert for that at church. They believed in the career open to enterprise and talent, and that their own lives proved its merits.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875

“The only result of a horse race which historians can tell us with absolute confidence is one that has already been run.”
― Eric Hobsbawm

“Indeed, it may be suggested that ‘traditions’ and pragmatic conventions or routines are inversely related.”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition

“The Labour party on the whole has not been a very effective opposition since the election, partly because it spent months and months electing its new leader. I think the Labour party should, for one thing, stress much more that for most people in the past 13 years, the period was not one of collapse into chaos but actually one where the situation improved, and particularly in areas such as schools, hospitals and a variety of other cultural achievements—so the idea that somehow or other it all needs to be taken down and ground into the dust is not valid. I think we need to defend what most people think basically needs defending and that is the provision of some form of welfare from the cradle to the grave.”
― Eric Hobsbawm

“The Communist Manifesto as political rhetoric has an almost biblical force.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism

“So far as I am aware no leader of a party of the European left in the past twenty-five years has declared capitalism as such to be unacceptable as a system. The only public figure to do so unhesitatingly was Pope John Paul II.”
― Eric Hobsbawm

“If a single misleading sentence is to sum up the relations of artist and society in this era, we might say that the French Revolution inspired him by its example, the Industrial Revolution by its horror, and the bourgeois society, which emerged from both, transformed his very existence and modes of creation.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848

“On the whole, however, it was accepted that money not only talked, but governed. All the industrialist had to get to be accepted among the governors of society was enough money.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848

“It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does. The vast majority of printed works enter a state of suspended animation within a few weeks or years of publication, from which they are occasionally awakened, for equally short periods, by research students.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism

“It is an irony of history that the first and greatest success of scientists in persuading governments of the indispensability of modern scientific theory to society was in the war against fascism. It is an even greater and more tragic irony that it was anti-fascist scientists who convinced the American government of the feasibility and necessity of manufacturing nuclear arms, which were then constructed by an international team of largely anti-fascist scientists.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism

“Even the austere philosopher Immanuel Kant of Koenigsberg, it is said, whose habits were so regular that the citizens of that town set their watches by him, postponed the hour of his afternoon stroll when he received the news, thus convincing Koenigsberg that a world-shaking event had indeed happened.”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848

“It rests on the attempt since the 1970s to translate a pathological degeneration of the principle of laissez-faire into economic reality by the systematic retreat of states from any regulation or control of the activities of profit-making enterprise. This attempt to hand over human society to the (allegedly) self-controlling and wealth- or even welfare-maximising market, populated (allegedly) by actors in rational pursuit of their interests, had no precedent in any earlier phase of capitalist development in any developed economy, not even the USA. It was a reductio ad absurdum of what its ideologists read into Adam Smith, as the correspondingly extremist 100% state-planned command economy of the USSR was of what the Bolsheviks read into Marx.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism