Eric Hobsbawm: Quotes about the world

Eric Hobsbawm was British academic historian and Marxist historiographer. Explore interesting quotes on world.
Eric Hobsbawm: 94   quotes 5   likes

“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

As quoted by Eric Hobsbawn, in “A Question of Faith,” Maya Jaggi, The Guardian (Sept. 14, 2002)

World , Passion , Time , Future

“Communism as an ideology had been passionately committed to women's equality and liberation, in every sense including the erotic, in spite of Lenin's own dislike of casual sexual promiscuity. (However, both Krupskaya and Lenin were among the rare revolutionaries who specifically favored the sharing of housework between the sexes)…Yet, with rather rare exceptions…they were not prominent in the first political ranks of their parties, or indeed at all, and in the new communist-governed states they became even less visible. Indeed, women in leading political functions virtually disappeared…When women streamed into a profession opened to them, as in the U. S. S. R., where the medical profession became largely feminized in consequence, it lost status and income. As against Western feminists, most married Soviet women, long used to a lifetime of paid work, dreamed of the luxury of staying at home and doing only one job…whatever the achievements and failures of the socialist world, it did not generate specifically feminist movements, and could indeed hardly have done so, given the virtual impossibility of any political initiatives not sponsored by state and party before the mid-1980s”

Eric Hobsbawm book The Age of Extremes

The Age of Extremes (1992)

Women , World , Dreams , Sex

“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 book The Age of Extremes

The Age of Extremes (1992)

World

“In the simplest terms the question who or what caused the Second World War can be answered in two words: Adolf Hitler.”

Eric Hobsbawm book The Age of Extremes

Source: The Age of Extremes (1992), p. 36 <Ref> https://libcom.org/files/Eric%20Hobsbawm%20-%20Age%20Of%20Extremes%20-%201914-1991.pdf</ref>

War , World , Question

“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

Source: Nations and nationalism since 1780 programme, myth, reality (1992), p. 133.

War , World , Appearance

“'Europe' had been on the defensive for a millennium. Now, for half a millennium, it conquered the world. Both observations make it impossible to sever European history from world history.”

Eric Hobsbawm

Chap. 17 : The Curious History of Europe
On History (1997)

History , World