Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 165
Context: TURGOT... I present today one of the three greatest statesmen who fought unreason in France between the close of the Middle Ages and the outbreak of the French Revolution—Louis XI and Richelieu being the two other. And not only this: were you to count the greatest men of the modern world upon your fingers, he would be of the number—a great thinker, writer, administrator, philanthropist, statesman, and above all, a great character and a great man. And yet, judged by ordinary standards, a failure. For he was thrown out of his culminating position, as Comptroller-General of France, after serving but twenty months, and then lived only long enough to see every leading measure to which he had devoted his life deliberately and malignantly undone; the flagrant abuses which he had abolished restored, apparently forever; the highways to national prosperity, peace, and influence, which he had opened, destroyed; and his country put under full headway toward the greatest catastrophe the modern world has seen.
“In terms of political geography, The French Revolution ended the European Middle Ages.”
Source: The Age of Revolution (1962), Chapter 4, War
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Eric Hobsbawm 47
British academic historian and Marxist historiographer 1917–2012Related quotes
Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 195
Ingeborg Glier, in Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: The European Inheritance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) p. 184.
Praise
The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999, Chapter IV. The Middle Ages
Letter to Fr. Pastells (11 November 1892)
Introduction: The Misjudgment of Paris
The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (1998)
"Why I am Not a Conservative" https://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/excerpt/2011/hayek_constitution.html
1960s–1970s, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)