Eric Hobsbawm

Dr Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, CH (9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012) was a British Marxist historian and author, once the leading theorist of the defunct Communist Party of Great Britain, and former president of Birkbeck College, University of London.

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• Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.
  • The Age of Extremes, Abacus Publishing, London, p. 414 (2004)

• The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.
  • The Age of Extremes, p. 422

• "First, utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved."
  • Primitive rebels; studies in archaic forms of social movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, page 60 [1]

• "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." The Guardian

• (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.
  • Bandits, Penguin, 1985, p.25

• "[N]o serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so."
  • Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 2012, page 12 [2]