Eric Hobsbawm
British · 1917–2012
British Marxist historian, author of the "Age of" tetralogy spanning the modern era from the French Revolution to the fall of the Soviet Union, and co-editor of The Invention of Tradition.
Wikipedia ↗“The most lasting result of the French Revolution was the metric system.”
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“One of the most universal social assumptions, so universal that it is rarely stated, is that the economic system exists in order to provide what people need and want.”
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“Traditions which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented.”
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“Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round.”
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“The world economy was not designed to satisfy human needs. It was designed to generate profits.”
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“The destruction of the past — or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations — is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century.”
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“The short twentieth century — from the outbreak of the first world war to the collapse of the USSR — was an era of religious wars, though the most militant and bloodthirsty of its religions were secular ideologies.”
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