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Thoughts on Eric Hobsbawm? (hexbear.net)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Sorry if this is the wrong comm for this, I never post, but I'm most of the way through Age of Extremes and I'm a bit baffled. I get that he lived a long life and saw a lot of stuff but his analysis of the 20th century seems really defeated and... I mean liberal?

He has some pointed critiques of RES states that veer really close to saying revolution is impossible, that the market cannot be stopped, that basically we have to accept that communism was never a possibility and move on. It is really jarring after the previous titles. Am I misreading him? Some of it might just be old dude stuff, I guess, he has some old man takes on art at least. It just seems like he is totally despairing by the end of the last book, but everything I saw about him made it sound like he was a committed Marxist until he died.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

that's disappointing, i have some books by him I wanted to read..but yeah, he lived through WWII, and I think it probably broke his heart.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think they're worth reading still, to be clear. Especially the first three in the series, he isn't so disillusioned until the last one. At least from what I remember. And the criticism isn't all unfounded or bad, I just wish it wasn't framed as if it was the death knell of the project.