Works
Hobsbawm wrote extensively on many subjects as one of Britain's most prominent historians. As a Marxist historiographer he has focused on analysis of the "dual revolution" (the political French Revolution and the British industrial revolution). He saw their effect as a driving force behind the predominant trend towards liberal capitalism today. Another recurring theme in his work was social banditry, a phenomenon that Hobsbawm tried to place within the confines of relevant societal and historical context, thus countering the traditional view of it being a spontaneous and unpredictable form of primitive rebellion. He also coined the term "long nineteenth century", which begins with the French Revolution in 1789 and ended with the start of The Great War in 1914.
Outside his academic historical writing, Hobsbawm wrote a regular column (under the pseudonym Francis Newton, taken from the name of Billie Holiday's communist trumpet player, Frankie Newton) for the New Statesman as a jazz critic, and time to time over popular music such as with his "Beatles and before" article. He published numerous essays in various intellectual journals, dealing with subjects such as barbarity in the modern age, the troubles of labour movements, and the conflict between anarchism and communism. Among his final publications were Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism (2007), On Empire (2008), and the collection of essays How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840–2011 (2011).
Read more about this topic: Eric Hobsbawm
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“I know no subject more elevating, more amazing, more ready to the poetical enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment than the works of nature. Where can we meet such variety, such beauty, such magnificence?”
—James Thomson (1700–1748)
“Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“They commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not those which have a humane house alone. But I wished to see that seashore where man’s works are wrecks; to put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is the only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all you can say of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)