Thompson formed the Communist Party Historians Group along with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Dona Torr and others.

* Karl Marx, Pre-capitalist Economic Formations, with an introduction by Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm held that it ' broke out ' in Britain in the 1780s and was not fully felt until the 1830s or 1840s, while T. S. Ashton held that it occurred roughly between 1760 and 1830.

The later Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm remarked that " One cannot say Marx died a failure " because, although he had not achieved a large following of disciples in Britain, his writings had already begun to make an impact on the leftist movements in Germany and Russia.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm has called their machine wrecking " collective bargaining by riot ", which had been a tactic used in Britain since the Restoration, as the scattering of manufactories throughout the country made large-scale strikes impractical.

In France, Eric Hobsbawm argues the French state preceded the formation of the French people.

* Hobsbawm, Eric J.

Eric Hobsbawm has also argued for what he calls " the short twentieth century ", encompassing the period from the First World War through to the end of the Cold War.

** Eric Hobsbawm, British historian

* Eric Hobsbawm

* October 1 – Eric Hobsbawm, British Marxist historian ( b. 1917 )

Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, CH, FBA, FRSL ( 9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012 ) was a British Marxist historian, public intellectual, and author.

On the communist role in Spain, Hobsbawm writes simply that " its pros and cons continue to be discussed in the political and historical literature ", and refers to Orwell, not by his literary name, but as " an upper-class Englishman called Eric Blair ".

Proponents of this theory, such as Eric Hobsbawm, argue that ethnicity and notions of ethnic pride, such as nationalism, are purely modern inventions, appearing only in the modern period of world history.

The “ general crisis ” thesis generated much controversy between those, such as the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who believed in the thesis, but saw the problems of 17th-century Europe as being more social and economic in origin than Trevor-Roper would allow.

Trevor-Roper's " general crisis " thesis provoked much discussion, which led to experts in 17th century history such as Roland Mousnier, J. H. Elliott, Lawrence Stone, E. H. Kossmann, Eric Hobsbawm and J. H. Hexter all expressing themselves as to the pros and cons of the theory.

; Dave Cook became National Organiser in 1975 ; Pete Carter prominent in UCATT ; Beatrix Campbell and Judith Hunt active in National Women ’ s Advisory ; Jacques, on the EC since 1967 and replacing James Klugmann on Marxism Today in 1977 ; Sarah Benton was a " heresy " favouring editor of Comment ; critics from the past, like Eric Hobsbawm and Monty Johnstone, got more influence.

Under the influence of Eric Hobsbawm on the opposing wing of the party Martin Jacques became the editor of the party's theoretical journal Marxism Today and rapidly made it a significant publication for Eurocommunist opinions in the party, and eventually for revisionist tendencies in the wider liberal-left, in particular for the soft left around Neil Kinnock in the Labour Party.

Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm observes that the sans-culottes were a ' shapeless, mostly urban movement of the labouring poor, small craftsmen, shopkeepers, artisans, tiny entrepreneurs and the like '.

* Social bandits, a term invented by Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm has observed that " no equally systematic attempt has been made before or since, in Europe or anywhere else, to redraw the political map on national lines.

Such arguments have been expressed by a number of writers, such as Eric Hobsbawm, Todd Gitlin, Michael Tomasky, Richard Rorty, Sean Wilentz, Robert W. McChesney, Bart Landry, and Jim Sleeper.

* Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914 – 1991. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.

Eric Hobsbawm has argued that as globalisation turns the entire planet into an increasingly remote kind of Gesellschaft, so too collective identity politics seeks for a factitious remaking of the qualities of Gemeinschaft by reforging artificial group bonds and identities.

Historians place the beginning of capitalism some time between about 1450 ( Sombart ) and some time in the 17th century ( Hobsbawm ).

He is credited by Eric Hobsbawm as having been the only member of the Historians ' Group of the English Communist Party to write eighteenth-century history, exploring the chronological " no-man's land between the Group's two most flourishing sections ".

The Marxist historians included members of the Communist Party Historians Group, including E. P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, and Dona Torr.

Hobsbawm joined the Sozialistischer Schülerbund ( Association of Socialist Pupils ), an offshoot of the Young Communist League of Germany, in Berlin in 1931, and the Communist Party in 1936.

The 1930s aside, Hobsbawm was criticised for never relinquishing his Communist Party membership.

David Evanier, in an article published in the American conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, called Hobsbawm " Stalin's cheerleader ," writing: " One can learn almost nothing about the history of communism from Hobsbawm's Interesting Times — nothing about the show trials, the torture and execution of millions, the Communist betrayal of Spain.

Hobsbawm, uniquely among his notable colleagues, remained in the Party.

Hobsbawm supported Neil Kinnock's transformation of the British Labour Party from 1983 ( the party received just 28 % of the vote in that year's elections, just 2 % more than than the Social Democratic Party / Liberal Alliance ), and, though not close to Kinnock, came to be referred to as " Neil Kinnock's Favourite Marxist ".

His interventions in Kinnock's remaking of the Labour Party helped prepare the ground for the Third Way, New Labour, and Tony Blair, whom Hobsbawm later derisively referred to as " Thatcher in trousers ".

Whereas people like Arthur Koestler left the Party after seeing the friendly reception of Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Moscow during the years of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ( 1939-1941 ), Hobsbawm stood firm even after the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, though he was against them both.

Others, for example Eric Hobsbawm, chose to stay in the Party to try to reform it.

Hobsbawm was born in 1917 at Alexandria, Egypt, to Leopold Percy Hobsbaum, a British colonial officer of Polish-Jewish descent, and Nelly Grün, who was from a middle-class Austrian Jewish family background, and his early childhood was spent in Vienna, Austria, and Berlin, Germany.

A clerical error at birth altered his surname from Hobsbaum to Hobsbawm.

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.

Hobsbawm was also denied a lectureship at Cambridge by political enemies, and, given that he was also blocked for a time from a professorship at Birkbeck for the same reasons, spoke of his good fortune at having got a post at Birkbeck in 1948 before the Cold War really started to take off.

" After reading Age of Extremes, Kremlinologist Robert Conquest concluded that Hobsbawm suffers from a " massive reality denial " regarding the USSR, and John Gray, though praising his work on the nineteenth century, has described Hobsbawm's writings on the post-1914 period as " banal in the extreme.

*“ Discussion of H. R. Trevor-Roper: " The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century "” pages 8 – 42 from Past and Present, No. 18, November 1960 with contributions from Roland Mousnier, J. H. Elliott, Lawrence Stone, H. R. Trevor-Roper, E. H. Kossmann, E. J. Hobsbawm and J. H. Hexter.

Hobsbawm calls the period from the start of World War I to the fall of the so-called Soviet bloc " the short twentieth century ", to follow on " the long 19th century ", the period from the start of the French Revolution in 1789 to the start of World War I in 1914, which he covered in an earlier trilogy of histories ( The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789-1848, The Age of Capital: 1848 – 1875, The Age of Empire: 1875 – 1914 ).

" Hobsbawm draws a straight line from this belief to the disastrous Great Leap Forward and the subsequent Chinese famine of 1959-1961

* Hobsbawm, Eric " The Revival of Narrative: Some Comments " pages 3 – 8 from Past and Present, Volume 86, 1980.

Henceforth, Hobsbawm argues that the French Nation-state was constituted during the 19th century, through conscription which accounted for interactions between French citizens coming from various regions, and the Third Republic's public instruction laws, enacted in the 1880s, probably in parallel with the birth of the European nationalisms.