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

In it, Hobsbawm comments on what he sees as the disastrous failures of state communism, capitalism, and nationalism ; he offers an equally skeptical take on the progress of the arts and changes in society in the latter half of the twentieth century.

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.

British historian David Pryce-Jones conceded that Hobsbawm was " no doubt intelligent and industrious, and he might well have made a notable contribution as a historian ", but also charged that, as a professional historian who has " steadily corrupted knowledge into propaganda, and scorns the concept of objective truth ", he was " neither a historian nor professional.

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.

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.

At the time of the 1789 French Revolution, only half of the French people spoke some French, and 12-13 % spoke it " fairly ", according to Hobsbawm.

Hobsbawm was later a leading light of the Eurocommunist faction in the CPGB that began to gather strength after 1968, when the CPGB criticised the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring and the French CP failed to support the May students in Paris.

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 ).

Bonapartism as an ideology of politically neutral French peasants and workers ( EJ Hobsbawm ) was essential in the election of Napoleon I's nephew Louis Napoleon Bonaparte as President of the Second Republic, and gave him the political support necessary for his 1852 discarding of the constitution and proclaiming the Second Empire.

According to Eric Hobsbawm ( 1990 ), only aristocrats and scholars spoke French before the French Revolution, whilst about two-thirds of the population of the French kingdom spoke a variety of local indigenous languages often referred to as dialects.

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.

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.

Hence Hobsbawm argues that identity politics, such as queer nationalism, Islamism, Cornish nationalism or Ulster Loyalism are just other versions of bourgeois nationalism.

Anderson falls into the " historicist " or " modernist " school of nationalism along with Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm in that he posits that nations and nationalism are products of modernity and have been created as means to political and economic ends.

In contrast to Gellner and Hobsbawm, Anderson is not hostile to the idea of nationalism nor does he think that nationalism is obsolete in a globalizing world.

Speaking to an audience of anthropologists, the historian E. J. Hobsbawm pointed out the central role of the historical profession in the development of nationalism:

A vast silence surrounds the realities of communism, a refusal to engage which led the late Tony Judt to conclude that Hobsbawm had ' provincialised himself '.

Hobsbawm has similarly argued that, " In a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing ".

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.

None of this throws Hobsbawm into the embrace of free-market capitalism: " Those of us who lived through the years of the Great Slump still find it almost impossible to understand how the orthodoxies of the pure free market, then so obviously discredited, once again came to preside over a global period of depression in the late 1980s and 1990s, which once again, they were equally unable to understand or to deal with.

Hobsbawm goes on to write that " The cultural revolution of the latest twentieth century can thus best be understood as the triumph of the individual over society, or rather, the breaking of the threads which in the past had woven human beings into social textures " and evokes this as paralleling Margaret Thatcher's claim that ' There is no society, only individuals '.

The same title is used for the autobiography of the historian Eric Hobsbawm, and for writer George Packer's New Yorker blog ( which focuses on the Iraq war and other political issues ).

Other members, most notably Eric Hobsbawm, remained in the group, which in 1956 launched a quarterly monograph series " Our History ".

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.

Hobsbawm was a student at the Prinz Heinrich-Gymnasium Berlin ( today Friedrich-List-School ) when Hitler came to power in 1933 ; that year the family moved to London, where Hobsbawm enrolled in St Marylebone Grammar School ( now defunct ).

Julia is chief executive of Hobsbawm Media and Marketing and a Visiting Professor of Public Relations at the College of Communication, University of the Arts London.

In the early hours of 1 October 2012, at the age of 95, Hobsbawm died at the Royal Free Hospital, London after a long illness.

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.

" However, the profound fascist / anti-fascist schism of the period described by Hobsbawm was real enough, as Yale historian Timothy Snyder notes: Nevertheless, Snyder also claimed that " The Spanish Civil War revealed that Stalin was determined, despite the Popular Front rhetoric of pluralism, to eliminate opposition to his version of socialism ", and that his determination was knowable and known even contemporaneously ( Snyder cites George Orwell's analysis of, and dismay at, communist actions in Spain ).

Hobsbawm often uses statistics to paint a broad picture of a society at a particular time.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm, there also at the time, wrote ' she probably had more influence on me than any other person I have known.

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.

Hobsbawm has very mixed feelings about the end of the nineteenth-century imperial order, largely because he is no happier with the nation-states that replaced the empires.

The term is analogous to the long 19th century, also coined by Hobsbawm, denoting the period 1789 to 1914, and to the long eighteenth century, or approximately 1688 to 1815.

" 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.

Hobsbawm, in particular, has criticized nationalisms, and the principle of national self-determination adopted internationally after World War I, since national governments are often merely an expression of a ruling class or power, and their proliferation was a source of the wars of the twentieth century.

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

The long nineteenth century, defined by Eric Hobsbawm ( after Fernand Braudel's " long 16th century " idea ), a British Marxist historian and author, refers to the period between the years 1789 and 1914.

The short twentieth century, defined by Eric Hobsbawm, a British Marxist historian and author, refers to the period between the years 1914 and 1991.