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.

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

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.

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.

Regarding The Queen, Hobsbawm stated that constitutional monarchy in general has " proved a reliable framework for liberal-democratic regimes " and " is likely to remain useful ".

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.

" 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.

Conquest has claimed that in 1994, in an interview with Canadian author and politician Michael Ignatieff on British television, Hobsbawm responded in the affirmative to the question of whether 20 million deaths may have been justified had the proposed communist utopia been created.

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 ".

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.

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.

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.

Hobsbawm also comments on popular culture, a subject he has left alone in other books.

He has been described as " one of the best known academic Marxists of his generation ", in this manner being compared with Edward Palmer Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson.

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.

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 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.

On planet Hobsbawm, Stalin planned multi-party democracies and mixed economies for Eastern Europe after World War II, and reconsidered only after the United States launched the Cold War.

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.

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.

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

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 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 ).

* Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Revolutions, section " Greek War of Independence "

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

Hobsbawm stressed that since the utopia had not been created, the sacrifices were in fact not justified — a point he emphasised in Age of Extremes:

; 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.

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.

Noted recipients are Pope John XXIII ( 1962 ), Andrey Kolmogorov ( 1962 ), Paul Hindemith ( 1962 ), Jean Piaget ( 1979 ), Jorge Luis Borges ( 1980 ), Edward Shils ( 1983 ), Jan Hendrik Oort ( 1984 ), Otto E. Neugebauer ( 1986 ), Emmanuel Levinas ( 1989 ), Paul Ricoeur ( 1999 ), Abdul Sattar Edhi ( 2000 ), Eric Hobsbawm ( 2003 ), Bruce A. Beutler ( 2007 ), and Carlo Ginzburg ( 2010 ).

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.

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.

Although the expression " on the left " covers a range of politics, many well-known figures " on the left " have been of Jews, for instance, Karl Marx, Moses Hess, Herbert Marcuse, Murray Bookchin, Saul Alinsky, Tristan Tzara, Leon Trotsky, Leon Blum, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Eric Hobsbawm, Harold Laski, Betty Friedan, Abbie Hoffman, or Howard Zinn, who were born into Jewish families and have various degrees of connection to Jewish communities, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition or the Jewish religion in its many variants.

According to historians such as Elie Halevy, Eric J. Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, Methodism had a major impact in the early decades of the making of the English working class ( 1760 – 1820 ).

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 ).

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.

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

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.

In 1929, when Hobsbawm was 12, his father died, and he started contributing to his family's support by working as an au pair and English tutor.

His second marriage was to Marlene Schwarz, with whom he had two children, Julia Hobsbawm and Andy Hobsbawm.

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.

" In 2002, Hobsbawm was described by right-leaning magazine The Spectator as " arguably our greatest living historian — not only Britain's, but the world's ", while Niall Ferguson wrote: " That Hobsbawm is one of the great historians of his generation is undeniable.

On planet Hobsbawm, for example, the fall of the Soviet Union was a disaster, and the Revolutions of 1989 a defeat for humanity.

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

As Orwell himself documented, a great deal of evidence was reliably knowable even before 1939, but Hobsbawm pleads that much of it was not reliably knowable until Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956.