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Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm (9 June 1917 1 October 2012) was a British Marxist
historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism, and nationalism. Naci el 9 de
junio de 1917 en Alejandra, entonces sultanato de Egipto y parte del Imperio britnico.
Hurfano de padre a los 12 y de madre a los 14, ambos de familia juda, fue adoptado
por sus tos, con quienes pas parte de su adolescencia en el Berln que vio el ascenso
de Hitler. En ese contexto polticamente efervescente, justo antes del desastre del que
lograron escapar, se hizo comunista. 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.

Age of catastrophe/of massacre (from 1914 to the aftermath of the WWII)

25/30 years of extraordinary economic growth and social transformation golden age
era of decomposition, uncertainty and crisis
fin de sicle gloom

Before WWI
aggressive expeditions, strong imperialist missions, oversea
troops. Britain as a world power. campaigns to extend the British and French colonial
empires. British dominated world economy.
WWI
marked the breakdown of the western civilization of the XIX century. This
civilization was capitalists in its economy; liberal in its legal and constitutional structure;
bourgeois in the image of its characteristic hegemonic class. Destruction of the Ottoman
and German empires.
Between wars
global rebellion and revolution. Huge colonial empires were
shaken and crumbles into dust. A world economic crisis of unprecedented depth brought
even the strongest capitalist economies t their knees and seemed to reverse the creation
of a single universal world economy. The institutions of liberal democracy gradually and
virtually disappeared as fascism and its satellite authoritarian movements and regimes
advanced.
The arts: modernism: cubism, expressionism, futurism, pure abstraction in
painting, functionalism and flight, the abandonment of tonality in music, the break with
traditional literature. T.S.Elliot. Dadaism, constructivism, surrealism. Spontaneous
imagination. These arts became dramatically politicized, perhaps more so than the high
arts in any period since the age of revolution.

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1920s.
the basic institution of liberal constitutional government, elections
to representative assemblies and/or presidents was almost universal in the world of
independent states. (1/3 of the worlds population lived under colonial rule). The Great
Slump of 1929-33 was to be such a landmark in the history of anti-imperialism and 3 rd
world liberation movements. Their value was essentially as suppliers of primary products.
1945-1991: Cold War
Golden Age
belonged to the developed countries. Revering form the war
was the overwhelming priority of the European countries and Japan after 1945. 1950s
spectacularly prosperous. No starvation. Higher food production. Over production.
Manufactures quadrupled. Fossil fuels. Cheap energy. Automobiles. Scientific research
and practical applications. Capital-intensive and labour-saving technologies. Commitment
to welfare and social security, chemical and pharmaceutical chief innovations.
Western sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s was made possible by antibiotics which
appeared to remove risks from sexual promiscuity by making venereal diseases easily
curable, and by the birth-control pill which became widely available.
Social revolution: post. Universality. The most dramatic and far-reaching social
change: the death of peasantry. Rise of occupations which required secondary and high
education
demand for educated people. Early 1980s extraordinary growth of
higher education. Way of winning better income and higher social status. Late 1960s:
student radicalism, the decade of students unrest per excellence.
Immediate
effect: wave of working-class strikes for higher wages and better conditions. The
certificate of graduation guaranteed them a place in the state machine. Pop music
revolution,
generational
gap,
not
shared
experiences.
Feminist movements from 1960s
new gender-consciosness. Example: women in
Roman Catholic countries against unpopular doctrines of the Church and pro more liberal
abortion laws. What changed in the social revolution was not only the nature of womens
own activities in society, but also the roles played by women. In particular, the
assumptions about the public roles of women and their public prominence. Initially, this
revival was concerned with problems affecting middle-class women, or in the form which
chiefly affected them. By 1981 women had not only virtually eliminated men from office
and white-collar occupations, most of which were indeed subaltern though respectable,
but they formed almost 50% of real-estate agents and almost 40% of bank officers and
financial managers. Demand for freedom and autonomy.
1973-1975 end of the Golden Age. Then, crisis decades. (the problems of the
period before the golden age re-appeared)
1980s onwards
miscellaneous population who earned their living by selling
their manual labour for wages. Live through collective action, through organizations
whether by mutual aid, striking, or voting. Differentiation between the respectable and
unrespectable poor. Changes in family structure, divorce, reduction in the wish for
children, children of unmarried women, illegitimate births
crisis in the relation

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between sexes, the rise of a specific and extraordinarily powerful youth culture which
indicated a profound change in the relation between generations. Acceptance of lowerclasses clothing, music and styles; sex and drugs widely accepted. The cultural
revolution of the latter XX century can best be understood as the triumph of the
individual over society, or rather, the braking of the threads which in the past had woven
human beings into social textures. Textures which consisted not only of the actual
relations between human beings but also as those relations as the expected patterns of
peoples behaviour towards each other (p.334). womens liberation, or more precisely
womens demand for birth-control, including abortion and the right to divorce, drove
perhaps the deepest wedge between the church and what had in the XIX century
become the basic stock of the faithful as became increasingly evident in notoriously
Catholic countries. Vocations for priesthood and other forms of the religious life fell
steeply. under-class
Small scale wars, Rich vs poor, domestic violence, conflict within states in the USA,
collapse of the Soviet Union , religious wars, decline of Catholicism, mass emotion,
population movements,
Dependence on the natural sciences
(whole XX century) rise in the
number of researchers. Due to the age of catastrophe, there was a movement of brains
from Europe to the USA. Science-based technology became an ideology: the same that
during the XIX century happened with Darwins the survival of the fittest. Practical
purpose: employees without knowledge were productive and useful. The century of the
mathematicians.