Eric (John Ernest) Hobsbawm - Life, Politics, Academic life, Works, Controversy, Publication list

Historian, born in Alexandria, N Egypt. The son of Jewish parents - an English-born father and Viennese mother - his early years were spent in Vienna and Berlin before moving to London (1933). He studied at Cambridge and became a lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London (1947), and later professor of Economic and Social History there (1970–82, emeritus 1982). His many works include Labour's Turning Point (1948), The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Capital (1975), Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (1990), and Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century (1994).

Dr Eric John Blair Hobsbawm CH (born June 9, 1917) is a British Marxist historian and author.

One of Hobsbawm's interests is the development of traditions.

Life

Hobsbawm (a clerical error altered Eric's name ) was born in 1917 as child of Leopold Percy Hobsbaum and Nelly Grün, both Jewish, in Alexandria, Egypt, and he grew up in Vienna and Berlin.

His father died in 1929, and he started working as a male au pair and English tutor.

He became an orphan at age 14 when his mother died, and he and Nancy were adopted by his maternal aunt Gretl and paternal uncle Sidney, who married and had a son, also named Eric.

Hobsbawm married twice, first to Muriel Seaman in 1943 (divorced in 1951) and the second time to Marlene Schwarz.

He became a Companion of Honour in 1998.

Politics

He joined the Socialist Schoolboys in 1931 and the Communist party in 1936.

In 1956, he spoke out against the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

He worked with the magazine Marxism Today during the 1980s and supported Neil Kinnock's modernization of the British Labour Party.

Academic life

He was educated at Prinz-Heinrich-Gymnasium Berlin, St Marylebone Grammar School (now defunct) and King's College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a Ph.D.

During World War II, he served in the Royal Engineers and the Royal Army Educational Corps.

In 1947, he became a lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, University of London.

He was a visiting professor at Stanford in the 1960s.

In 1970, he was appointed professor and in 1978 he was made a Fellow of the British Academy.

He retired in 1982 but stayed as visiting professor some months a year at The New School for Social Research in Manhattan until 1997.

He speaks English, German, French, Spanish and Italian, and reads Dutch, Portuguese and Catalan.

Works

Hobsbawm has written extensively on many subjects as one of Britain's most prominent historians.

His most recent publication was the autobiography, Interesting Times.

Controversy

Hobsbawm has attracted criticism for his support for Communism.

But, in his own 1994 book, The Age of Extremes he wrote that the deaths were beyond justification (page 393, ISBN 0-349-10671-1):

"Still, whatever assumptions are made, the number of direct and indirect victims must be measured in eight rather than seven digits.In these circumstances it does not much matter whether we opt for a 'conservative` estimate nearer to ten than to twenty millions or a larger figure: none can be anything but shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification."

Publication list

He has written (among other things) the following books:

Labour's Turning Point : extracts from contemporary sources (1948) Primitive Rebels : studies in archaic forms of social movement in the 19th and 20th centuries (1959) The Age of Revolution : Europe 1789-1848 (1962) Labouring Men : studies in the history of labour (1964) Industry and Empire (1968) Bandits (1969) Captain Swing (1968; with George Rude) Revolutionaries : contemporary essays (1973) The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (1975) Workers : worlds of labor (1985) The Age of Empire (1987) The Jazz Scene (1989) Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1780 : programme, myth, reality (Cambridge Univ.