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''The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991'' is a book by
Eric Hobsbawm Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm (; 9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012) was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. A life-long Marxist, his socio-political convictions influenced the character of his work. H ...
, published in 1994. In it, Hobsbawm comments on what he sees as the disastrous failures of state socialism,
capitalism Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for Profit (economics), profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, pric ...
, and
nationalism Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the State (polity), state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a in-group and out-group, group of peo ...
; he offers an equally skeptical take on the progress of the arts and changes in society in the latter half of the twentieth century. Hobsbawm calls the period from the start of
World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
to the fall of the so-called
Soviet bloc The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc and the Soviet Bloc, was the group of socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America under the influence of the Soviet Union that existed du ...
" the short twentieth century", to follow on "
the long 19th century The ''long nineteenth century'' is a term for the 125-year period beginning with the onset of the French Revolution in 1789 and ending with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. It was coined by Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg and British Marxist hi ...
", the period from the start of the
French Revolution The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in November 1799. Many of its ideas are considere ...
in 1789 to the start of
World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
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''). In the United States, the book was published with the subtitle ''A History of the World, 1914–1991'' (). The book made the British best seller list and was translated in thirty languages.


Contents

* Part I. The Age of Catastrophe ** 1. The Age of Total War ** 2. The World Revolution ** 3. Into the Economic Abyss ** 4. The Fall of Liberalism ** 5. Against the Common Enemy ** 6. The Arts 1914–1945 ** 7. End of Empires * Part II. The Golden Age ** 8. Cold War ** 9. The Golden Years ** 10. The Social Revolution 1945–1990 ** 11. Cultural Revolution ** 12. The Third World ** 13. "Real Socialism" * Part III. The Landslide ** 14. The Crisis Decades ** 15. Third World and Revolution ** 16. End of Socialism ** 17. The Avant-Garde Dies: The Arts After 1950 ** 18. Sorcerers and Apprentices: The Natural Sciences ** 19. Towards the Millennium


Failure of prediction

Hobsbawm points out the abysmal record of recent attempts to predict the world's future. "The record of forecasters in the past thirty or forty years, whatever their professional qualification as prophets, has been so spectacularly bad that only governments and economic research institutes still have, or pretend to have, much confidence in it." He quotes President
Calvin Coolidge Calvin Coolidge (born John Calvin Coolidge Jr.; ; July 4, 1872January 5, 1933) was the 30th president of the United States from 1923 to 1929. Born in Vermont, Coolidge was a History of the Republican Party (United States), Republican lawyer ...
, in a message to Congress on December 4, 1928, on the eve of the
Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...
, as saying "The country can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism." Speaking of the future himself, Hobsbawm largely confines himself to predicting continued turmoil: "The world of the third millennium will therefore almost certainly continue to be one of violent politics and violent political changes. The only thing uncertain about them is where they will lead," and expressing the view that "If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present." In one of his few more concrete predictions, he writes that "Social distribution and not growth would dominate the politics of the new millennium."


Failure of communism

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was not the revolution of the most advanced capitalist societies predicted by
Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
. As Hobsbawm, puts it, "Capitalism had proved far easier to overthrow where it was weak or barely existed than in its heartlands." Even within Russia, Hobsbawm doubts the ostensibly "progressive" effects of the revolution: "What remained fter revolution and civil warwas a Russia even more firmly anchored in the past... at actually governed the country was an undergrowth of smaller and larger bureaucracy, on average even less educated and qualified than before." It is a central thesis of Hobsbawm's book that, from the start, State Socialism betrayed the
socialist Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes the e ...
and internationalist vision it claimed to uphold. In particular, State Socialism always dispensed with the democratic element of the socialist vision: "Lenin... concluded from the start that the liberal horse was not a runner in the Russian revolutionary race." This anti-liberalism ran deep. In 1933, with
Benito Mussolini Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (; 29 July 188328 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who founded and led the National Fascist Party. He was Prime Minister of Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 until his deposition in 194 ...
firmly in control of Italy, "Moscow insisted that the Italian communist leader Palmiro Togliatti withdraw the suggestion that, perhaps, social-democracy was not the primary danger, at least in Italy." As for support for international revolution, "The communist revolutions actually made (Yugoslavia, Albania, later China) were made against Stalin's advice. The Soviet view was that, both internationally and within each country, post-war politics should continue within the framework of the all-embracing anti-fascist alliance.... There is no doubt that Stalin meant all this seriously, and tried to prove it by dissolving the Comintern in 1943, and the Communist Party of the United States in 1944. " e Chinese Communist regime, though it criticized the USSR for betraying revolutionary movements after the break between the two countries, has no comparable record of practical support for Third World liberation movements." On the other hand, he is no friend of the
Maoist Maoism, officially called Mao Zedong Thought by the Chinese Communist Party, is a variety of Marxism–Leninism that Mao Zedong developed to realise a socialist revolution in the agricultural, pre-industrial society of the Republic of Ch ...
doctrine of perpetual revolution: "Mao was fundamentally convinced of the importance of struggle, conflict and high tension as something that was not only essential to life but prevented the relapse into the weaknesses of the old Chinese society, whose very insistence on unchanging permanence and harmony had been its weakness." Hobsbawm draws a straight line from this belief to the disastrous
Great Leap Forward The Great Leap Forward (Second Five Year Plan) of the People's Republic of China (PRC) was an economic and social campaign led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1958 to 1962. CCP Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to reconstruc ...
and the subsequent Chinese famine of 1959–1961. Socialism, Hobsbawm argues, ultimately fell because, eventually, "...hardly anyone believed in the system or felt any loyalty to it, not even those who governed it."


End of imperialism

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. "[
World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
]... had made the habitual and sensible process of international negotiation suspect as 'secret diplomacy'. This was largely a reaction against the secret treaties arranged among the Allies during the war... The
Bolshevik The Bolsheviks (russian: Большевики́, from большинство́ ''bol'shinstvó'', 'majority'),; derived from ''bol'shinstvó'' (большинство́), "majority", literally meaning "one of the majority". also known in English ...
s, discovering these sensitive documents in the Tsarist archives, had promptly published them for the world to read." "The botched peace settlements after 1918 multiplied what we, at the end of the twentieth century, know to be the fatal virus of democracy, namely the division of the body of citizens exclusively along ethnic-national or religious lines." "The '' reductio ad absurdum'' of... anti-colonialist logic was the attempt by an extremist Jewish fringe group in Palestine to negotiate with the Germans (via Damascus, then under the
Vichy French Vichy France (french: Régime de Vichy; 10 July 1940 – 9 August 1944), officially the French State ('), was the fascist French state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II. Officially independent, but with half of its terr ...
) for help in liberating Palestine from the British, which they regarded as the top priority for
Zionism Zionism ( he, צִיּוֹנוּת ''Tsiyyonut'' after ''Zion'') is a Nationalism, nationalist movement that espouses the establishment of, and support for a homeland for the Jewish people centered in the area roughly corresponding to what is ...
. (A militant of the group involved in this mission eventually became prime minister of Israel:
Yitzhak Shamir Yitzhak Shamir ( he, יצחק שמיר, ; born Yitzhak Yezernitsky; October 22, 1915 – June 30, 2012) was an Israeli politician and the seventh Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms, 1983–1984 and 1986–1992. Before the establishment ...
.)"


Failure of free-market capitalism

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." "As it happened, the regimes most deeply committed to laissez-faire economics were also sometimes, and notably in the case of Reagan's United States and Thatcher's Britain, profoundly and viscerally nationalist and distrustful of the outside world. The historian cannot but note that the two attitudes are contradictory." He points up the irony that " e most dynamic and rapidly growing economy of the globe after the fall of Soviet socialism was that of Communist China, leading Western business-school lectures and the authors of management manuals, a flourishing genre of literature, to scan the teachings of Confucius for the secrets of entrepreneurial success." Ultimately, in world terms, he sees capitalism being just as much of a failure as state socialism: "The belief, following neoclassical economics, that unrestricted international trade would allow the poorer countries to come closer to the rich, runs counter to historical experience as well as common sense. he examples of successful export-led Third World industrialization usually quoted – Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea — represent less than two percent of the Third World population" (brackets in the original)


Fascism

Denying fascism's claim to philosophical respectability, Hobsbawm writes: "Theory was not the strong point of movements devoted to the inadequacies of reason and rationalism and the superiority of instinct and will", and further on the same page: "
Mussolini Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (; 29 July 188328 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who founded and led the National Fascist Party. He was Prime Minister of Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 until his deposition in 194 ...
could have readily dispensed with his house philosopher,
Giovanni Gentile Giovanni Gentile (; 30 May 1875 – 15 April 1944) was an Italian neo-Hegelian idealist philosopher, educator, and fascist politician. The self-styled "philosopher of Fascism", he was influential in providing an intellectual foundation for I ...
, and
Hitler Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Germany from 1933 until his death in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then ...
probably neither knew nor cared about the support of the philosopher Heidegger." Instead, he claims, the popular appeal of fascism lay with its claims to technocratic achievement: "Was not the proverbial argument in favour of fascist Italy that 'Mussolini made the trains run on time'?" He also writes: "Would the horror of the holocaust be any less if historians concluded that it exterminated not six millions but five or even four?"


Hobsbawm's use of statistics

Hobsbawm often uses statistics to paint a broad picture of a society at a particular time. With reference to the contemporary United States (at the time of writing) he points out, "In 1991, 58 per cent of all black families in the United States were headed by a single woman and 70 per cent of all children were born to single mothers," and "In 1991 15 per cent of what was proportionally the largest prison population in the world — 426 prisoners per 100,000 population – were said to be mentally ill."''The Age of Extremes'', p.337 He finds damning statistics to back up his claim of the total failure of state socialism to promote the general welfare: "In 1969, Austrians, Finns and Poles could expect to die at the same average age (70.1 years) but in 1989, Poles had a life expectancy about four years shorter than Austrians and Finns," "...The great hinesefamine of 1959–61, probably the greatest famine of the twentieth century: According to official Chinese statistics, the country's population in 1959 was 672.07 millions. At the natural growth rate of the preceding seven years, which was at least 20 per thousand per year, one would have expected the Chinese population in 1961 to have been 699 millions. In fact it was 658.59 millions or forty millions less than might have been expected." Similarly, "Brazil, a monument to social neglect, had a GNP per capita almost two-and-a-half as large as Sri Lanka in 1939, and over six times as large at the end of the 80s. In Sri Lanka, which had subsidized basic foodstuffs and given free education and health care until the later 1970s, the average newborn could expect to live several years longer than the average Brazilian, and to die as an infant at about half the Brazilian rate in 1969, at a third of the Brazilian rate in 1989. The percentage of illiteracy in 1989 was about twice as great in Brazil as on the Asian island."


Hobsbawm on the arts

Hobsbawm writes on Post-war modernist art practice: :"...consisted largely in a series of increasingly desperate gimmicks by which artists sought to give their work an immediately recognizable individual trademark, a succession of manifestos of despair... or of gestures reducing the sort of art which was primarily bought for investment and its collectors ad absurdum, as by adding an individual's name to piles of brick or soil (' minimal art') or by preventing it from becoming such a commodity through making it too short-lived to be permanent ('
performance art Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...
'). :"The smell of impending death rose from these
avant-garde The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...
s. The future was no longer theirs, though nobody knew whose it was. More than ever, they knew themselves to be on the margin."


Hobsbawm on popular culture

Hobsbawm also comments on popular culture, a subject he has left alone in other books. He writes, "
Buddy Holly Charles Hardin Holley (September 7, 1936 – February 3, 1959), known as Buddy Holly, was an American singer and songwriter who was a central and pioneering figure of mid-1950s rock and roll. He was born to a musical family in Lubbock, Texas ...
,
Janis Joplin Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970) was an American singer and musician. One of the most successful and widely known Rock music, rock stars of her era, she was noted for her powerful mezzo-soprano vocals and "electric" stage ...
, Brian Jones of
the Rolling Stones The Rolling Stones are an English rock band formed in London in 1962. Active for six decades, they are one of the most popular and enduring bands of the rock era. In the early 1960s, the Rolling Stones pioneered the gritty, rhythmically d ...
,
Bob Marley Robert Nesta Marley (6 February 1945 – 11 May 1981; baptised in 1980 as Berhane Selassie) was a Jamaican singer, musician, and songwriter. Considered one of the pioneers of reggae, his musical career was marked by fusing elements o ...
,
Jimi Hendrix James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix (born Johnny Allen Hendrix; November 27, 1942September 18, 1970) was an American guitarist, singer and songwriter. Although his mainstream career spanned only four years, he is widely regarded as one of the most ...
and a number of other popular divinities fell victim of a life-style designed for early death. What made such deaths symbolic was that youth, which they represented, was impermanent by definition." Of these, Joplin's and Hendrix's deaths were drug-related; Jones's may have been (the coroner's verdict was "death by misadventure"; there has been much controversy surrounding the events leading to his death); Holly died in a plane crash and Marley of cancer. However, he does use youth culture as a lens to view the changes in the late-twentieth-century social order: :"The novelty of the new youth culture was threefold. :"First, 'youth' was not seen as a preparatory stage of adulthood but, in some sense, as the final stage of full human development. As in sport, the human activity in which youth is supreme, and which now defined the ambitions of more human beings than any other, life clearly went downhill after the age of thirty... :"The second novelty of the youth culture...: it was or became dominant in the 'developed market economies'... What children could learn from their parents became less obvious than what parents did not know and children did. The role of generations was reversed. Blue jeans..., pioneered... by students who did not wish to look like their elders, came to appear... below many a grey head. :"The third peculiarity of the new youth culture in urban societies was its astonishing internationalism... The English language of rock lyrics was often not even translated... The heartlands of Western youth culture themselves were the opposite of culturally chauvinist... They welcomed styles imported from the Caribbean, Latin America and, from the 1980s, increasingly Africa." 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 Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (; 13 October 19258 April 2013) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party (UK), Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. S ...
's claim that 'There is no society, only individuals'.


Reception

The book was praised for its broad scope and for its insights. Criticisms focused on the book's pessimism and Hobsbawm's alleged inability to appreciate capitalism's adaptability and contribution to living standards. Edward Said called the book "unsettling and powerful" in the London Review of Books. He also wrote that Hobsbawm's own participation in the events he narrated added to the appeal of the book, and that there was a significant overlap of history and memory in it. Moreover, Said commended Hobsbawm's ability to draw conclusions from political and economic trends in the West, but criticized him for being unaware of relevant debates in the historical study of non-Western societies. In particular, Said criticized Hobsbawm's claim that politicized religion was an exclusively Muslim phenomenon. Said also lamented the lack of "a view from within" in the book, constructed with the experiences of witnesses and activists, as opposed to the large scale and impersonal overview that Hobsbawm offered. Similarly to Said, M.E. Sharpe observed that the book was written as both history and memory. Sharpe also wrote that without historians like Hobsbawm we would be utterly lost. Francis Fukuyama wrote in Foreign Affairs that "it was a work of great insight coupled with extraordinary blindness". He commended Hobsbawm's erudition and the book's breadth but he criticized him for failing to appreciate the strengths of capitalism. Fukuyama similarly disparaged Hobsbawm's preference for centralized governments. Finally, Fukuyama was also critical of the short space that the book dedicated to capitalist Asia. Tony Judt, writing in the N York Review of Books, underlined Hobsbawm's impact on historical writing but criticized his Marxist convictions. Lawrence Freedman wrote that the book set the standards for accounts of the twentieth century and praised it for its "powerful analysis" and "broad sweep". Nevertheless, Freedman thought that Hobsbawm was not justified in seeing capitalism as an unruly and intrinsically extremist force nor did he share Hobsbawm's worry about anarchy becoming triumphant in the post-cold-war world. In his reply to Freedman's review, Hobsbawm criticized Freedman for passing his ideological beliefs as historical judgements and defended his pessimism on the world's future.


Notes


External links


Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes

The age of extremes 1914–1991 – Eric Hobsbawm
{{DEFAULTSORT:Age of Extremes 1994 non-fiction books 20th-century history books History books about international relations History books about politics History books about the 20th century Books by Eric Hobsbawm