On Hist -Op/106

Professor Hobsbawm reminds us why we do academic history. Take this book as part of a broad foundation in Historiography and ignore claims about "snobbery" for if anyone has a "right" to tell us how to do things, it is Hobsbawm. Also recommended: Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Age of Extremes and Freud for Historians (by Peter Gay).

If any one historian can be said to have written the history of the last two centuries in its totality, then Eric Hobsbawm would be the name that comes to mind. "On History" is a collection of theoretical essays of one of the greatest practicioners of the craft, and one of the greatest Marxist minds of our century. For anyone interested in practicing the craft of historical materialism and making sense of the contemporary confusion caused by the fall of the Soviet Union, for anyone who is not convinced that we have aproached "the end of history", for anyone with historical mind, willing to look for the logic of change and to consider the past in its entirety, this book is a must read. Hobsbawm's defense of history is powerful and thought-provoking, and his book is of great relevance for today.

Another reviewer (above) wrote as follows: "Hobsbawm's reputation may precede him, but his book is a weak, pretentious, and crushingly dry collection of essays that add just the wrong touch of elitism and snobbery to make the whole thing taste sour. The language, syntax, and sentence structure he uses is excruciatingly abstruse, and one suspects that the style he uses hides the fact that his conclusions are all rather a statement of the obvious." Indeed? Who wrote this? Jonathan Yardley (famous for his political animus)? No doubt anyone who uses such phrases as "crushingly dry" (autumn leaves?)and "excruciatingly abstruse" will have a hard time with Hobsbawm's elegantly stated if necessarily complicated thought. If any of his ideas seem "obvious" it is no doubt a result of his influence as one of the major historians of the twentieth century. These essays are learned but never boring (many were written to be read at conferences and I can assure you Hobsbawm's auditors were not put to sleep). Their range is amazing and the issues Hobsbawm takes up--Marxism, Marxist history, the Russian Revolution, barbarism to name a few--remain timely. Of interest to anyone concerned with contemporary history and the history of the modern world.