Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism.
44 Facts About Eric Hobsbawm
2.
Eric Hobsbawm was president of Birkbeck, University of London, from 2002 until he died.
3.
Eric Hobsbawm's father was Leopold Percy Hobsbaum, a Jewish merchant from the East End of London of Polish Jewish descent.
4.
Eric Hobsbawm's mother was Nelly Hobsbaum, who was from a middle-class Austrian Jewish family.
5.
In 1929, when Eric Hobsbawm was 12, his father died, and he started contributing to his family's support by working as an au pair and English tutor.
6.
Eric Hobsbawm was a student at the Prinz Heinrich-Gymnasium Berlin when the Nazi Party came to power in 1933.
7.
Eric Hobsbawm's migration from Germany created the false belief that Hobsbawm was a refugee, which persisted throughout his life, while he was actually British by birth because of his father's nationality.
8.
Eric Hobsbawm received a doctorate in History from Cambridge University for his dissertation on the Fabian Society.
9.
Eric Hobsbawm was prevented from serving overseas after he attracted the attention of the security services by using the wall newspaper he edited during his army training to argue for the opening up of a Second Front, which was a demand made by the Communist Party of Great Britain at the time.
10.
Eric Hobsbawm applied to return to Cambridge as a research student, and was released from the military in 1946.
11.
Eric Hobsbawm became reader in 1959, professor between 1970 and 1982 and an emeritus professor of history in 1982.
12.
Eric Hobsbawm was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, from 1949 to 1955.
13.
Eric Hobsbawm said there was a weaker version of McCarthyism that took hold in Britain and affected Marxist academics: "you didn't get promotion for 10 years, but nobody threw you out".
14.
Eric Hobsbawm was denied a lectureship at Cambridge by political enemies, and, given that he was 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.
15.
Eric Hobsbawm was a visiting professor at Stanford University in the 1960s.
16.
Eric Hobsbawm was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.
17.
Eric Hobsbawm formally retired from Birkbeck in 1982, becoming Emeritus Professor of History, and was appointed as president of Birkbeck in 2002.
18.
Eric Hobsbawm remained as visiting professor at The New School for Social Research in Manhattan between 1984 and 1997.
19.
Eric Hobsbawm was, until his death, professor emeritus in the New School for Social Research in the Political Science Department.
20.
Eric Hobsbawm wrote extensively on many subjects as one of Britain's most prominent historians.
21.
Eric Hobsbawm saw their effect as a driving force behind the predominant trend towards liberal capitalism today.
22.
Eric Hobsbawm coined the term "long nineteenth century", which begins with the French Revolution in 1789 and ends with the start of World War I in 1914.
23.
Eric Hobsbawm published numerous essays in various intellectual journals, dealing with subjects such as barbarity in the modern age, the troubles of labour movements, and the conflict between anarchism and communism.
24.
Outside his academic historical writing, Eric Hobsbawm wrote a regular column about jazz for the New Statesman.
25.
Eric Hobsbawm had become interested in jazz during the 1930s when it was frowned upon by the Communist Party.
26.
Eric Hobsbawm joined the, an offshoot of the Young Communist League of Germany, in Berlin in 1931, and the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1936.
27.
Eric Hobsbawm was a member of the Communist Party Historians Group from 1946 until its demise and subsequently president of its successor, the Socialist History Society, until his death.
28.
Eric Hobsbawm later described the New Left as "a half-remembered footnote".
29.
Eric Hobsbawm signed a historians' letter of protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary and was firmly in favour of the Prague Spring.
30.
Eric Hobsbawm was a leading light of the Eurocommunist faction in the Communist Party of Great Britain that began to gather strength after 1968, when the CPGB criticised the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring and the French Communist Party's failure to support the May 68 movement in Paris.
31.
Eric Hobsbawm supported Neil Kinnock's transformation of the British Labour Party from 1983, and, though not close to Kinnock, came to be referred to as "Neil Kinnock's Favourite Marxist".
32.
Eric Hobsbawm developed contacts with Italian left-wing academics and intellectuals in the early 1950s, which led to him encountering the work of Antonio Gramsci, whose writings were a key influence on Hobsbawm's work on the history of subaltern groups, emphasising their agency as well as structural factors.
33.
Eric Hobsbawm claimed that the demise of the USSR was "traumatic not only for communists but for socialists everywhere".
34.
Eric Hobsbawm 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" but, unfortunately, "the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the World Revolution".
35.
Eric Hobsbawm does feel bad about the appalling waste of lives in Soviet communism.
36.
The 1930s aside, Eric Hobsbawm was criticised for never relinquishing his Communist Party membership.
37.
Eric Hobsbawm accepted the order to side with the Nazis against the Weimar-supporting Social Democrats in the great Berlin transport strike of 1932.
38.
Eric Hobsbawm condoned the show trials of men like Laszlo Rajk in Hungary.
39.
When Khrushchev himself ordered the tanks into Budapest, Hungary, Eric Hobsbawm finally spoke up, publishing a letter of protest.
40.
Eric Hobsbawm let his membership lapse not long before the party's dissolution in 1991.
41.
Eric Hobsbawm had an out-of-wedlock son, Joshua Bennathan, who died in November 2014.
42.
Eric Hobsbawm died from complications of pneumonia and leukemia at the Royal Free Hospital in London on 1 October 2012, aged 95.
43.
Eric Hobsbawm was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and his ashes were interred in Highgate Cemetery, very close to Karl Marx.
44.
Eric Hobsbawm's writings reached particular prominence in India and Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s at a time of lively debate about these countries' political and social future.