Eric J. Hobsbawm
Birth of a Holiday: The First of May - Eric Hobsbawm
Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm's account of the international celebration of Mayday.
In 1990 Michael Ignatieff, writing about Easter in the Observer, observed that 'secular societies have never succeeded in providing alternatives to religious rituals'.
Socialism and the Avant-Garde, 1880-1914 - Eric Hobsbawm
Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm's account of the relationship between the prewar artistic avant-garde and the workers' movement of that period. Both converged in the late nineteenth century, diverged quite sharply in the first phase of radical 'modernism', but found each other again - at least for a few passionate years - under the impact of the Great War and the October Revolution.
Both socialism as a mass movement and the cultural and artistic avant-garde as a widely recognized, self-conscious and sometimes separately organized representative of 'modernity' and 'progress’ within the arts are, as European phenomena, children of the last. decades of the nineteenth century. In this paper I propose to consider their relationship.
The Machine Breakers - Eric Hobsbawm
The purpose of this essay is clearly stated: to defend British labour movements against what E. P. Thompson was later to call 'the enormous condescension of posterity'; and, one might add, against ideologists of our own times. It was first published in 1952 in the first issue of a historical journal that had been recently founded by the author and a group of friends, and is still published, Past & Present
It is perhaps time to reconsider the problem of machine-wrecking in the early industrial history of Britain and other countries. About this form of early working-class struggle misconceptions are still widely held, even by specialist historians.
Cities and Insurrections - Eric J. Hobsbawm
Hobsbawm discusses the potential and limits of cities as sites of riot and insurrection.
Eric J. Hobsbawm is a well-known English Marxist academic historian. This article is an adaptation of a chapter that was originally published in his book Revolutionaries (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973).
