British historian, the most read and most translated Marxist historian of the twentieth century; author of the tetralogy The Age of Revolution / Capital / Empire / Extremes that is the canonical Marxist narrative of the long nineteenth century and the short twentieth. A lifelong member of the British Communist Party — the last major Western intellectual to remain one into the 1990s — he is also the historian who, more than any other, succeeded in writing Marxist history for a non-Marxist general public.
Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria in 1917 to Jewish parents — a British father and an Austrian mother — grew up in Vienna and Berlin, and saw the Nazi seizure of power at fifteen; the family left for England in 1933. He took first-class honors at King's College, Cambridge, joined the Communist Party in 1936, served in the British Army in the Second World War, and from 1947 taught at Birkbeck, University of London, where he remained for the rest of his academic career. He was a central figure in the Communist Party Historians' Group of the late 1940s and early 1950s — the group out of which E. P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, and Dorothy Thompson emerged — and a founding editor, with Thompson and others, of the journal Past and Present (1952).
The major work is the four-volume history of the modern world: The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (1962), The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (1975), The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (1987), and The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (1994). The argument, at its broadest, is that the "long nineteenth century" is defined by the interaction of the French political revolution and the British industrial revolution — the "dual revolution" — and that the "short twentieth century" runs from 1914, when that order collapsed, to 1991, when its socialist alternative also collapsed. The Age of Extremes is the book most read by non-historians: a structural account of the century that is clear-eyed about Stalinism, insistent on the 1945–73 "golden age" of regulated capitalism, and pessimistic about the neoliberal settlement that replaced it.
Hobsbawm also produced substantial work on the pre-industrial and proto-industrial world — Primitive Rebels (1959), Bandits (1969) — on the history of labor — Workers: Worlds of Labour (1984) — and, with Terence Ranger, the widely used collection The Invention of Tradition (1983), whose titular concept (that much of what passes as "ancient" national custom was constructed recently, often in the later nineteenth century) has entered the general vocabulary. He was also, under the pen name "Francis Newton," The New Statesman's jazz critic from 1955 to 1965; The Jazz Scene (1959) remains a reference work.
His Communist loyalty to the end was the subject of long public argument. He defended his 1994 Le Monde interview statement that, had the Soviet experiment succeeded, the human cost would have been worth it — a defense most of his readers, including Marxist ones, rejected. The last book, Fractured Times (2013), on the end of bourgeois culture, was posthumous.