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Eric J. Hobsbawm QUOTES

Eric J. Hobsbawm QUOTES

1 " But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm

2 " It is an irony of history that the first and greatest success of scientists in persuading governments of the indispensability of modern scientific theory to society was in the war against fascism. It is an even greater and more tragic irony that it was anti-fascist scientists who convinced the American government of the feasibility and necessity of manufacturing nuclear arms, which were then constructed by an international team of largely anti-fascist scientists. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm , How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011

3 " More history than ever is today being revised or invented by people who do not want the real past, but only a past that suits their purpose. Today is the great age of historical mythology. The defence of history by its professionals is today more urgent in politics than ever. We are needed. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm , Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

4 " The Labour party on the whole has not been a very effective opposition since the election, partly because it spent months and months electing its new leader. I think the Labour party should, for one thing, stress much more that for most people in the past 13 years, the period was not one of collapse into chaos but actually one where the situation improved, and particularly in areas such as schools, hospitals and a variety of other cultural achievements—so the idea that somehow or other it all needs to be taken down and ground into the dust is not valid. I think we need to defend what most people think basically needs defending and that is the provision of some form of welfare from the cradle to the grave. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm

5 " There is a patent conflict between the need to reverse or at least to control the impact of our economy on the biosphere and the imperatives of a capitalist market: maximum continuing growth in the search for profit. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm , How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011

6 " And yet, something has changed for the better. We have rediscovered that capitalism is not the answer, but the question. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm , How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011

7 " So far as I am aware no leader of a party of the European left in the past twenty-five years has declared capitalism as such to be unacceptable as a system. The only public figure to do so unhesitatingly was Pope John Paul II. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm

8 " Once again it is evident that even between major crises, ‘the market’ has no answer to the major problem confronting the twenty-first century: that unlimited and increasingly high-tech economic growth in the pursuit of unsustainable profit produces global wealth, but at the cost of an increasingly dispensable factor of production, human labour, and, one might add, of the globe’s natural resources. Economic and political liberalism, singly or in combination, cannot provide the solution to the problems of the twenty-first century. Once again the time has come to take Marx seriously. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm , How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011

9 " The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy—not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm

10 " It rests on the attempt since the 1970s to translate a pathological degeneration of the principle of laissez-faire into economic reality by the systematic retreat of states from any regulation or control of the activities of profit-making enterprise. This attempt to hand over human society to the (allegedly) self-controlling and wealth- or even welfare-maximising market, populated (allegedly) by actors in rational pursuit of their interests, had no precedent in any earlier phase of capitalist development in any developed economy, not even the USA. It was a reductio ad absurdum of what its ideologists read into Adam Smith, as the correspondingly extremist 100% state-planned command economy of the USSR was of what the Bolsheviks read into Marx. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm , How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011

11 " It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm , How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011

12 " Memory is life. It is always carried by groups of living people, and therefore it is in permanent evolution. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm , The Age of Empire, 1875-1914

13 " As one would expect of tourists, they tried to find poverty colourful, "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm , The Invention of Tradition

14 " The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessity. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm , The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991

15 " It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does. The vast majority of printed works enter a state of suspended animation within a few weeks or years of publication, from which they are occasionally awakened, for equally short periods, by research students. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm , How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011

16 " On the whole, however, it was accepted that money not only talked, but governed. All the industrialist had to get to be accepted among the governors of society was enough money. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm , The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848

17 " Seventy years after Marx’s death, one third of the human race lived under regimes ruled by communist parties which claimed to represent his ideas and realise his aspirations. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm , How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011

18 " Indeed, it may be suggested that ‘traditions’ and pragmatic conventions or routines are inversely related. "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm , The Invention of Tradition

19 " ..what there of is of jazz at its best is heavy stuff: it is small, but made of uranium "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm , The Jazz Scene

20 " ..there are men who regret that we cannot hear our Handel exactly as Handel meant us to because, unfortunately, we no longer castrate boy singers "

― Eric J. Hobsbawm , The Jazz Scene