Volume 42, Number 9 · May 25, 1995
Downhill All the Way
By Tony Judt
The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991
by Eric Hobsbawm
Pantheon, 627 pp., $30.00
Among historians in the English-speaking world there is a discernible 'Hobsbawm generation.' It consists of men and women who took up the study of the past at some point in the 'long nineteen-sixties,' between, say, 1959 and 1975, and whose interest in the recent past was irrevocably shaped by Eric Hobsbawm's writings, however much they now dissent from many of his conclusions. In those years he published a quite astonishing body of influential work: Primitive Rebels, which first appeared in 1959, introduced young urban students to a world of rural protest in Europe and overseas that has now become much more familiar to us, in large measure thanks to the work of scholars whose imaginations were first fired by Hobsbawm's little book. Labouring Men, Industry and Empire and Captain Swing (with George Rude) substantially recast the economic history of Britain and the story of the British labor movement; they brought back to scholarly attention a half-buried tradition of British radical historiography, reinvigorating research into the conditions and experiences of the artisans and workers themselves, but bringing to this engaged concern an unprecedented level of technical sophistication and a rare breadth of knowledge.
Review, 5141 words
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