E. J. Hobsbawm Quotes

War has been the most convenient pseudo-solution for the problems of twentieth-century capitalism. It provides the incentives to modernization and technological revolution which the market and the pursuit of profit do only fitfully and by accident, it makes the unthinkable (such as votes for women and the abolition of unemployment) not merely thinkable but practicable. What is equally important, it can re-create communities of men and give a temporary sense to their lives by uniting them against foreigners and outsiders. This is an achievement beyond the power of the private enterprise economy when left to itself. - E. J. Hobsbawm

Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved. - E. J. Hobsbawm

There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences of their activities. - E. J. Hobsbawm

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it. - E. J. Hobsbawm

It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans. - E. J. Hobsbawm

Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market. - E. J. Hobsbawm

As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports. - E. J. Hobsbawm

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