Quotes from Eric 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.

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

The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.

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.

Our problem is not to trace the emergence of a world market, of a sufficiently active class of private entrepreneurs, or even (in England) of a state dedicated to the proposition that the maximization of private profit was the foundation of government policy...By the 1780s we can take the existence of all these for granted...

What distinguishes the various members of the ideological family descended from humanism and the Enlightenment, liberal, socialist, communist, or anarchist, is not the gentle anarchy which is the utopia of all of them, but the methods of achieving it.

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.

Still, let us not disarm, even in unsatisfactory times. Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better on its own.

In June 1793 sixty of the eighty departments of France were in revolt against Paris; the armies of the German princes were invading France from the north and east; the British attacked from the south and west; the country was helpless and bankrupt. Fourteen months later all France was under firm control, the invaders had been expelled, the French armies in turn occupied Belgium and were about to enter on twenty years of almost unbroken and effortless military triumph.

If their way was a blind alley, let us not deny them the longing for liberty and justice which moved them.

In their way the brigands, dressed in torn peasant costume with Bourbon rosettes, or in more gorgeous apparel, were avengers and champions of the people. If their way was a blind alley, let us not deny them the longing for liberty and justice which moved them.

destruction of the past, or rather the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century. Most young men and women at the century's end grow up in a permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times in which they live

E tanto a Grã-Bretanha quando o mundo sabiam que a revolução lançada nestas ilhas não só pelos comerciantes e empresários como através deles, cuja única lei era comprar no mercado mais barato e vender sem restrição no mais caro estava transformando o mundo. Nada poderia detê-la. Os deuses e os reis do passado eram impotentes diante dos homens de negócios e das máquinas a vapor do presente.

Quienes perciben con mayor intensidad el impacto de la globalización son quienes menos se benefician de ella.

En estas circunstancias, la democracia era más bien un mecanismo para formalizar las divisiones entre grupos irreconciliables.

It is significant that none of the modern secular states have neglected to provide national holidays giving occasions for assemblage. American Journal of Sociology, 1896–733

For, whatever was the case in de Tocqueville's day, not the passion for egalitarianism but an individualist, that is anti-authoritarian, antinomian though curiously legalistic anarchism, has become the core of the value system in the USA.

Mito e invenção são essenciais à política de identidade pela qual grupos de pessoas, ao se definirem hoje por etnia, religião ou fronteiras nacionais passadas ou presentes, tentam encontrar alguma certeza em um mundo incerto e instável, dizendo: Somos diferentes e melhores do que os Outros.

O domínio do passado não implica em uma imagem de imobilidade social. É compatível com visões cíclicas de mudança histórica, e certamente com a regressão e a catástrofe (ou seja, o fracasso em reproduzir o passado). É incompatível com a ideia de progesso contínuo.

Nevertheless, in some ways I had lost touch with many of the currents of French culture and theoretical discussion after the 1960s, and, although any admirer of Queneau and Perec cannot but be sympathetic to the French intellectual tradition of playing games with language, as French thinkers increasingly moved into the territory of 'postmodernism' I found them uninteresting, incomprehensible, and in any case of not much use to historians. Even their puns failed to grip.

La repugnancia a hacer la guerra no debe confundirse con la negativa a luchar

There may be a logical or historical reason why mid-Victorian English butchers should have been predominantly Conservative (a link with agriculture?) and grocers overwhelmingly Liberal (a link with overseas trade?), but none has been established, and perhaps what needs explaining is not this, but why these two omnipresent types of shopkeeper refused to share the same opinions, whatever they were.

Es cierto que los imperios se han construido a menudo con la ayuda de las armas, pero las armas no bastan para mantener el orden, como nos lo recuerda un viejo dicho que se remonta a los tiempos napoleónicos: «Puedes hacer lo que quieras con una bayoneta, salvo sentarte en ella».

The periodic famines, the burden of labour which made men old at forty and women at thirty, were acts of God; they only became acts for which men were held responsible in times of abnormal hardship or revolution.