Revolutionaries

Back in print, groundbreaking essays from “the popular people’s historian who has influenced our understanding of the previous three centuries like no other” (The Boston Globe)

“One of the few genuinely great historians of our century,” according to the New Republic, Eric Hobsbawm produced a canon of landmark books—including The Age of Capital, The Age of Revolution, Bandits, and The Age of Extremes—that both set the standard for radical scholarship and influenced historical thinking across the political spectrum.

Now back in print after thirty years, Revolutionaries is vintage Hobsbawm, written masterfully amid one of the century’s most intense periods of political and social upheaval, putting those events in historical context. Few observers were as astute as Hobsbawm at probing, criticizing, and clarifying radical movements, whether in Beijing or Berkeley. Ranging from historical investigations into communism to contemporary appraisals of revolutionary movements and meditations on Marxism, Hobsbawm’s commentaries are essential guides to ideas and people that changed the face of the twentieth century.

Hobsbawm’s essays retain a freshness that speaks both to his brilliance as a writer and scholar, as well as to the perennial importance of his subjects. At a time when the very concept of revolution has been largely discredited, these essays remind us of the enduring importance of radical investigations into—and solutions to—society’s persistent inequalities and injustices.

Praise

“An unusually rewarding book; almost every item bears witness to Professor Hobsbawm’s sharp intelligence and felicitous style.”
Times Literary Supplement
“For sheer intelligence, Hobsbawm has no superior in the historical profession.>”
The Guardian
“A highly readable, lucid and well written book from which any student of contemporary revolutions can derive a great deal of profit. ”
New Statesman
“What distinguishes Hobsbawm is his ability to describe, make sense of, and provoke debate about the changing nature of the modern world as a whole. ”
The Washington Post

Books by Eric Hobsbawm

Interesting Times
A Twentieth-Century Life

Eric Hobsbawm

Industry and Empire
The Birth of the Industrial Revolution

Eric Hobsbawm

Fractured Times
Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century

Eric Hobsbawm

Goodreads Reviews