Customer Reviews

The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I recommend this book to everyone who wishes to understand (or at least begin to do so) the 20th century... In my opinion, that is an imperative, because if we don't understand our past, we won't be able to see our present clearly, and we will also be deprived from a good perspective regarding our future. As Hobsbwam says, things "can only be understood as part of a particular historical context".

In "The Age of Extremes", Hobsbawm's explains us his idea that the 20th century began in 1914 (with the outbreak of World WarI), and ended in 1991 (with the collapse of the USSR). That is the reason why he calls it "the short century". He divides that "short century" in three parts: an age of catastrophe (from 1914 to the end of World War II), a golden age (1947 - 1973) and the Landslide (1973 - 1991).

Hobsbawm not only delves into politics, but also into economics, technology, and art, all with a profound knowledge of the subject and a caustic wit that I find irresistible. Yes, of course that there are a lot of history books regarding the 20th century. As a matter of fact, I've read many of them... But this is still my favorite, because it manages to both interesting and clear, entertaining and useful.

Belen Alcat

Fukuyama claimed that with the fall of the Eastern Block, history was over. Wrong, says Hobsbavn - only an epoch has ended. The short twentieth century, the age dominated by war. Hobsbavn revolutionised history by refusing to adhere to the somewhat artificial restraint of centuries. Instead he has split up the ninetenth and twentieth centuries in four distinct epochs. And does it work! This was his fourth book on the subject, and it created quite a stir when it came out.
In retrospect it seems obvious to say that up until 1991 we lived in an age that were stillsuffering from the effects of the first world war. Hobsbawn even claims that the first world war did not really end until 1991. Now we have entered an era which is ruled by other historical processes.
Hobsbawn is a socialist, but he does not rub it in, in this book at least. Rather, he, for me at least, comes out as a very clear thinker. He is not stuck in ideology, especially when he praises Ronald Reagan, or the northern European monarchies. His ideas about art during the age of extremes are interesting, but are bound to provoke; are the only operas of note during the twentieth century really just King Ubu and Peter Grimes?

This is a really impressive performance by this distinguished historian. Hobsbawm seems to know everything about the 20th century, has actually lived through most of it and writes from the combined perspective of a remarkably accomplished scholar and direct observer of events. Readers should be aware that this book is a sequel to his impressive trilogy on the 19th century, The Age or Revolution, The Age of Capital, and The Age of Empire. In those books, Hobsbawm followed two key themes, the impact of industrial capitalism on European and world history, and the persistence through the 19th century of the revolutionary tradition that begins with the French Revolution. Readers should be aware also that this book is not a convential narrative overview but follows these major themes with considerable analysis. Some readers (see some reviews below) are put off by Hobsbawm's marxian (not the same as Marxist) approach. This approach, however, is a powerful tool for making sense of the complexities of the past century. Hobsbawm is an avowed Marxist but his work is not doctrinaire in any sense. In this book, for example, he remarks that the 19th century really was a century of progress, both material and moral. Not the statement of a doctrinaire leftist. His erudition is remarkable but not showy and employed only as needed to carry forward his narrative and analysis. This book is never boring, always compelling and challenging. The focus of this book is very much on Europe and North America. Hobsbawm is explicitly, unashamedly, and appropriately 'eurocentric' in his emphasis on these regions as the key theatres for the actions of 20th century history. The best overviews of complex historical topics combine narrative with thematic analysis as a way of unifying the narrative. See, for example, Patterson's recent Grand Expectations, an overview of recent American history in which the quest for rights by traditionally disadvantaged groups is treated as a unifying theme of our recent past. The Age of Extremes is a remarkable combination of narration and analysis that illuminates the darkness of the past century.

Hobesbawm is the master of looking at history in general terms, extrapolating general trends and terms in a way that are so obvious but generally overlooked by most mainstream historians. Like the fact that in the span of two generations a university education spread from less than 1% of the population of the Western industrialised countries to more than 40% of the population. In an even shorter period of time in 1930 1 in 4 people worked on a farm. Now 1 in 100 do. WIth a little reflection we can see the breakneck pace of the the speed of this short 20th Century (1914 - 1991).

Although the above may seem banal it has implications for the entire planet and is reflective of the changes in the way the world feeds itself to the way that industry organises itself around the processes of efficiency.

Hobesbawm also notes the reoccuring theme of the fate of what used to be called the industrial working class and how "class" as a term has become increasingly meaningless -- with modern well pampered industrialised union workers voting for Bush, because they have more in common with him than they do with with those in society who are truly powerless -- such as those comprising the unfortunate term -- the underclass. This is a constant bugbear for those who, clinging to traditional marxist interpretations, think that the underclass and the working class are and should be, one and same. It should also serve as pause for consideration for anyone who simply considers Hobesbawn a "Marxist Historian" -- he may be, but I never found a shred of evidence to butress this supposed self-evident truth.

Hobsbawm also points out the rise of the underclass has been in direct proportion with the rise of industrial and economic efficiency and the importance of knowledge-based industries. In what he calls the "Golden Age" (roughly from 1940 - 1970) industry was able to utilise almost any working person in some way or another. Scales of efficiency, globalisation and the microchip, have meant that the record low levels of unemployment of those times are a permanent thing of the past. There will alwayse be a permanent group of unemployable or under-employable people in our midst that will always be subject to the will of "market forces." Having lived in partly in both worlds I would strongly agree with him. The societal effects of this permanent group are less clear, and Hobesbawm does not pretend to know all the answers.

One person once recommended Paul Johnson's "Modern Times" as an antidote for Hobsbawm. While Johnson is a wonderful romp, his conclusions and observations and general historiography are totally different. Hobsbawn has trenchent and at times profound analysis on Man and his historical condition. Johnson comes up as a wonderful, yet clearly lightweight intellect.

The only thing I can cite as not meeting my expectations was the fact that Hobsbawn writes historiography and he is little tempted to delve in to anecdotal evidence -- he mainly cites scholarly studies solid historical first sources -- to build up a case to butress his mostly common sense arguments. This lack of anecdotal evidence, the mark of historians such as Barbara Tuchman, means that the text can be dense at times and there are, at times, too many profound thoughts to be digested in a single read. Therefore I had to balance the text with a lighter historical read. But that should not be interpreted as a weakness, it is however a good excuse to read the book yet again.

A major tour de force for any thinking person whatever their political stripe.

Hobsbawm was the first historian to fashion the concept of the "Short 20th Century" as the ideological struggle touched off as a consequence of the First World War and ending with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Most of the other histories of the 20th Century -- either global or European -- have accepted this framework, with good reason.

In "Age of Extremes," Prof. Hobsbawm makes sense of an often-chaotic period in world history. The title is especially apt, as the main movements in the struggle were driven by extreme manifestations of all kinds of ideology, on both the right (Nazi-fascism, militarism, capitalism) and on the left (Communism). While I do not share all of Hobsbawm's opinions and conclusions, his insights are a great starting point for understanding the turbulence of the 20th Century. His interpretation is also refreshingly different from the post-Cold War triumphalism of some other authors.

He also does not ignore the strivings and yearnings of emerging nations that did not play a leading role in the ideological struggles of the great powers. The tone of this material suggests that these groups may play a more central role in the drama of the new century.

As we look to the 21st Century with some uncertainty (after the events of Sept. 11), Hobsbawm's book is a good way to find out how we got to this point in history.

Eric Hobsbawm is one of the best historians I have read. I have read his entire series - Age of Revolution, Capital, Empire, and Extremes. Hobsbawm goes much beyond just recouting historical events. He relates them to other disciplines like Literature, Arts, Science (yes, science and technology), architecture, and many more aspects of life.
This series starts with the French Revolution and ends with the disintegration of Soviet Union. The vast canvas painted by Hobsbawm is truly insightful. This series is particularly helpful in understanding the birth of nation states, the evolution of democracy, and the traumatic finale in the middle of the last century. Hobsbawm open acceptance of a having a 'point of view' is indeed refreshing. His Marxian approach is helpful in making sense of the events of the last 2.5 centuries.
My most important learning from Hobsbawm is that if we do not learn from the past, we will not be able to handle the future. I strongly recommend all four books as required reading for anyone who wishes to understand how we got to this point in History.

In the first part of his book,the writer comments that the statements of the common people, he felt were more relevant in writing history. This small piece of his thinking indicates clearly that his book can not but be a work for the vox populi at the end of the 20th century. His non-dogmatic approach peeps through every page of his book. He did not hesitate for a moment to go against the commonly held notions about the history of the 20th century(1914-1991).His approach to Stalin shows how balanced he is in writing his book. But the book raises more questions than it could successfully answer. The book ends with a sort of pessimistic note , that is unbecoming of a Marxist thinker. The idea that Soviet Union, ironocally did good to its antagonist, the capitalist system; both in peace and war,is a good observation. The chapter 'The Golden Years', fails to explain the reasons for the unprecedented development of capitalism for over 25 years after world war second. This failure indicates that the writer did not get the fullest possible grip on the Marxist economics.This weakness is visible all along in various chapters.The concepts of 'scissors crisis' and the 'proletarian scissors' explain the origins and the end of the Soviet system well.The nature of competition between capitalism and socialism, as that of competition of unequals is a good observation. His attack on the third international, in distancing the Social Democrats is not realistic. The Leninist stand that the liberals are the biggest enemies of the proletarian movement, was vindicated all along by history. The observation that the Russia was not ready for even a liberal democratic upsurge in 1917, leave alone Bolshevik revolution was revealing.It proves that from the onset Russian revolution had its own roots of failure with in itself. The book shatters the illusion that Soviet Union stood for the revolutios world wide, all along. The Soviet Unions narrow agenda of holding on to power, and self-preservation was well elucidated by the author. This element of the Soviet policy infact has done more damage to the revolutions world wide, than benefit.The role of China, in fostering revolutions in the third world was put under scrutiny. The conclusions on the years of Great depression were educative.The observation that the western free-market advocates have forgotten the history proves the wholesale amnesia of the mankind and its leaders in particular. The futile attempt to restore the 19th century type of free-market economy was well demonstrated all through the book. The book overall is objective. But at the same time not so penetrative of the 20th century developmens. It can be used as a starting point to critically study the history of the 20th century. But, after reading the book the reader will have more questions along with many clarified doubts.

I agreed with most of the complimentary comments made in other reviews, but the underlying theme of the book, which is stated in the title, is at best a half-truth. Hobsbawm thinks the "Short 20th Century" was the age of extremes--among other things he says it was extremely violent. That's true, but where he goes wrong is in contrasting this violence with his idealized Eurocentric view of the 19th Century. Several times he says the 19th Century was an age of moral progress, and that the 20th Century saw a regression into barbarism. If one only looks at events inside Europe this is true. It is manifestly false if you look outside of Europe. Hannah Arendt knew better than this--in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism she says the mass murders of the 20th Century dictatorships were prefigured in the mass murders of the imperialist powers. King Leopold II of Belgium was responsible for millions of deaths in his Congo Free State--in one of his earlier volumes Hobsbawm mentions the atrocities in the Congo, but vastly underestimates their extent. Adam Hochschild in his book King Leopold's Ghost uses the middle-range figure of ten million dead. And this isn't the only example of "megadeaths" before 1914. Mike Davis in the recently published "Late Victorian Holocausts" shows that the British policies in India caused most of the tens of millions of famine deaths in that country during the late 1800's, not to mention the one million dead in Ireland. This is comparable to what Stalin did in the early 1930's, except that Stalin's famines killed fewer people. Nor are manmade cataclysms limited to countries directly under the control of European imperialists. China went through civil wars which killed 20 million, followed by a series of famines which killed tens of millions more. These were mostly preventable deaths. (And to some degree the European-imposed opium trade contributed to the weakness and corruption of the Chinese rulers of the time. 18th Century China had a much better record in famine relief.) Add to this the massive numbers who died in northern Africa under the French, the American conquest of the Philippines, etc..., and you have a 19th century which, considering the smaller world population then, was every bit as bad as the 20th.

Hobsbawm is a Marxist historian who specializes in the 19th Century. It is surprising to see how little he seems to know about the horrific results of European imperialism. What happened in the 20th Century, as others have pointed out, was that the brutality of the imperial era was brought back home to Europe.

However good Hobsbawm's analysis of 19th Century Europe may have been, his analysis fails in this volume, his history of what he labels the "Short Twentieth Century" from 1914 to 1991.
The book first of all lacks structure. To take, for example, his chapter entitled "World Revolution", a subject on which one would suppose Hobsbawm is an expert, one can read it and still not understand the overall point Hobsbawm is trying to make, as he doubles back on himself, contradicts himself, ignores evidence, cites evidence that has nothing to do with the point he seems to be trying to elucidate, etc. etc. He ranges across places and times without any guiding principle. The chapter is supposed to focus on Marxist/Communist world revolution in the context of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia. But he gives no historical detail about the actual course of the Revolution (hard to imagine a history of the Russian Revolution that does not mention Kerensky and mentions Trotsky only in passing, as a post-revolutionary figure, but Hobsbawm does just this), or about the principles of Marxism/Leninism that motivated the chief actors in the Revolution. You will read this chapter and know nothing about what early Communism meant, the course of the Revolution, the attempted Western interventions, or how the Communists were able to seize power in a principally agrarian, non-industrialized country. You will hear a lot about the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and bits and pieces about other not necessarily Communist revolutionary movements throughout the 20th Century, but you won't know how this all ties together. Ultimately, Hobsbawm is left with vapid, unhelpful conclusions such as: "[T]he history of the short Twentieth Century cannot be understood without the Russian Revolution and its direct and indirect effects." Well, that's helpful, isn't it, especially as he fails to offer any cogent analysis of what those effects were. How good to know that, after 75 years of Communism, "it is obvious that a return to the world of the ancien regimes of those countries is as impossible as it was in France after the revolutionary and Napoleonic era..." and that "even where the experience of communism has been reversed [which seems to contradict the prior sentence], the present of the ex-communist countries, and presumably their future, bear, and will continue to bear, the specific marks of the counter-revolution which replaced the revolution." You can get this kind of trenchant analysis from a 500-word column in Time or Newsweek. One expects more from a person alleged to be one of the 20th Century's greatest historians.
Hobsbawm also suffers from some rather tired old ideas, which he passes on uncritically. Discussing the Spanish Civil War he parenthetically asks "whether popular politics in a less macho society than the Iberian would have been as murderously iconoclastic is a counterfactual question [and] one on which serious research about women's attitudes might nevertheless throw some light." So he manages to buy into the stereotype of Spanish machismo (different from being macho, of course, but that's the kind of sloppy thinking rife throughout the book) and certain stereotypes of women as less politically violent than men. Furthermore, who is to say that Russian society in 1917 was less "macho", whatever he thinks that word means, than Spanish society in the 1930s? And wasn't the Russian Revolution actually just as "murderously iconoclastic", whatever that phrase is supposed to mean. Finally, there's actually plenty of research about this, if he had bothered to look at any of the feminist literature. All this statement reveals is that Hobsbawm's biases are firmly stuck in the mid-late 20th Century. These stale biases show why Hobsbawm is unable to offer any interesting or original perspectives on his subject matter.
Finally, there is also no excuse for the number of outright grammatical errors in the text. In this same chapter, we are told that "the feelings of the actual 'masses' ... was often at odds with their leaders' ideas." On the very next page we discover that "the kind of revolution which sees the structure of political order and authority suddenly evaporate leav[es] the man on the street to their own devices." I would fail a student who could not even get his subjects and verbs to agree. For a historian of this stature to fail to do so repeatedly is simply shameful. And there are dozens upon dozens of such grammatical errors throughout the book, far more than can be noted in an on-line review. I was truly appalled.
In short, the book is a poorly drafted and poorly written mess, lacking both an overarching thesis and relevant historical detail. It reads more like Hobsbawm's disorganized and unedited notes for a book than a rigorously written analysis. Don't waste your time reading it. I wish I hadn't.

I have just finished Age of Extremes and not being an academic I cannot comment on the accuracy or leanings of the author. I try to read all non fiction with an open mind.
Back to the book . . . having been born in the early 60's I found reading about that period onwards a little like reading an obituary. The names and places familiar, while stimulating memories of my earlier youth. Not entirely aware of the historical happenings as I lived through this period it was a little scary to read an historian's point of view and account, of how we have arrived at this particular point in time. So here we are, now what. Do I lay awake at night wondring what under handedness is presently happening in the world and maybe reading about it historically in 30 years (if I am alive). Hobsbawm implies that apathy on the part of the general western populace vibrates throughout the later part of the 20th century in regards to the stastical drop off of voting participation. I am starting to feel that if there is not a general call to turn up at the polls than we will most definately have only ourselves to blame for future uninspiring, unqualified leadership.
I found the book relatively easy to follow if not a little challenging to keep up with the references.
Give the book a bash and get a concise thought provoking account of our times.