Customer Reviews

Revolutionaries; contemporary essays

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This is a collection of Hobsbawm's essays on the subject(s), originally published at the height of the New Left. It's marked by its sober assessment of the real problems facing those who would remake society, despite (or perhaps because of?) the author's clear sympathies for such a project and for the people who attempted it.

The essay on Vietnam (published in 1965 just as the United States was first committing troops in large numbers), which with dialectical precision lays out the reasons why the defeat of the United States was inevitable, is alone worth the purchase price.

As said above, the book "Revolutionaries" is a collection of mostly book reviews and a few essays by Eric Hobsbawm, written in the 1960s. Written in Hobsbawm's usual accessible and lively style, he considers all sorts of topics related to socialism and revolution. The quality of the reviews/essays varies a bit, but is generally high, and there are a few gems in it. Interesting in particular are his criticism of Hannah Arendt's idealist conception of revolution, his articles on historians and communism, his piece on the May 1968 movement in France, and an essay on "the revolution and sex" (which should really be a book of its own). Less succesful are some pieces on guerrilla war and on Leninism and revisionism. A curious addition is an article on revolution and cities, in which Hobsbawm discusses the oft-remarked, but rarely thoroughly analyzed, relation between city layout and planning on the one hand and the success of riots and insurrections on the other. Nowadays with Marxist influence firmly rooted in the area of social geography as well, there is more work on this, but Hobsbawm's article is a good preview.

On the whole, certainly worth a casual read.