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The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, by Eric Hobsbawm. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. S30.00. Pp. xii, 627.
Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes is a wonderful achievement in which telling details, sweeping observations, penetrating insights, and provocative judgments are felicitously combined by the most widely respected Marxist historian writing today. Emeritus Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, Hobsbawm is widely known in America because of his regular teaching at the New School for Social Research and elsewhere and his 14 previous books, including the three-volume history of the l9th century: The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, and The Age of Empire.
Tackling what he calls "the short twentieth century," meaning from 1914 to the end of the Soviet era, Hobsbawm argues that this history is best understood as falling into three periods: an "Age of Catastrophe" from 1914 to the aftermath of World War II that was marked by two world wars, two waves of global revolution, the crumbling of colonial empires, and a crisis of unprecedented depth for capitalism and liberal democracy; a "Golden Age," from 1950 until 1970, marked by "extraordinary" economic growth and social transformation worldwide; and finally a period of "Landslide," from 1970 to 1991, marked by global crises including mass unemployment, severe cyclical swings of national economies, growing inequality, shrinking state revenues, the erosion of the nation state, and the general chaos resulting from the collapse of Soviet socialism. As these divisions indicate, Hobsbawm's major focus is on the century's political economy. As in his previous volumes on the 19th century, to which this is a worthy successor, Hobsbawm also devotes chapters to the arts, social and cultural change, and the natural sciences and technology.
Hobsbawm draws on a truly amazing array of monographs written in several different languages by scholars in at least a score of lands, as well as on a variety of primary source material ranging from poetry and memoirs to United Nations...