This character appears in 53 books.
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The Age of Empire, 1875-1914
by E. J. Hobsbawm
Memorable Quotes by Eric Hobsbawm:
“For, as we shall see, the very tendencies in the pre-1914 economy which made the era so golden for the middle classes drove it towards world war, revolution and disruption, and precluded a return to the lost paradise”
“In short, politics and economics cannot be separated in a capitalist society, any more than religion and society in an Islamic one”
“The conquest of the globe by its ´developed´minority transformed images, ideas an aspirations, both by force and institutionss, by example and by social transformation”
“What imperialism brought to the elites or potential elites of the dependent world was therefore essentially ´westernization´.”
“Could world empires , so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the passivity of the many, could they last?”
“In the absence of monarchies, the flag itself could become the virtual embodiment of state, nation, and society, as in the USA where the practice of worshipping the flag as a daily ritual in the country's schools spread from the endo of the 1880s until it became universal.”
“Except in the Iberian world, always out of phase with other European develpments, anarchism nowhere in Europe became the majority ideology of even weak labour movements. Except in Latin countries, and - as the revolution of 1917 revealed- in Russia, anarchism was politically negligible”
“Contemporaries, ever since Nietzche, had no doubt that the crisis of the arts reflected the crisis of a society- the liberal bourgeois society of the nineteenth century- which, in one way or another, was in the process of destroying the bases of its existence, thesystems of value, convention and intellectal understanding which structured and ordered it.”
“All the same, the avant gardes of the last pre-1914, had progressed from Gistav Mahler to Kokoschka, Gropius and (a less succesful cultural investment) the expressionist Franz Werfel. they were taken up by a secrio og high fashion. That was all”
“All the same, the avant gardes of the last pre-1914 years marks a fundamental break in the history of the high arts since the Renaissance.”
“Tsarist Russia exemplified all the contradictions of the globe in the Age of Empire. All it would take to make them burst into simultaneous eruption was that world war which Europe increasingly expected, and found itself unable to prevent.”
“To the end of his days Gavrilo Princip, the assasin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, could not believe that his tiny match put the world in flames.”
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The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848
by E. J. Hobsbawm
Eric Hobsbawm: First in a series of 4
Memorable Quotes by Eric Hobsbawm:
“The products of other climates were still rarities, verging on luxury, except perhaps for sugar, the most important foodstuff imported from the tropics and the one whose swetness has created more human bitterness”
“They ( the British) used colonial power to rob the inhabitants of the East Indies”
“The Great Enciclopaedia of Diderot and D'Alembert was not merely a compendium of progressive social and political thought, but of technological and scientific progress”
“it is significant that the two chief centres of ideology were also those of the dual revolution, France and England: though in fact its ideas gained widest international currency in their French formulations ( even when these were merely gallicized versions of British ones)”
“At the beginning of his century witches were still widely burned; at its end enlightened governments like the Austrian had already abolished not only judicial torture but also slavery.”
“Yet in practice the leaders of the emancipation for which the enlightenment called were likely to be the middle ranks of society, the new, rational men of ability and merit rather than birth, and the social order which would emerge from their activities would be a 'bourgeois' and capitalist one”
“The dual revolution was to make European expansion irresistible, though it was also to provide the non-European world with the conditions and equipment for its eventual counter-attack”
“By any reckoning this was probably the most important event in world history, at any rate since the invention of agriculture and cities,”
“The traditional view which has seen the history of the British Industrial Revolution primarily in terms of cotton is thus correct”
“Its most serious consequences were social: the transition to the new economy created misery and discontent, the materials of social revolution.”
“The explotation of labour which kept its incomes at subsitence level, thus enabling the rich to accumulate the profits which financed industrialization (and their own ample comforts), antagonized the proletarian.”
“This immense industry (coal mining in England), though probably not expanding fast enough for really massive industrialization on the modern scale,nwas sufficiently large to stiulatenthe basic invention which was to transform the capital goods industries: the railway.”
“France provided the codes of law, the model of scientific and technical organization, the metric system of measurement for most countries. the ideology of the modern world first penetrated the ancient civilizations which had hitherto resisted European ideas through French influence. tis was the work of the French Revolution.”
“In times of revolution nothing is more powerful than the fall of symbols.”
“Peasant revolutions are vast, shapeless, anonymous, butnirresistible movements.”
“It was not a comfortable phase to live through, for most men were hungry and many afraid; but it was a phenomenon as awful and irreversible as the first nuclear explosion and all history has been permanently changed by it.”
“This revolutionary army (Napoleon's) was the most formidable child of the Jacobin Republic”
“He (Napoleon) had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in its majesty to shake off oppression. it was a more powerful myth than this, and not his memory, which inspired the revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his own country”
“In terms of political geography the French Revolution ended the European middle ages”
“If there was a flourishing religion among the late eighteenth century elite, it was rationalist, iluminist and anti-clerical Freemasonry”
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The Age of Capital, 1848-1875
by E. J. Hobsbawm
Eric Hobsbawm: second book in his series of four.
Memorable Quotes by Eric Hobsbawm:
“The revolutions of 1848 were ´the springtime of the peoples´-and like spring-, they did not last”
“It is no accident that the document of that year (1848) which has had the most lasting and significant effect on world history is the Communist Manifesto”
“The paradox of nationalism was that in forming its own nation it automaticallly created the counternationalism of those whom it now forced into the choice between assimilation and inferiority”
“The most obvious contrast between develpoed and underdeveloped worlds was and still remains that between poverty and wealth”
“This is not simply to write history with the wisdom of hindsight, though there is no good reason why the historian should deprive himself of his most powerful asset, for which any betting man and investor would give his eye-teeth, namely the knowledge of whar actually happened”
“For the main characteristic of the bourgeoisie as a class was that it was a body of persons of power and influence, independent of the power and influence of traditional birth and status”
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Making History
An Introduction to the History and Practices of a Discipline
by Peter Lambert, Philipp Schofield
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