"Clearly some historians have shifted from 'circumstances' to 'men' (including women), or have discovered that a simple base-superstructure model and economic history are not enough, or - since the pay-off from such approaches has been very substantial - are no longer enough. Some may well have convinced themselves that there is an incompatibility between their 'scientific' and 'literary' functions. But it is not necessary to analyse the present fashions in history entirely as a rejection of the past, and insofar as they cannot be entirely analysed in such terms, it will not do."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
CommunistsAcademics from the United KingdomNon-fiction authors from the United KingdomMarxistsHistorians from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Chap. 14 : On the Revival of Narrative
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_Hobsbawm
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Eric Hobsbawm
1920 – 1991
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, CH, FRSL, FBA (9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012) was a British Marxist historian and author and a leading theorist of the Communist Party of Great Britain (1920–1991), and former president of Birkbeck College, University of London.
109 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Eric Hobsbawm →
Related Quotes
"First, utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major …"
"[H]istorians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to the heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw…"
"Liberalism was failing. If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalis…"
"Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle."
"Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous weal…"
"As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, no…"
"Though the web of history cannot be unravelled into separate threads without destroying it, a certain amount of subdi…"
"Words are witnesses which often speak louder than documents. Let us consider a few English words, which were invented…"
"It is not strictly accurate to call the ‘enlightenment’ a middle class ideology, though there were many enlighteners—…"
"The love affair between intellectuals and Marxism which is so characteristic of our age developed relatively late in …"