Frases de Eric Hobsbawm

„A história, mesmo quando generaliza com muita eficácia - e em minha opinião ela não vale muita coisa se não genereliza -, sempre está atenta à dessemelhança. A primeira lição que um historiador profissional aprende é ficar à espreita de anacronismo ou de diferenças naquilo que à primeira vista parece ser a mesma coisa, como a monarquia britânica em 1797 e 1997.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm

On History

„Naturalmente, minha objeção não é quanto aos historiadores tomarem de empréstimo técnicas e ideias de outras ciências sociais e incorporarem a seu próprio trabalho os mais recentes desenvolvimentos nessas ciências, desde que sejam úteis e pertinentes. É quanto à distribuição de bagagem histórica em uma série de vasos não comunicantes. Não existe uma coisa do tipo história econômica, social, antropológica, ou história psicanalística: existe apenas história.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm

On History

„O domínio do passado não implica em uma imagem de imobilidade social. É compatível com visões cíclicas de mudança histórica, e certamente com a regressão e a catástrofe (ou seja, o fracasso em reproduzir o passado). É incompatível com a ideia de progesso contínuo.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm

On History

„Mito e invenção são essenciais à política de identidade pela qual grupos de pessoas, ao se definirem hoje por etnia, religião ou fronteiras nacionais passadas ou presentes, tentam encontrar alguma certeza em um mundo incerto e instável, dizendo: "Somos diferentes e melhores do que os Outros.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm

On History

„É precisamente essa a dificuldade de uma antropologia histórica-e-social que abandona a velha crença nos procedimentos e vocações de ambas as disciplinas, por inadequadas que possam ser sub specie aeternitatis, principalmente para o tipo de modelos intelectuais que assolaram os departamentos de literatura. Fica muito difícil conferir estrutura intelectual e expositória ou literária aos nossos escritos, afora o risco de que nosso tema seja desconstruído em fragmentos unidos apenas pela experiência comum de uma crise de identidade incomunicável.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm

On History

„Como eu penso de volta, eu me pergunto, de novo e de novo: houve uma alternativa para o avanço indiscriminado, brutal, basicamente não planejado do Plano de Cinco Anos? Eu gostaria de poder dizer que houve, mas não posso. Não consigo encontrar uma resposta.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm

„Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm

The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/10/financial-crisis-capitalism-socialism-alternatives (2009).

„People may not like to meet bandits, especially on a dark night, but a taste for reading about them seems to be universal.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm

Preface to Pantheon Edition
Bandits (1969)

„Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm, livro The Age of Extremes

Fonte: The Age of Extremes (1992), p. 414.

„Banditry is freedom, but in a peasant society few can be free. most are shackled by double chains of lordship and labour, one reinforcing the other.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm

Fonte: Bandits (1969), Chapter Two
Contexto: Banditry is freedom, but in a peasant society few can be free. most are shackled by double chains of lordship and labour, one reinforcing the other. For what makes peasants the victim of authority is not as much their economic vulnerability - indeed they are as often as not virtually self sufficient - as their mobility.

„Uncertainty and unpredictability impended. Compass needles no longer had a North, maps became useless.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm, livro The Age of Extremes

Fonte: The Age of Extremes (1992), Chapter Eleven, Cultural Revolution, p.338-339
Contexto: The old moral vocabulary of rights and duties, mutual obligations, sin and virtue, sacrifice, conscience, rewards, and penalties, could no longer be translated into the new language of desired gratification. Once such practices and institutions were no longer accepted as part of a way of ordering society that linked people to each other and ensured social cooperation and reproduction, most of their capacity to structure human social life vanished. They were reduced simply expressions of individuals' preferences, and claims that the law should recognize the supremacy of these preferences. Uncertainty and unpredictability impended. Compass needles no longer had a North, maps became useless.

„As I think back, I ask myself, again and again: was there an alternative to the indiscriminate, brutal, basically unplanned rush forward of the Five-Year Plan? I wish I could say there was, but I cannot. I cannot find a answer.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm, livro The Age of Extremes

Fonte: The Age of Extremes (1992), Chapter Sixteen, End of Socialism

„Words are witnesses which often speak louder than documents.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm

Introduction
The Age of Revolution (1962)
Contexto: Words are witnesses which often speak louder than documents. Let us consider a few English words, which were invented or gained their modern meanings, substantially in the period of sixty years with which this volume deals. They are such words as 'industry', 'industrialist', 'factory,' middle class,' 'working class,' and 'socialism.' They include 'aristocracy,' as well as 'railway,' 'liberal' and 'conservative' as political terms, 'nationality,'scientist,' and 'engineer,' 'proletariat,' and (economic) 'crisis'.

„Why brilliant fashion-designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, is one of the most obscure questions in history; and, for the historian of culture, one of the most central.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm, livro The Age of Extremes

Fonte: The Age of Extremes (1992), Chapter Six, The Arts 1914-1945

„My object is to understand ad explain why things turned out the way they did, and how they hang together.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm, livro The Age of Extremes

Introduction
The Age of Extremes (1992)
Contexto: My object is to understand ad explain why things turned out the way they did, and how they hang together. For anyone of my age-group who has lived through all or most of the Short Twentieth Century this is inevitably also a autobiographical endeavor. We are talking about, amplifying (and correcting) our own memories. And we are talking as men and women of a particular time and place, involved, in various ways, in its history as actors in its dramas - however insignificant our parts - as observers of our times and, not least, as people whose views of the century have been formed by what we have come to see as its crucial events.

„Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm

„It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm

Fonte: How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism

„Happiness ( a term which caused its definers almost as much trouble as its pursuers) was each individual's supreme object; the greatest happiness of the greatest number was plainly the aim of society“

—  Eric Hobsbawm

Fonte: The Age of Revolution (1962), Chapter 13, Ideology: Secular

„The really frightening risk of war was neglect, filth, poor organization, defective medical services, and hygenic ignorance, which conditions (as in the troops) practically everybody.“

—  Eric Hobsbawm

Fonte: The Age of Revolution (1962), Chapter 4, War