Miss Case

In this essay I am going to review an article which is written by Eric Hobsbawm and it is about the short twentieth century.

Eric Hobsbawm was a communist historian who wrote several books about the twentieth and the nineteenth century i.e. The Age of Capital 1848-1875. The things that were going on in the 1930s have marked him which is why he expressed his emotions through his book of the age of Extremes. The Age of Extremes was written in 1914-1991 but was later published by Michael Joseph in 1994, and it was written about the things that happen in the 20th century for example the First World War and the Second World War. The author has written the Age of Extremes for the late twentieth century audience as he was a writer who had experienced of the things that happen in the 20th century and wrote about it as he observed.

Hobsbawm splits the short 20th century in to three different phases which was the age of Catastrophe (1914-1945), the Golden Age (1950-1970), and the Landslide 1970-1989). Even though he states that in the preamble that "nobody can write the history of the twentieth century like that of any other era, if only because nobody can write about his or her lifetime as one can write about a period known only from outside," his effort to combined a firsthand experience and a degree of objective reality is very admirable.

Hobsbawm undeniably touches that the October Revolution of 1917 was the most important event of the short twentieth century because of its influence on every parts of the world growth.

Hobsbawm describes the 20th century as the most deadly century the world as ever seen which caused the death of many human beings more than ever before. Not only does he talk about the century in the most negative brutal way but he also talks about the economic growth the century had

Hobsbawm compares how our generation and his generation are so different because we have more opportunities compare to the people of his generation and that maybe the reason why we are so disengaged from history. He mentions how history affects everyone around the world and it's not only the historians who have history as part of their life so he suggests that we should never forget our history.

In the end of the article Hobsbawm agrees with Karl Marx, about his theory of social relations and how capitalism has always existed and will continue to be.

The thing that is likeable about the authors theory is that he draws your attention to the article because he talks about our generation quite often and he talks to us in a way that makes it seem like he is warning us so we don't make the same mistakes people made after the first world war and how we need to do things to prevent 3rd world war from happening as we don't know what the future holds for us.