In it, Hobsbawm comments on what he sees as the disastrous failures of state socialism, capitalism, and nationalism; he offers an equally sceptical take on the progress of the arts and changes in society in the latter half of the twentieth century.

"The record of forecasters in the past thirty or forty years, whatever their professional qualification as prophets, has been so spectacularly bad that only governments and economic research institutes still have, or pretend to have, much confidence in it.

"[1] He quotes President Calvin Coolidge, in a message to Congress on December 4, 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression, as saying "The country can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism.

In particular, State Socialism always dispensed with the democratic element of the socialist vision: "Lenin... concluded from the start that the liberal horse was not a runner in the Russian revolutionary race.

"[16] "The botched peace settlements after 1918 multiplied what we, at the end of the twentieth century, know to be the fatal virus of democracy, namely the division of the body of citizens exclusively along ethnic-national or religious lines.

"[19] "As it happened, the regimes most deeply committed to laissez-faire economics were also sometimes, and notably in the case of Reagan's United States and Thatcher's Britain, profoundly and viscerally nationalist and distrustful of the outside world.

"[20] He points up the irony that "[T]he most dynamic and rapidly growing economy of the globe after the fall of Soviet socialism was that of Communist China, leading Western business-school lectures and the authors of management manuals, a flourishing genre of literature, to scan the teachings of Confucius for the secrets of entrepreneurial success.

"[21] Ultimately, in world terms, he sees capitalism being just as much of a failure as state socialism: "The belief, following neoclassical economics, that unrestricted international trade would allow the poorer countries to come closer to the rich, runs counter to historical experience as well as common sense.

With reference to the contemporary United States (at the time of writing) he points out, "In 1991, 58 per cent of all black families in the United States were headed by a single woman and 70 per cent of all children were born to single mothers,"[26] and "In 1991 15 per cent of what was proportionally the largest prison population in the world — 426 prisoners per 100,000 population – were said to be mentally ill."[27] He finds damning statistics to back up his claim of the total failure of state socialism to promote the general welfare: "In 1969, Austrians, Finns and Poles could expect to die at the same average age (70.1 years) but in 1989, Poles had a life expectancy about four years shorter than Austrians and Finns,"[28] "...The great [Chinese] famine of 1959–61, probably the greatest famine of the twentieth century: According to official Chinese statistics, the country's population in 1959 was 672.07 millions.

He writes, "Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and a number of other popular divinities fell victim of a life-style designed for early death.

However, he does use youth culture as a lens to view the changes in the late-twentieth-century social order: Hobsbawm goes on to write that "The cultural revolution of the latest twentieth century can thus best be understood as the triumph of the individual over society, or rather, the breaking of the threads which in the past had woven human beings into social textures"[34] and evokes this as paralleling Margaret Thatcher's claim that 'There is no society, only individuals'.

Moreover, Said commended Hobsbawm's ability to draw conclusions from political and economic trends in the West, but criticised him for being unaware of relevant debates in the historical study of non-Western societies.

Said also lamented the lack of "a view from within" in the book, constructed with the experiences of witnesses and activists, as opposed to the large scale and impersonal overview that Hobsbawm offered.

[39] Lawrence Freedman wrote that the book set the standards for accounts of the twentieth century and praised it for its "powerful analysis" and "broad sweep".