Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm (/ˈhɒbz.bɔːm/; 9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012) was a British Marxist historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism.

[6] In 1929, when Hobsbawm was 12, his father died, and he started contributing to his family's support by working as an au pair and English tutor.

Upon the death of their mother in 1931, he and his sister Nancy were adopted by their maternal aunt, Gretl, and paternal uncle, Sidney, who married and had a son named Peter.

[6][7] Hobsbawm attended King's College, Cambridge, from 1936,[8] where he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain "in the form of the university's Socialist Club.

He was prevented from serving overseas after he attracted the attention of the security services by using the wall newspaper he edited during his army training to argue for the opening up of a Second Front, which was a demand made by the Communist Party of Great Britain at the time.

[5] Hobsbawm said there was a weaker version of McCarthyism that took hold in Britain and affected Marxist academics: "you didn't get promotion for 10 years, but nobody threw you out".

[9] According to Noel Annan in his Our Age, Hobsbawm was denied a lectureship at Cambridge by political enemies, and blocked for a time from a professorship at Birkbeck for the same reasons.

He published numerous essays in various intellectual journals, dealing with subjects such as barbarity in the modern age, the troubles of labour movements, and the conflict between anarchism and communism.

Among his final publications were Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism (2007), On Empire (2008) and the collection of essays How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840–2011 (2011).

He was a member of the Communist Party Historians Group from 1946 until its demise and subsequently president of its successor, the Socialist History Society, until his death.

"[30] Hobsbawm stressed that since communism was not created, the sacrifices were in fact not justified—a point he emphasised in Age of Extremes: Still, whatever assumptions are made, the number of direct and indirect victims must be measured in eight rather than seven digits.

[33] Regarding Queen Elizabeth II, Hobsbawm stated that constitutional monarchy in general has "proved a reliable framework for liberal-democratic regimes" and "is likely to remain useful".

[35] He believed there was an ancillary political, non-military reason for the bombings: "perhaps the thought that it would prevent America's ally the USSR from establishing a claim to a major part in Japan's defeat was not absent from the minds of the US government either.

Hobsbawm's capacity to store and retrieve detail has now reached a scale normally approached only by large archives with big staffs".

[9] In 2002, Hobsbawm was described by right-leaning magazine The Spectator as "arguably our greatest living historian—not only Britain's, but the world's",[37] while Niall Ferguson wrote: "That Hobsbawm is one of the great historians of his generation is undeniable ... His quartet of books beginning with The Age of Revolution and ending with The Age of Extremes constitute the best starting point I know for anyone who wishes to begin studying modern history.

"[38] In 2003, The New York Times described him as "one of the great British historians of his age, an unapologetic Communist and a polymath whose erudite, elegantly written histories are still widely read in schools here and abroad".

[39] James Joll wrote in The New York Review of Books that "Eric Hobsbawm's nineteenth century trilogy is one of the great achievements of historical writing in recent decades".

Telling that kind of history in a way that is as compelling as a detective story is a real challenge of style and composition: in the tetralogy, Hobsbawm shows how to do it.

[43] With regard to the impact of his Marxist outlook and sympathies on his scholarship, Ben Pimlott saw it as "a tool not a straitjacket; he's not dialectical or following a party line", although Judt argued that it has "prevented his achieving the analytical distance he does on the 19th century: he isn't as interesting on the Russian revolution because he can't free himself completely from the optimistic vision of earlier years.

[45] In a 1994 interview on BBC television with Canadian academic Michael Ignatieff, Hobsbawm said that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens under Stalin would have been worth it if a genuinely communist society had been the result.

[46][48] The following year, when asked the same question on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, if "the sacrifice of millions of lives" would have been worth the future communist society, he replied: "That's what we felt when we fought the Second World War".

[46] Tony Judt was of the opinion that Hobsbawm "clings to a pernicious illusion of the late Enlightenment: that if one can promise a benevolent outcome it would be worth the human cost.

Whereas people like Arthur Koestler left the Party after seeing the friendly reception of Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Moscow during the years of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939–1941),[50] Hobsbawm stood firm even after the Soviet interventions of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Prague Spring.

He admits to having been dismayed when, two years later, Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party.

Didn't you know about the induced famine, the horrors of collectivisation, the false confessions, the terror within the Party, the massive forced labour of the gulag?

Regarding the execrable pact between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which shocked many former communist sympathizers into lives of anticommunism, Mr. Hobsbawm dismisses the "zig-zags and turns of Comintern and Soviet policy," specifically the "about-turn of 1939–41," which "need not detain us here."

In one sense, Mr. Hobsbawm's admirers are right about his erudition: He possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of Marxist thought, specifically Italian communism and pre-Soviet socialist movements.

[58] Following Hobsbawm's death reactions included praise for his "sheer academic productivity and prowess" and "tough reasoning" in The Guardian.

[59] Reacting to news of Hobsbawm's death, Ed Miliband called him "an extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics ...

[53] Owing to his status as a widely read and prominent Communist historian, and the fact that his ideology had influenced his work, Hobsbawm has been credited with spreading Marxist thought around the globe.