The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991
by Eric Hobsbawm, 1994
Abacus (2002 reprint)
II, p 5-6
The record of forecasters in the past thirty of 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.
I, p 34
The war had made the habitual and sensible process of international negociation suspect as 'secret diplomacy'. This was largely a reaction against the secret treaties arranged among the Allies during the war [...] The Bolsheviks, discovering these sensible documents in the Tsarist archives, had promptly published them for the world to read.
II, p 43
Would the horror of the holocaust be any less if historians concluded that it exterminated not six millions (the rough and almost certainly exaggerated original estimate) but five or even four?
I, p 58
In 1917 Lenin [...] concluded from the start that the liberal horse was not a runner in the Russian revolutionary race.
IV, p 72
Curiously enough, the Chinese Communist regime, though it criticized the USSR for betraying revolutionary movements after the break between the two countries, has no comparable record of practical support for Third World liberation movements.
VII, p 82
Capitalism had proved far easier to overthrow where it was weak or barely existed than in its heartlands.
President Calvin Coolidge, Message to Congress, 4 December 1928, p 85
"The country can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism."
III, p 103
Those of us who lived through the years of the Great Slump still find it almost impossible to understand how the orthodoxies of the pure free market, then so obviously discredited, once again came to preside over a global period of depression in the late 1980s and 1990s, which once again, they were equally unable to understand or to deal with.
p 104
In 1933 Moscow insisted that the Italian communist leader P. Togliatti withdraw the suggestion that, perhaps, social-democracy was not the primary danger, at least in Italy.
II, p 117
Mussolini could have readily dispensed with his house philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, and Hitler probably neither knew nor cared about the support of the philosopher Heidegger.
p 124
Was not the proverbial argument in favour of fascist Italy that 'Mussolini made the trains run on time'?
V, p 139
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.
V, p 168
The communist revolutions actually made (Yugoslavia, Albania, later China) were made against Staline's advice. The Soviet view was that, both internationally and within each country, post-war politics should continue within the framework of the all-embrassing anti-fascist alliance [...] There is no doubt that Staline meant all this seriously, and tried to prove it by dissolving the Comintern in 1943, and the Communist Party of the USA in 1944.
VII, p 172
The reductio ad absurdum of [...] anti-colonialist logic was the attempt by an extremist Jewish fringe group in Palestine to negociate with the Germans (via Damascus, then under the Vichy French) for help in liberating Palestine from the British, with they regarded as the top priority for Zionism. (A militant of the group involved in this mission eventually became prime minister of Israel: Yitzhak Shamir.)
I, p 322
In 1991, 58 per cent of all black families in the USA were headed by a single woman and 70 per cent of all children were born to single mothers.
II, p 324
Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and a number of other populars divinities fell victim of a life-style designed for early death. What made such deaths symbolic was that youth, which they represented, was impermanent by definition.
p 325-327
The novelty of the new youth culture was threefold.
First, 'youth' was not seen as a preparatory stage of adulthood but, in some sense, as the final stage of full human development. As in sport, the human activity in which youth is supreme, and which now defined the ambitions of more human beings than any other, life clearly went donwhill after the age of thirty [...]
The second novelty of the youth culture [...]: it was or became dominant in the 'developed market economies' [...] What children could learn from their parents became less obvious than what parents did not know and children did. The role of generations was reversed. Blue jeans [...] pioneered [...] by students who did not wish to look like their elders, came to appear [...] below many a grey head.
The third peculiarity of the new youth culture in urban societies was its astonishing internationalism. [...] The English language of rock lyrics was often not even translated. [...] The heartlands of Western youth culture themselves were the opposite of culturally chauvinist [...] They welcomed styles imported from the Caribbean, Latin America and, from the 1980s, increasingly Africa.
IV, p 334
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.
p 337
Margaret Thatcher: 'There is no society, only individuals'.
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. [USA]
I, p 379
What remained [after revolution and civil war] was a Russia even more firmly anchored in the past [...]
[W]hat actually governed the country was an undergrowth of smaller and larger bureaucracy, on average even less educated and qualified than before.
I, p 412
As it happened, the regimes most deeply committed to laissez-faire economics were also sometimes, and notably in the case of Reagan's USA and Thatcher's Britain, profondly and viscerally nationalist and distrustful of the outside world. The historian cannot but note that the two attitudes are contradictory.
p 412-413
[T]he most dynamic and rapidly growing economy of the globe after the fall of Soviet communism 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 enterpreneurial success.
V, p 460
The world of the third millenium will therefore almost certainly continue to be one of violent politics and violent political changes. The only thing uncertain about them is where they will lead.
I, p 466-467 (note)
The great 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. At the natural growth rate of the preceding seven years, which was at least 20 per thousand per year, one would have expected the Chinese population in 1961 to have been 699 millions. In fact it was 658.59 millions or forty millions less than might have been expected.
p 469
Mao was fundamentally convinced of the importance of struggle, conflict and high tension as something that was not only essential to life but prevented the relapse into the weaknesses of the old Chinese society, whose very insistence on unchanging permanence and harmony had been its weakness.
II p 472
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.
V, p 488
Yet hardly anyone believed in the system or felt any loyalty to it, not even those who governed it.
II, p 516-517
[Post-war modernist painting] consisted largely in a series of increasingly desperate gimmicks by which artists sought to give their work an immediately recognizable indivdual trademark, a succession of manifestos of despair [...] or of gestures reducing the sort of art which was primarily bought for investment and its collectors ad absurdum, as by adding an individual's name to piles of brick or soil ('minimal art') or by preventing it from becoming such a commodity through making it too short-lived to be permanent ('performance art').
The smell of impeding death rose from these avant-gardes. The future was no longer theirs, though nobody knew whose it was. More than ever, they knew themselves to be on the margin.
IV, p 571
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. [The examples of successful export-led Third Word industrialization usually quoted -- Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea -- represent less than two percent of the Third World population].
V, p 577
Brazil, a monument to social neglect, had a GNP per capita almost two-and-a-half as large as Sri Lanka in 1939, and over six times as large at the end of the 80s. In Sri Lanka, which had subsidized basic foodstuffs and given free education and health care until the later 1970s, the average newborn could expect to live several years longer than the average Brazilian, and to die as an infant at about half the Brazilian rate in 1969, at a third of the Brazilian rate in 1989. The percentage of illiteracy in 1989 was about twice as great in Brazil as on the Asian island.
Social distribution and not growth would dominate the politics of the new millenium.
VII, p 585
If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present.
Reference: Basile Kerblay, Modern Soviet Society (1983).