If you want to understand why the world feels so fractured right now, you kind of have to read Eric Hobsbawm. Honestly, his book The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 is a monster. It’s huge. It’s dense. It’s also probably the most influential work of history written in the last fifty years, even if it makes some people absolutely furious.
Hobsbawm wasn't just some guy in a library. He was a lifelong Marxist who watched the Soviet Union rise and fall from the inside of the Western intellectual elite. That perspective matters. It’s why he frames the "Short Twentieth Century" as a drama in three acts: the Age of Catastrophe, the Golden Age, and the Landslide.
What is Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes actually about?
Basically, Hobsbawm argues that the 19th century didn't end in 1900. It ended in 1914 with the start of World War I. And the 20th century? That ended in 1991 when the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin.
He calls it the "Short Twentieth Century."
Think about that for a second. In seventy-seven years, humanity went from horse-drawn carriages and absolute monarchs to nuclear weapons, the internet, and the total collapse of every major social structure that had existed for a thousand years. It was a period of "extremes" because the highs were higher and the lows were more depraved than anything in recorded history.
We’re talking about a century that saw the fastest economic growth ever recorded during the 1950s and 60s, but also the deliberate industrialization of death in the Holocaust.
The Age of Catastrophe (1914–1945)
This first chunk of the book is grim. Hobsbawm paints a picture of a world that basically tried to commit suicide. For thirty years, the global liberal order—the stuff of free trade and Victorian "progress"—just evaporated.
You’ve got two world wars. You’ve got the Great Depression, which Hobsbawm argues was the real catalyst that made people think capitalism was dead. This is a crucial point: people didn't just turn to Communism or Fascism because they liked the aesthetics. They did it because they were starving and the "old way" had failed them.
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Hobsbawm notes that without the total breakdown of the liberal economy in the 1930s, Hitler likely remains a footnote in German fringe politics. It’s a sobering thought. History isn't just about "great men"; it’s about the structural floors falling out from under people's feet.
The weird paradox of the Golden Age
The middle of the book covers 1947 to 1973. This is what Hobsbawm calls the "Golden Age."
It’s the era of the "Great Leap Forward" for the Western world. Most people think of the Cold War as a time of constant terror, but Hobsbawm points out that for the average person in France, the US, or Japan, it was a period of unbelievable prosperity.
- Standard of living skyrocketed.
- The "consumer society" was born.
- Technological change happened so fast that the older generation couldn't even recognize the world their kids lived in.
But here’s the kicker. Hobsbawm argues that this prosperity actually undermined the very foundations of society. By making everyone an individual consumer, capitalism accidentally destroyed the "social glue" (like family, community, and religion) that held everything together.
The Landslide: Why everything felt like it was falling apart
By the 1970s, the wheels started coming off. This is the "Landslide" era.
It wasn't just the oil shocks or the stagflation. It was a feeling that the state—whether it was the socialist state or the welfare state—could no longer solve people's problems. Hobsbawm is surprisingly cynical here, even about his own side. He watches the Soviet Union stagnate into a "gerontocracy" where nobody believed the propaganda anymore, but the system kept grinding on out of habit.
When 1989 happened, it wasn't a bang. It was a whimper.
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The Soviet Union didn't fall because of a grand invasion. It fell because it ran out of steam, and the West was too busy dealing with its own internal fragmentation to really know what to do with the "victory."
Why Hobsbawm gets people so worked up
You can't talk about Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes without talking about the fact that he was a communist.
Critics like Tony Judt or Robert Conquest have hammered him for this. They argue that Hobsbawm was too soft on the crimes of Stalin. In the book, Hobsbawm treats the Soviet Union as a tragic, flawed experiment that was necessary to defeat Hitler.
Is that true? It’s a massive debate.
Hobsbawm famously said in an interview that if the "radiant tomorrow" of communism had actually been achieved, the loss of millions of lives might have been justified. That’s a chilling statement. It’s also why many historians find his work brilliant but morally compromised. He looks at history through a telescope, focusing on the movement of massive social forces, which sometimes makes him lose sight of the individual human suffering on the ground.
The "Death of the Peasantry" and other big ideas
One of the coolest, most overlooked points Hobsbawm makes is about the peasantry.
For about 10,000 years, most humans were farmers. In the "Short Twentieth Century," that ended. This is arguably the biggest change in human history since the invention of fire. By the 1980s, even in developing countries, people were flooding into cities.
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We are the first species of "urbanites."
He also dives deep into the "Cultural Revolution" of the 1960s. He doesn't just mean the music or the drugs. He means the shift from "we" to "me." He argues that the 20th century was the moment the individual became the supreme unit of the world, for better or worse.
Does the book still hold up?
Honestly, yeah. Maybe more than ever.
Hobsbawm predicted that the end of the 20th century wouldn't lead to a "New World Order" of peace, but to a period of global disorder. He saw the rise of identity politics, ethnic nationalism, and religious fundamentalism filling the void left by the death of the big 20th-century ideologies.
He was right.
Look at the headlines today. We see the same patterns:
- Massive inequality leading to political radicalization.
- The collapse of traditional authority.
- The tension between a globalized economy and local identities.
Actionable insights for the modern reader
If you’re going to tackle Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes, don't just read it as a textbook. Read it as a warning.
- Look for the "lag": Hobsbawm shows that it takes decades for people to realize the world has changed. We are likely living in a new "era" right now but using 20th-century words to describe it.
- Question the "Golden Age": Whenever someone promises a return to a stable past (like the 1950s), remember Hobsbawm’s point: that stability was a freak accident of history, not a permanent state of being.
- Focus on the structures: Instead of blaming specific politicians for everything, look at the economic and social "fault lines" Hobsbawm describes. Usually, the "big events" are just the result of pressure that’s been building for forty years.
- Read the critics: To get the full picture, pair Hobsbawm with someone like Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands) or Tony Judt (Postwar). It helps balance out Hobsbawm’s ideological blind spots regarding Eastern Europe.
The 20th century was a wild, terrifying, and brilliant mess. Hobsbawm didn't get everything right, but he understood the scale of the drama better than almost anyone else. If you want to know where we're going, you have to understand the "extremes" that brought us here.
Start by focusing on the transition between the "Golden Age" and the "Landslide." That is where the roots of our current global instability really lie. Understanding that shift from state-led stability to market-led fragmentation is the single most important lesson you can take from Hobsbawm’s work today.