Fractured Times - by Eric Hobsbawm (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Eric Hobsbawm, who passed away in 2012, was one of the most brilliant and original historians of our age. Through his work, he observed the great twentieth-century confrontation between bourgeois fin de siècle culture and myriad new movements and ideologies, from communism and extreme nationalism to Dadaism to the emergence of information technology. In Fractured Times, Hobsbawm, with characteristic verve, unpacks a century of cultural fragmentation.

Hobsbawm examines the conditions that both created the flowering of the belle époque and held the seeds of its disintegration: paternalistic capitalism, globalization, and the arrival of a mass consumer society. Passionate but never sentimental, he ranges freely across subjects as diverse as classical music, the fine arts, rock music, and sculpture. He records the passing of the golden age of the "free intellectual" and explores the lives of forgotten greats; analyzes the relationship between art and totalitarianism; and dissects phenomena as diverse as surrealism, art nouveau, the emancipation of women, and the myth of the American cowboy.

Written with consummate imagination and skill, Fractured Times is the last book from one of our greatest modern-day thinkers.

Review Quotes

Praise for Fractured Times:

"Hobsbawm speaks to the crucial need for engaged public intellectuals and the kind of rigorous social and political analysis so well represented by these urgent and important essays."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Fractured Times shows this revolutionary traditionalist at his best. It is an account of the collapse of the high bourgeois culture of the nineteenth century, and an examination of the ruins it left behind in the twentieth century."
--The Guardian

"Eric Hobsbawm's Fractured Times is a fascinating engagement with the culture of modernity by its most brilliant and insightful historian. Whether he is writing about Jewish emancipation, the avant garde, the Western, Karl Kraus or forties jazz, these penetrating reflections of a participant observer are guaranteed to take you deeper into the perplexities of the modern than anything you have read before."
--Robin Blackburn, Distinguished Visiting Professor of History, The New School

"In this wonderful collection of essays, Hobsbawm gives a theoretically informed and historically sensitive reflection on the cultural manifestations of advanced capitalism. Whether commenting on the gradual demise of classical music or the rise of the phenomenon of celebrity, the range of his knowledge is remarkable, only surpassed by his ability to integrate diverse insights into a coherent vision. This book not only confirms Hobsbawm as a great historian and political thinker but is also a compelling contribution to critical theory."
--Patrick Baert, Professor of Social Theory, University of Cambridge

"Only Eric Hobsbawm could have written these engaging and moving evocations of the European world to which he was born and which is now only a memory. When he writes of culture, he writes of himself: at odds with the world, filled with its possibilities, both injured by it and alert to its paradoxes. These essays are the fruits of a master, the likes of which we will not see again."
--Jay Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History, Yale University

"Punctuated by the four volumes The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and The Age of Extremes, the works of Eric Hobsbawm served for many of us as indispensable guides to the history of our own time. With his death in 2012, the modern world lost one of its greatest and most controversial historians. This volume of his last essays is a testament to his broad ranging mind, his political engagement, and his tremendous erudition."
-- Peter E. Gordon, Amabel B. James Professor of Modern European History, Harvard University

"It is a treasure to have the last essays from that great historian Eric Hobsbawm. It's sad to think that there will be no more but here he is in all his strength, his extraordinary range, his ability to write with great perception on a variety of subjects, most frequently here dealing with aspects of art and culture in Europe and elsewhere. Writing with insight about art, he is also keenly aware of its limitations and failures in contributing to making a better world. He is particularly enlightening on those on the left such as J.D. Bernal and Joseph Needham. He concludes with a bravura essay on the American cowboy and the promise that America represented in the past. In a sense in this final essay he circles back to his own childhood, and his love of Karl May, the German writer of cowboy stories. Reading these wonderful pieces reminded me how lucky I was to be one of his students."
-- Peter Stansky, Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, emeritus, Stanford University

Praise for Eric Hobsbawm:
"One of the few genuinely great historians of our century."
--The New Republic

"Eric Hobsbawm surveys the writings of modern historians with the magisterial gaze of a man who has seen both the rise of Hitler and the fall of Communism."
--The New York Times Book Review

"One of the greatest British historians of his age. . . . For sheer intellectual firepower and analytical skill, Hobsbawm remained unsurpassed."
--The Daily Telegraph

"A magisterial historian of the modern age . . . Eric Hobsbawm pioneered the study of popular protest, riot and revolt, and his writings were as important to social scientists as to historians."
--The Times (London)

"A brilliant historian in the great English tradition of narrative history."
--Tony Judt

About the Author

Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) was born in Egypt in 1917 and educated in Austria, Germany, and England. He taught at Birkbeck College, the University of London, and the New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes as well as On History, Uncommon People, Industry and Empire, Bandits, On the Edge of the New Century, Revolutionaries, On Empire, Fractured Times, and his memoir Interesting Times (The New Press).