Eric Hobsbawm, one of the
leading historians of the 20th century, has died, his family said on Monday.
Hobsbawm, a lifelong Marxist
whose work influenced generations of historians and politicians, died in the
early hours of Monday morning at the Royal Free Hospital in London after a long
illness, his daughter Julia said. He was 95.
Hobsbawm's four-volume history of the 19th and
20th centuries, spanning European history from the French revolution to the
fall of the USSR, is acknowledged as among the defining works on the period.
Fellow historian Niall Ferguson
called the quartet, from The Age of Revolution to 1994's The Age of Extremes,
"the best starting point I know for anyone who wishes to begin studying
modern history".
Hobsbawm was dubbed "Neil
Kinnock's guru" in the early 1990s, after criticising the Labour party for
failing to keep step with social changes, and was regarded as influential in
the birth of New Labour, though he later expressed disappointment with the
government of Tony Blair.
Ed Miliband, the Labour leader,
described Hobsbawm as "an extraordinary historian, a man passionate about
his politics and a great friend of my family".
He said: "His historical
works brought hundreds of years of British history to hundreds of thousands of
people. He brought history out of the ivory tower and into people's lives.
"But he was not simply an
academic, he cared deeply about the political direction of the country.
"Indeed he was one of the
first people to recognise the challenges to Labour in the late 1970s and 1980s
from the changing nature of our society
"He was also a lovely man,
with whom I had some of the most stimulating and challenging conversations
about politics and the world. My thoughts are with his wife, Marlene, his children
and all his family."
Hobsbawm's lifelong commitment
to Marxist principles made him a controversial figure, however, in particular
his membership of the British Communist party that continued even after the
Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
He said many years later he had
"never tried to diminish the appalling things that happened in
Russia", but had believed in the early days of the communist project that
"a new world was being born amid blood and tears and horror: revolution,
civil war, famine. Thanks to the breakdown of the west, we had the illusion
that even this brutal, experimental, system was going to work better than the
west. It was that or nothing."
Hobsbawm was born into a Jewish
family in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1917, and grew up in Vienna and Berlin, moving
to London with his family in 1933, the year that Hitler came to power in
Germany. He studied at Marylebone grammar school and King's College, Cambridge,
and became a lecturer at Birkbeck University in 1947, the beginning of a
lifelong association that culminated in his becoming the university's
president.
He became a fellow of the
British Academy in 1978 and was awarded the companion of honour in 1998.
He is survived by his wife,
Marlene, his daughter, Julia, and sons Andy and Joss, and by seven
grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
