why did Eric hobsbawn describe the 20th century as the age of extremes
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Eric Hobsbawm has written a book which has been rightly acclaimed as setting the standard for accounts of the Twentieth Century. We can expect such books to proliferate as we approach the end of the millennium. Few will be able to match the powerful analysis and broad sweep of this book. Others may display more mastery of the specialist historical literature (into which, Hobsbawm acknowledges, he has only dipped) but they will be hard put to address so confidently all the great issues that have occupied intellectual talents over the century, taking in the arts and sciences as readily as economics and politics. Hobsbawm is best approached as much as a political theorist as an historian.
For Hobsbawm the Age of Extremes follows those of Revolution, Capitalism and Empire on which he has already written at length and with great distinction. This age is further subdivided into `The Age of Catastrophe' (1914-50), `The Golden Age' (1950-75), and `The Landslide' (1975 to 1991 and beyond). Neither the periodization nor the labelling are particularly felicitous. Hobsbawm has confined himself to the `short Twentieth Century' marked by the start of the first world war and concluding with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the start of the 1990's. In practice he allows his analysis to move on beyond 1991 and he is well aware of the political forces that need to be understood if 1914 is to be explained. Neither 1950 nor 1975 are obvious punctuation points. While the economic growth between these two points might just be termed `golden', if not for all, it is hardly convincing to describe the period since 1975 as a `landslide', as if things have been rolling steadily down hill since that point. Such an image does not do justice to a much more complex picture.
It is only from a very particular perspective that the last quarter of this century appears as a significant retreat on the third. Hobsbawm has such a perspective. This is in part because he was born three years into his period, and thankfully still survives it. His narrative is sprinkled (although not liberally) with occasional reminiscences. More important is the fact that ideologically speaking, Hobsbawm backed the losing side. He was an active communist for many years and remains notoriously unrepentant. To be sure, he accepts that communism failed to deliver the goods, but capitalism only survived by the skin of its teeth. When communism seemed full of promise, capitalism had to learn to revise itself in order to escape the depression. During the first decades of the cold war the two systems played a sort of score draw, with the competition obliging them both to raise their economic game. While communism faltered, Hobsbawm appears to be saying, capitalism too lost its bearings. Completing this book in the immediate post-cold-war period, he sensed a prospect not of the triumph of democratic capitalism, but a form of anarchy, incapable of producing the conditions for a healthy environment and social stability.