The Age of Extremes
| Country | United Kingdom, United States |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | History |
| Publisher |
Michael Joseph (UK) Vintage Books (U.S.) |
|
Publication date
|
1994 |
| Pages | 640 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 33817813 |
| Preceded by | The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 |
The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 is a book by Eric Hobsbawm, published in 1994. In it, Hobsbawm comments on what he sees as the disastrous failures of state communism, capitalism, and nationalism; he offers an equally skeptical take on the progress of the arts and changes in society in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Hobsbawm calls the period from the start of World War I to the fall of the so-called Soviet bloc "the short twentieth century", to follow on "the long 19th century", the period from the start of the French Revolution in 1789 to the start of World War I in 1914, which he covered in an earlier trilogy of histories (The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789-1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914). In the United States, the book was published with the subtitle A History of the World, 1914–1991 ().
Hobsbawm points out the abysmal record of recent attempts to predict the world's future. "The record of forecasters in the past thirty or 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." He quotes President Calvin Coolidge, in a message to Congress on December 4, 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression, as saying "The country can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism."
Speaking of the future himself, Hobsbawm largely confines himself to predicting continued turmoil: "The world of the third millennium 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," and expressing the view that "If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present."
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