Eric Hobsbawm was widely acknowledged as the outstanding historian working in the English language of the postwar period. He was never, however, simply a “radical historian,” seeking parallels in the past for his own convictions. Often, he worked against the grain.

A Marxist, he was peerless as an anatomist of the nineteenth century bourgeois social order. A loyal foot-soldier of Communist “democratic centralism,” he wrote perceptively of the anarchical “social bandit.” A refined intellectual, he dug deep into the study of workers’ lives and proletarian autodidacts. A historian of society and impersonal economic “long waves,” he composed a classic of autobiography. An aficionado of traditions of labor, jazz, and Marxism, he helped create a virtual sub-field in the modernist construction of “invented traditions.” Even as a holiday-home owner in Wales, mystified by local resentment of interlopers, he produced a masterpiece on the phenomenon of nationalism.

Born under British rule in Alexandria, Egypt, he grew up in Austria and Germany, where he was drawn into the maelstrom of the Weimar Republic’s crisis politics. In central Europe it was difficult for a young man to believe that liberalism, deserted by its traditional middle class supporters, could long resist the rising appeal of stern dictatorship, whether of the fascist or the proletarian variety. Being of Jewish descent, and foreign to the cult of the German nation, Hobsbawm as a schoolboy gravitated to the Communist Party. He took part in the last legal Communist demonstration in Berlin before the Nazi regime crushed the Left.