In his biography of Eric Hobsbawm, Richard J. Evans describes a heated 1988 phone conversation between Hobsbawm’s agent and George Weidenfeld, cofounder of the publishing house that had put out many of the British historian’s books over the preceding three decades. Weidenfeld, upset over Hobsbawm’s intention to accept bids from other publishers for a prospective history of the twentieth century, lambasted the project: “This is a great mistake — historians have no business writing about the present. [Hobsbawm is] a historian; he should stick to what he knows about.”

Nonetheless, The Age of Extremes hit the shelves in October 1994 (with a different publisher) and familiarized readers with the Short Twentieth Century, a period that begins with the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and ends with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. While the book was an immediate and lasting commercial success, it was not without critics. Tony Judt, writing in the New York Review of Books in May 1995, described it as permeated by a “Jeremiah-like air of impending doom” and scolded Hobsbawm for his refusal to “treat fascism and communism as more than just occasional and paradoxical allies.” Judt wanted Hobsbawm to admit that advocates of grouping the two ideologies together as “totalitarian” projects had been correct and that the seventy-seven-year-old historian’s lifelong identification as a communist had been judged by History as futile (at best).

A less remembered review was published a few weeks earlier on the blog of James Bradford DeLong, a thirty-four-year-old economic historian fresh out of the Clinton Treasury. DeLong shared Judt’s frustration with Hobsbawm’s gloominess and went further: “It struck me as history gone awry: a sketch of the twentieth century not as it has been lived here on earth but as it might have been lived somewhere else, on some ‘planet Hobsbawm.’” Twenty-seven years later, in September 2022, DeLong published his own history of the twentieth century, Slouching Towards Utopia. In the intervening period, he had greatly expanded an already impressive list of scholarly publications. Slouching Towards Utopia, however, is closer in tone and style to his Grasping Reality newsletter than an academic monograph.