Five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the communist historian Eric Hobsbawm published his best-selling history of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes. The book presented a man coming to terms with the fate of the political project to which he had committed his adult life while trying to understand the twentieth century as a historical epoch. Though famous for its pessimism, the book, like the work of many left-wing authors in the 1990s, was also an opportunity to rethink what the project of the Left might become after the collapse of communism.

In its final pages, Hobsbawm reflected darkly on the future. The “titanic economic and techno-scientific” development of capitalism, he wrote, had unleashed forces capable of destroying “the material foundations of human life” while eroding the social bonds of the past, including the ones capitalism itself depends upon. “Our world risks both explosion and implosion. It must change.” Humanity could not survive the third millennium by prolonging the past or the present, he warned, and “the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness.”

Almost twenty years later, in 2011, mass protests erupted across the world. The Arab Spring overthrew dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia, while the uprising in Syria descended into civil war. Elsewhere, Occupy Wall Street emerged in the United States, and the Indignados movement occupied the streets and squares of Spain. I was among those participating in these demonstrations and at the time was reading The Age of Extremes with my classmates. The book made a lasting impression on how we thought about both the past and the possibilities of the future. It was not only the history Hobsbawm was telling but the feeling that we were somehow living through the same story again. For a left that had struggled to articulate a vision of the future since the collapse of communism, the Indignados movement became a moment of political imagination, when a different future seemed possible. For a new generation of politically committed historians, the struggles of Eric Hobsbawm — a communist who had lived in Berlin when the Nazis came to power, been in Paris at the height of the Popular Front in 1936, and traveled to Spain during the civil war — could be inspiring.