Eric Hobsbawm

(1917 - 2012)

The British historian Eric Hobsbawm is credited with formulating a number of historical concepts, including the invention of tradition, the social bandit, and the long nineteenth century. “The intellectual study of politics and society was transformed,” he wrote in an essay on the mass production of traditions, “by the recognition that whatever held human collectivities together it was not the rational calculation of their individual members.” Hobsbawm was buried in 2012 in London’s Highgate Cemetery, near the grave of Karl Marx.