Emile Chabal, "The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Eric Hobsbawm emerged as a product of Europe’s collapsing early 20th-century empires, evolving from a bookish child into a preeminent Marxist historian. His intellectual formation relied on a fusion of the Annales School’s total history with a Marxist framework that emphasized the interconnectedness of social, economic, and cultural structures. Hobsbawm’s methodology, characterized by a grounded pedagogy and a commitment to writing for a mass audience, utilized large-scale concepts like the "dual revolution" and the "invention of tradition" to anchor historical change. Despite his lifelong commitment to communism, his work remained pragmatic and collaborative, evidenced by his editorial leadership on journals like *Past and Present*. His later career involved a complex mourning of the Soviet Union's collapse, while his autobiography, *Interesting Times*, reveals the tension between his personal history and the mythic status he achieved as a global intellectual.