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A life-long Marxisthis socio-political convictions influenced the character of his work. Hobsbawm was born in AlexandriaEgyptbirkbeck politics dissertation, and spent his childhood mainly in Vienna and Berlin. Following the death of his parents and the rise to power of Adolf HitlerHobsbawm moved to London with his adoptive family.
After serving in the Second World Warhe obtained his PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. Inhe was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour.
He was President of Birkbeck, University of Londonfrom until he died, birkbeck politics dissertation. Eric Birkbeck politics dissertation was born in in AlexandriaEgypt. His father was Leopold Percy Hobsbaum né Obstbauma Jewish merchant from the East End of London of Polish Jewish descent, birkbeck politics dissertation.
Although both of his parents were Jewish, neither was observant. A clerical error at birth altered his surname from Hobsbaum to Hobsbawm. Inwhen Hobsbawm was 12, his father died, and he started contributing to his family's support by working as an au pair and English tutor.
Upon the death of their mother inhe and his sister Nancy were adopted by their maternal aunt, Gretl, and paternal uncle, Sidney, who married birkbeck politics dissertation had a son named Peter, birkbeck politics dissertation. Hobsbawm was a student at the Prinz Heinrich- Gymnasium Berlin today Friedrich-List-School when the Nazi Party birkbeck politics dissertation to power in That year the family moved to London, where Hobsbawm enrolled in St Marylebone Grammar School.
Hobsbawm attended King's College, Cambridgebirkbeck politics dissertation, from[8] where he joined the Communist Party "in the form of the university's Socialist Club. He received a doctorate PhD in History from Cambridge University for his dissertation on the Fabian Society. During the Second World Warhe served in the Royal Engineers and the Army Educational Corps, birkbeck politics dissertation.
He was prevented from serving overseas after he attracted the attention of the security services by using the wall newspaper he edited during his army training to argue for the opening up of a Second Frontwhich was a demand made by the Communist Party of Great Britain at the time.
He applied to return to Cambridge as a research student, and was released from the military in MI5 opened a personal file on Hobsbawm in and their monitoring of his activities was to affect the progress of his career for many years.
The appointment was swiftly vetoed by MI5 who believed Hobsbawm was unlikely "to lose any opportunity he may get to disseminate propaganda and obtain recruits for the Communist party". He was a Fellow of Birkbeck politics dissertation College, Cambridge, from to In s, he was appointed professor and in he became a Fellow of the British Academy. Hobsbawm formally retired from Birkbeck inbecoming Emeritus Professor of History, and was appointed as president of Birkbeck in He was, until his death, professor emeritus in the New School for Social Research in the Political Science Department.
A polyglot, he spoke Germanbirkbeck politics dissertation, Englishbirkbeck politics dissertation, FrenchSpanish and Italian fluently, and read Portuguese and Catalan.
Hobsbawm wrote extensively on many subjects as one of Britain's most prominent historians. As a Marxist historiographer he has focused on analysis of the " dual revolution " the political French Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution. He saw their effect as a driving force behind the predominant trend towards liberal capitalism today. Another recurring theme in his work was social banditrywhich Hobsbawm placed in a social and historical context, thus countering the traditional view of it being a spontaneous and unpredictable form of primitive rebellion.
He published numerous essays in various intellectual journals, dealing with subjects such as barbarity in the modern agethe troubles of labour movementsand the conflict between anarchism and communism.
Among his final publications were Globalisation, Democracy and TerrorismOn Empire and the collection of essays How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism — Outside his academic historical writing, Hobsbawm wrote a regular column about jazz for the New Statesman under the pseudonym Francis Newton, taken from the name of Billie Holiday 's communist trumpet player, Frankie Newton.
He had become interested in jazz during the s when it was frowned upon by the Communist Party. Hobsbawm joined the Sozialistischer Schülerbund Association of Socialist Pupilsan offshoot of the Young Communist League of Germanyin Berlin in[9] and the Communist Party of Great Britain CPGB in He was a member of the Communist Party Historians Group from until its demise and subsequently president of its successor, the Socialist History Society until his death. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in led thousands of its members to leave the British Communist Party — but Hobsbawm, unique among his colleagues, remained in the party, but was mistrusted by its leadership and ceased political work by the end of the s.
Thompson and John Saville who had left the CPGB at this time and became leading birkbeck politics dissertation of birkbeck politics dissertation New Left in Britain, occasionally contributing to New Left publications but also providing intelligence reports on the dissidents to CPGB headquarters.
He later described the New Left as "a half-remembered footnote". Hobsbawm was a leading light of the Eurocommunist faction in the Communist Party of Great Britain CPGB that began to gather strength afterbirkbeck politics dissertation, when the CPGB criticised the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring and the French Communist Party 's failure to support the May 68 movement in Paris. A third of the 30 reprints of Marxism Today 's feature articles that appeared in The Guardian during the s were articles or interviews by or with Hobsbawm, making him by far the most popular of all contributors, birkbeck politics dissertation.
In addition to his association with the CPGB, Hobsbawm developed close ties to the largest Communist Party in the western world, the Italian Communist Party PCIof which he declared himself a "spiritual member". He developed contacts with Italian left-wing academics and intellectuals in the early s, which led to him encountering the work of Antonio Gramsciwhose writings were a key influence on Hobsbawm's work on the history of subaltern groupsemphasising their agency as well as structural factors.
Hobsbawm spoke favourably about PCI general secretary Enrico Berlinguer 's strategy of Historic Compromise in the s, seeking rapprochement with the Catholic Church and the Christian Democratsproviding passive support to the latter in government in order to bring the Communists into the political mainstream birkbeck politics dissertation accepting Italy's position as a member of NATObirkbeck politics dissertation being able to build broader alliances and convince wider sections of society of its legitimacy as a potential governing force.
From the s, his politics took a more moderate turn, as Hobsbawm came to recognise that his hopes were unlikely to be realised, and no longer advocated "socialist systems of the Soviet type". I think very few attempts have been made to build a system on the total assumption of social ownership and social management, birkbeck politics dissertation.
At its peak the Soviet system tried it. And in the past 20 or 30 years, the capitalist system has also tried it. In both cases, the results demonstrate that it won't work.
So it seems to me the problem isn't whether this market system disappears, but exactly what the nature of the mixture between birkbeck politics dissertation economy and public birkbeck politics dissertation is and, above all, in my view, what the social objectives of that economy are.
One of the worst things about the politics of the past 30 years is that the rich have forgotten to be afraid of the poor — of most of the people in the world. Hobsbawm stressed that since communism was not created, the sacrifices were in fact not justified—a point he emphasised in Age of Extremes :.
Still, birkbeck politics dissertation, whatever assumptions are made, birkbeck politics dissertation, the number of direct and indirect victims must be measured in eight rather than seven digits. In these circumstances birkbeck politics dissertation does not much matter whether we opt for a "conservative" estimate nearer to ten than to twenty million or a larger figure: none can be anything but shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification.
I add, without comment, birkbeck politics dissertation, that the total population of the USSR in was said to have been millions, or Elsewhere he insisted:. I have never tried to diminish the appalling things that happened in Russia, though the sheer extent of the massacres we didn't realise In the early days we knew a new world was being born amid blood and tears and horror: revolution, civil war, famine—we birkbeck politics dissertation of the Volga famine of the early '20sif not the early '30s.
Thanks to the breakdown of the west, we had the illusion that even this brutal, experimental, system was going to work better than the west. It was that or nothing. With regard to the s, he wrote that. It is impossible to understand the reluctance of men and women on the left to criticise, or even often to admit to themselves, what was happening in the USSR in those years, or the isolation of the USSR's critics on the left, without this sense that in the fight against fascism, communism and liberalism were, birkbeck politics dissertation, in a profound sense, fighting for the same cause.
Not to mention the more obvious fact that, in the conditions of the s, what Stalin did was a Russian problem, however shocking, whereas what Hitler did was a threat everywhere.
He claimed that the demise of the USSR was "traumatic not only for communists but for socialists everywhere".
Regarding Queen Elizabeth IIHobsbawm stated that constitutional monarchy in general has "proved a reliable framework for liberal-democratic regimes" and "is likely to remain useful". InNeal Ascherson said of Hobsbawm: "No historian now writing in English can match his overwhelming command of fact and source. But the key word is 'command'. Hobsbawm's capacity to store and retrieve detail has now reached a scale normally approached only by large archives with big staffs".
His quartet of books beginning with The Age of Revolution and ending with The Age of Extremes constitute the best starting point I know for anyone who wishes to begin studying modern history. Nothing else produced by the British Marxist historians will endure as these books will. With regard to the impact of his Marxist outlook and sympathies on his scholarship, Ben Pimlott saw it as "a tool not a straitjacket; he's not dialectical or following a party line", although Judt argued that it has "prevented his achieving the analytical distance he does on the 19th century: he isn't as interesting on the Russian revolution because he can't free himself completely from the optimistic vision of earlier years.
For the same reason, he's not that good on fascism ". After reading Age of ExtremesKremlinologist Robert Conquest concluded that Hobsbawm suffers from a "massive reality denial" regarding the USSR, [39] and John Graybirkbeck politics dissertation, though praising his work on the nineteenth century, has described Hobsbawm's writings on the post period as "banal in the extreme.
They are also highly evasive. A vast silence surrounds the realities of communism, a refusal to engage which led the late Tony Judt to conclude that Hobsbawm had 'provincialised himself'. It is a damning judgement". In a interview on BBC television with Canadian academic Michael Ignatieffhe shocked viewers when he said that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens under Birkbeck politics dissertation would have been worth it if a genuinely communist society had been the result. Tony Judt was of the opinion that Hobsbawm "clings to a pernicious illusion of the late Enlightenment: that if one can promise a benevolent outcome it would be worth the human cost, birkbeck politics dissertation.
But one of the great lessons of the 20th century is that it's not true, birkbeck politics dissertation. For such a clear-headed writer, he appears blind to the sheer scale of the price paid. I find it tragic, birkbeck politics dissertation, rather than disgraceful. He does feel bad about the appalling waste of lives in Soviet communism. But he refuses to acknowledge that he regrets anything. He's not that kind of person, birkbeck politics dissertation. not agreement, approval or sympathy".
The s aside, Hobsbawm was criticised for never relinquishing his Communist Party membership. Whereas people like Arthur Koestler left the Party after seeing the friendly reception of Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Moscow during the years of the Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact —[49] Hobsbawm stood firm even after the Soviet interventions of the Hungarian Revolution of and the Prague Spring.
The essence of Communism is the abnegation of individual freedom, as Hobsbawm admits in a chilling passage: "The Party had the first, or more precisely the only real claim on our lives.
Its demands had absolute priority. We accepted its discipline and hierarchy. We accepted the absolute obligation to follow 'the lines' it proposed to us, birkbeck politics dissertation, even when we disagreed with it We did what it ordered us to do Birkbeck politics dissertation it had ordered, birkbeck politics dissertation, we would have obeyed If the Party ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did so.
Consider some of the "lines" our historian dutifully toed. He accepted the order to side with the Nazis against the Weimar -supporting Social Democrats in the great Berlin transport strike of He accepted the order to side with the Nazis against Britain and France following the Ribbentrop—Molotov Pact of
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, time: 3:03Eric Hobsbawm - Wikipedia
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm CH FRSL FBA (/ ˈ h ɒ b z. b ɔː m /; 9 June – 1 October ) was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism.A life-long Marxist, his socio-political convictions influenced the character of his work. His best-known works include his trilogy about what he called the "long 19th century" (The Age of Revolution: Europe I have submitted my doctoral dissertation on 1 November or later. (NB Submission is the date when the dissertation was given in to be examined, not the date of the viva.) If your course is not for a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), you must give the date when the Secretary of the Electors gave approval of the equivalence of your course A sample of work could be a chapter from your dissertation, or published article or articles, up to about 10, words. If you wish to submit more than one article, they should be merged into one file. This sample is intended show the intellectual qualities of your work
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