Il test di una vita: un profilo di Eric Hobsbawm

Abstract

The test of a life: an Eric Hobsbawm’s sketch

The author observes the figure of Eric Hobsbawm, retracing the main
stages of his intellectual biography: the middle-European background,
the university education in Cambridge, his involvement with the Communist
Party and his studies on social banditry and the British working
class. Hobsbawm’s particular and original blend of Marxism, his analysis
of capitalism and the concept of revolution (in the four volumes of
Ages), his work as an historian of society and culture and his influence
on contemporary historiography are here reconstructed.

aldo.agosti@unito.it