Eric Hobsbawm died yesterday:

Unlike some others, Hobsbawm achieved this wider recognition without in any major way revolting against either Marxism or Marx. In his 94th year he published How to Change the World, a vigorous defence of Marx’s continuing relevance in the aftermath of the banking collapse of 2008-10. What is more, he achieved his culminating reputation at a time when the socialist ideas and projects that animated so much of his writing for well over half a century were in historic disarray, and worse – as he himself was always unflinchingly aware.

In a profession notorious for microscopic preoccupations, few historians have ever commanded such a wide field in such detail or with such authority. To the last, Hobsbawm considered himself to be essentially a 19th-century historian, but his sense of that and other centuries was both unprecedentedly broad and unusually cosmopolitan.

The sheer scope of his interest in the past, and his exceptional command of what he knew, continued to humble many, most of all in the four-volume Age of… series, in which he distilled the history of the capitalist world from 1789 to 1991. “Hobsbawm’s capacity to store and retrieve detail has now reached a scale normally approached only by large archives with big staffs,” wrote Neal Ascherson. Both in his knowledge of historic detail and in his extraordinary powers of synthesis, so well displayed in that four-volume project, he was unrivalled.

Of all 20th century Marxist and Marxist influenced historians, Hobsbawm has been perhaps the most influential, especially in the English speaking world. For me he was one of the historians I started to discover and read when I had become a socialist, back in 2001/2002, somebody who was capable of showing the grand sweep of history without losing sight of its foundations.

James at Blood & Treasure always found Hobsbawm slightly off putting for his continued support of the Communist Party long after most people had abandoned it, as well as being a bit cavalier about the suffering actually existing communism perpetuated. For me, that was largely irrelevant, coming to him long after the USSR had ceased to exist, but also because Hobsbawm really didn’t have all that influence outside of his historical work and that was always solid.