Hobsbawm was the most widely read, influential and respected British intellectual and historian from the Marxist tradition
Eric Hobsbawm was by a considerable margin the most widely read, influential and respected British intellectual and historian from the Marxist tradition. He wrote more than 20 books including a celebrated three-volume series on the "long 19th century" from the French revolution to the first world war, as well as a best-selling memoir. His final book, now in proof stage, is scheduled for publication in 2013.
Hobsbawm, who was a member of the Communist party from 1936 until the party collapsed after 1989, spent most of his life as a university teacher at Cambridge as well as Birkbeck in London. His communist loyalties were always controversial, but he was always associated with the democratic Eurocommunist wing of those once resonant disputes and many of his articles were regularly reprinted in the Guardian.
His fame never diminished after his official retirement and in his later years he became one of the country's most prominent public intellectuals, appearing regularly on radio and television. In 1998 he became a Companion of Honour, a rare accolade for any Marxist.
He played a key role in a succession of academic and political debates of the postwar era, notably over the future of the Labour party in the 1980s, where his writings about the decline of the labour movement had wide influence.