HL 2 RESENTMENT IN BRITAIN: HOBSBAWM AND THOMPSON da finire - fatto HOB manca THOMP

2 RESENTMENT IN BRITAIN: HOBSBAWM AND THOMPSON
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It is a remarkable feature of the English reading public that it is always ready to treat historians as leaders in the world of ideas.
Note:POTERE ALLA STORIA

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Hobsbawm has been much criticized, less for his communist sympathies than for his dogged loyalty to the Party throughout the exposure of its crimes, abandoning his membership only when he had no choice,
Note:UOMO DI PARTITO

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his case also illustrates just how far you can go in collaborating with crime, when the crime is committed on the left. Crimes committed on the right receive no such absolution; and this tells us something important about left-wing movements, which seem to have the capacity assumed by religions, both to authorize crime and to wash the conscience of those who connive at it.
Note:CRIMINE

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The Cambridge spies – Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt – betrayed many people to their deaths and, by revealing the identities of those East European patriots who were organizing resistance to the Nazis in the hope of a democratic, rather than a communist, future, they ensured that Stalin would be able to ‘liquidate’ the most important opponents of his planned advance into Eastern Europe.
Note:LUNGA VITA A STALIN

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Born in Alexandria to Jewish parents, orphaned in childhood, and living in Berlin with the relatives who had adopted him, he suffered the trauma of Hitler’s rise to power in his most vulnerable years.
Note:SCUSATO

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His four-volume history of the emergence of the modern world – The Age of Revolution 1789–1848, The Age of Capital 1848–1875, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914, and The Age of Extremes, 1914–1991 – is a remarkable work of synthesis, seriously misleading only in the fourth volume, where the attempt to whitewash the communist experiment and to lay the blame for all ills at the door of ‘capitalism’ has an aspect that is partly sinister, partly quaint.
Note:GIUDIZIO DI SINTESI SULL OPERA DI H

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‘no serious discussion of history is possible which doesn’t refer back to Marx or, more exactly, which does not start where he starts. And that means, basically . . . a materialist conception of history.’
Note:LA PREMESSA DI H

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Marx’s ‘materialist’ theory of history was a response to Hegel,
Note:PRIMA CONTAVANO DI PIÚ MORALE RELIGIONE COSCIENZA

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It is ‘not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness

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(The German Ideology).
Note:X MARX...E H

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the basis of social life is likewise material, involving the production, distribution and exchange of goods.
Note:ECONOMIA COME ESSENZA...STRUTTURA

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The social superstructure changes in response to the needs and opportunities of production,
Note:LA LEGGE

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G. A. Cohen, in Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence.
Note:U GRANDE DIFENSORE CONTEMPORANEO DI QS ODEA

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Consider the rise of the novel as an art form during the second half of the eighteenth century. This addressed the self-image of the emerging society, entrenching ideas of liberty and individual responsibility in the life-plans of the property-owning class.
Note:UN ESEMPIO

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Marxist history is less an explanation than a shift of emphasis. Where others might study law, religion, art and family life, Marxists concentrate on the ‘material’ realities, which means the production of food,
Note:NO SPIEGAZIONE MA ENFASI

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More interesting for Marxist historians of Hobsbawm’s generation has been the idea of class.
Note:VOGLIA DI FOMENTARE LA LOTTA DI CLASSE

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the members of the proletariat form a class because they have shared economic interests, in particular the interest in breaking free from ‘wage slavery’

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NELL OTTICA MARXISTA

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From those competing interests arises the ‘class struggle’,
Note:CONFLITTO MESSO AL CENTRO

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when the consciousness of shared economic interests is itself also shared,
Note:IL PROMO PASSO VS LARIVOLUZ

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rewrite the history of the British people as a history of ‘class struggle’.
Note:LA MSSIONE DI H

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PROSA DI CLASSE

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‘parasites’ might equally have been described as merchants and tradesmen, and the ‘reactionary’ professions as the teachers, doctors and agents who, for all their faults, ensured that social capital was passed on and improved throughout the nineteenth century. As in every period, there must have been a few good people among them, including many averse to corruption.
Note:IL LINGUAGGIO DI H LO SMASCHERA

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Marx famously predicted that wages would fall under capitalism,
Note:FATTI SCOMODI LEVATI DI MEZZO

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Research has refuted this prediction, and shown that wages and living standards were, with a few hiccups, steadily rising throughout the Industrial Revolution.
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Rather than accept this, and rewrite his history accordingly, Hobsbawm puts the whole issue in brackets,
Note:LA MOSSA

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Marxist history means rewriting history with class at the top of the agenda. And it involves demonizing the upper class and romanticizing the lower.
Note:RISCRIVERE SECONDO QS MODELLO

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debunking those sources of loyalty that tie ordinary people not to their class (as the Marxist doctrine requires) but to their nation and its traditions.
Note:LA MISSIONE DI H

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To put the point in Marxist terms, the concept of class belongs to science, that of the nation to ideology.
Note:LA NAZIONE NN CONTA

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Hence, in Nations and Nationalism since 1780 Hobsbawm sets out to show that nations are not the natural things they claim to be but inventions, designed to fabricate a specious loyalty to this or that prevailing political system. In The Invention of Tradition
Note:INVENZIONE DELLA TRADIZIONE

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When challenged by the rise of Nazism this ‘nation for itself’ proved far more effective than the international solidarity of the proletariat, which showed itself, by contrast, to be a mere dream of the intellectuals.
Note:UN CASO CHECCONFUTA

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Scottish country dancing and the highland kilt; the Lord Mayor’s procession and the Ceremony of Nine Lessons and Carols; the uniforms and customs of the county regiments – all such things are of course the product of the imagination.
Note:GLI ESEMPI SCELTI DA H

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imagination also provides us with symbols of a deep and lasting reality; and those particular examples of ‘tradition for itself’ are of little significance when set beside the ‘tradition in itself’
Note:LA CRITICA A H

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the example that, properly understood, leaves the Marxist theory of history in ruins: the common law of the English-speaking people.
Note:L ESEMPIO CRUCIALE...DI TRADIZIONE MILLENARIA

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the liturgy of the Catholic communions, diatonic tonality in music, the symphony orchestra and the brass band, the pas de Basque in formation dances, the two–piece suit and tie,11 the offices of Parliament, the crown, the knife and fork, sauce béarnaise, greetings such as Grüß Gott and sabah an-noor, grace before meals, manners, honour in peace and in war.
Note:ALTRE TRADIZIONI AUTENTICHE

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Hobsbawm does not describe Lenin’s policies in detail, but summarizes them in Marxist Newspeak.
Note:ALTRO PUNTO DEBOLE DI H....LIBRI IV TOMO THE AGE OF EXTREDMES

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Lenin acted on behalf of ‘the masses’,
Note:LA TESI DI H

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the ability to recognize what the masses wanted . . . ’ (p. 61),
Note:L ABILITÀ DI LENIN

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Hobsbawm brushes away the question of who the ‘masses’ were, and whether they really called for the violence

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LACUNA

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‘Who – he said so often enough – could imagine that the victory of socialism “can come about . . . except by the complete destruction of the Russian and European bourgeoisie”?’
Note:LE PAROLE DI L CHE H MINIMIZZA MA DA CUI È EVIDENTE UN PROGETTO

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Whatever the Bolsheviks did was achieved by ‘the necessarily ruthless and disciplined army of human emancipation’ (p. 72),
Note:CRUDELTÀ GIUSTIFICATA

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Marxist history does not bother with things like law and judicial process, Hobsbawm sees no need to mention Lenin’s decree of 21 November 1917, which abrogated the courts,
Note:E CHE STRANI MEZZI X EMANCIPARSI

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Lenin’s founding of the Cheka, precursor of the KGB, and his empowering it to use all the terrorist methods required in order to express the will of the ‘masses’ against that of mere people, is of course not mentioned. Nor is the famine of 1921, the first of three man-made famines in early Soviet history, used by Lenin in order to impose the will of the ‘masses’ on those recalcitrant Ukrainian peasants
Note:L OMESSO

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Reading these pages of The Age of Extremes I found myself astonished that the book had not been dismissed as a scandal of the same order as David Irving’s whitewash of the Holocaust.
Note:IL DAVID IRVING ROSSO...PRATICAMENTE UN NEGAZIONISTA

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committed
DA FINIRE CON TOMPSON....ARRIVATI FINO A HABSBAWN