Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century

“What happened to the art and culture of bourgeois society[?]” In this posthumous collection of lectures, fugitive pieces, and reflections written between 1996 and 2010, the prolific Marxist social and cultural historian and polymath Hobsbawm (1917–2012), author of The Age of Revolution, explores that question in the expected places (classics in music, opera, ballet, drama, and modern literature) and some unexpected ones: the changing nature of public festivals; the cultural “impact of Jews on the rest of humanity”; the “rise of politicized religion”; and the “invented cowboy tradition.” Along the way, Hobsbawm pays tribute to Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind, Richard Overbury’s The Morbid Age, and, using the book review as occasion, Hobsbawm sketches biographies of scientist J. D. Bernal and historian Joseph Needham. There’s a short answer to the question posed—technical progress and mass demand are the culprits in a vanishing society that never recovered after WWI—but Hobsbawm’s essays fascinate as they explore the impact of technological obsolescence and technological triumph (“But the new Pentecostal converts do not shy away from the world of Google and the iPhone: they flourish in it.”), among other subjects. Together with increased mobility, expanded literacy, mass demand, and globalization, bourgeois civilization “belongs to a past that is not likely to return.” Hobsbawm writes that “[n]o class of people is enthusiastic about writing its own obituary.” This is its challenging, but often illuminating autopsy. (May)