Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (London:The Folio Society, 2005) ("The impact of Marx on the social sciences illustrates the difficulty of comparing their development with that of the natural sciences in this period. For they [that is, the social sciences] dealt essentially with the behavior and problems of human beings, who are very far from neutral and dispassionate observers of their own affairs. [E]ven in the natural sciences ideology becomes more prominent as we move from the inanimate world to life, and especially to problems of biology which directly involve and concern human beings. The social and human sciences operate entirely, and by definition, in the explosive zone where all theories have direct political implications, and where the impact of ideology, politics and the situation in which thinkers find themselves is paramount. It was quite possible in our (or any) period to be both a distinguished astronomer and a revolutionary Marxist, like A. Pannekock (1873-1960), whose professional colleagues doubtless thought his politics as irrelevant to his astronomy as his comrades felt his astronomy to be to the class struggle. Had he been a sociologist nobody would have regarded his politics as irrelevant to his theories. The social sciences have zigzagged, dressed and recrossed the same territory or turned in a circle often enough for this reason. Unlike the natural sciences, they lacked a generally accepted central body of cumulative knowledge and theory, a structured field of research in which progress could be claimed to result from an adjustment of theory to new discoveries. And in the course of our period the divergence between the two branches of 'science' became accentuated." Id. at 290. NOTE: This is a good reminder that "law" as a subject for scholarly research is, at best, a social science (or uses the social science as a tool of analysis), and, therefore, the scholar's politics, ideology and situation are, or should be, deemed relevant to understanding the research and result.).
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991 (London:The Folio Society, 2005) ("The growth of brutalisation was due not so much to the release of the latent potential for cruelty and violence in the human being, which war naturally legitimizes, though this certainly emerged after the First Word War among a certain type of ex-servicemen (veterans), especially in the strong-arm or killer squads and 'free Corps' on the nationalist ultra-right. Why should men who had killed and seen their friends killed and mangled hesitate to kill and brutalize the enemies of a good cause?" Id. at 45. "Another reason, however, was the new impersonality of warfare, which turned killing and maiming into the remote consequence of pushing a button or moving a lever. Technology made its victims invisible, as people eviscerated by bayonets, or seen though the sights of fire-arms could not be. Opposite the permanently fixed guns of the Western Front were not men but statistics--not even real, but hypothetical statistics, as the 'bodycounts' of enemy causalities during the US Vietnam War showed. Far below the aerial bombers were not people about to be burned and eviscerated, but targets. Mild young men, who would certainly not have wished to plunge a bayonet in the belly of any pregnant village girl, could far more easily drop high explosive on London or Berlin, or nuclear bombs on Nagasaki. Hard-working German bureaucrats, who would certainly have found repugnant to drive starving Jews into abattoirs themselves, could work out the railway timetables for a regular supply of death-trains to Polish extermination camps with less sense of personal involvement. The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessities. Id. at 45-46. "Yet it had become increasingly clear over the last half of the Short Twentieth Century that the First World could win battles but not wars against the Third, or rather that winning wars, even if possible, could not guarantee control of such territories. The major asset of imperialism had disappeared, namely the readiness of colonial populations, once conquered, to let themselves be quietly administered by a handful of occupiers. Ruling Bosnia-Herzegovina had been no problem for the Habsburg Empire, but in the early 1990s all governments were advised by their military advisers that eh pacification of that unhappy war-torn country would require the presence, for an indefinite period, of several hundreds of thousands of troops, i.e., a moibilisation comparable to that of a major war. Somaliland had always been a difficult colony, and had once even briefly required the intervention of a British force headed by a major-general, and yet it had not crossed the minds of London or Rome that even Muhammed ben Abdallah, the celebrated 'Md Mullah', raised permanently unmanageable problems for the British and Italian colonial governments. Yet in the early 1990s the USA and the rest of the UN forces of occupation of several tens of thousands withdrew ignominiously when confronted with the option of an indefinite occupation without clear ends. Even the might of the great USA blenched when faced in neighboring Haiti--a traditional satellite and dependent of Washington--by a local general, heading the local, American-armed and -shaped army, who refused to allow an elected and (reluctantly) American-backed president to return, and challenged the USA to occupy Haiti. The USA refused to occupy Haiti once again, as it had done from 1915 until 1934, not because the one thousand or so uniformed thugs of the Haitian army constituted a serious military problem, but because it simply did not know any longer how to settle the Haitian problem by outside force." "In short, the [short twentieth] century ended in a global disorder whose nature was unclear, and without an obvious mechanism for with ending it or keeping it under control." Id. at 510-511. NOTE: Implicit in the just quoted passage is the "twentieth-century" lesson Americans, generally, and George W. Bush and his administration, specifically, had failed to learn before, in the early twenty-first century, wrong-headedly invading, first, Afghanistan, then, Iraq: What happens after one "wins" the war? How many, and for how long, troops are you willing to keep there to maintain the peace given that one is unlikely to have won the hearts and minds of the core local population. In short, How does this end? The "successful" wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have resulted in the ongoing, seemingly unending and unwindable war on terror.).
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1790-1848 (London:The Folio Society, 2005) (From the "Preface to the First Edition": "This book traces the transformation of the world between 1789 and 1849 insofar as it was due to what is here called the 'dual revolution'--the French Revolution of 1789 and the contemporaneous (British) Industrial Revolution." Id. at xvii. Among other things one might learn from reading this book is that the French Revolution of 1789 was more important, had greater long-term impact and repercussions, than the American Revolution of 1776. From the text: "[A]lone of all the contemporary revolutions, the French was ecumenical. Its armies set out to revolutionize the world; its ideas actually did so. The American Revolution has remained a crucial event in American history, but (except for the countries directly involved in it) it has left few major traces elsewhere. The French Revolution is a landmark in all countries. Its repercussions, rather than those of the American Revolution, occasioned the risings which led to the liberation of Latin America after 1808. Its direct influence mediated as far as Bengal, where Ram Mohan Roy was inspired by it to found the first Hindu reform movement, the ancestor of modern Indian nationalism . . . It was, as had been well said, 'the first great movement of idea in western Christendom that had any real effect on the world of Islam', and that almost immediately. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Turkish world vatan, hitherto merely describing a man's place of birth or residence, had begun to turn under its influence into something like patrie; the term 'liberty', before 1800 primarily a legal term denoting the opposite to 'slavery', had begun to acquire a new political content. Its indirect influence is universal, for it provided the pattern for all subsequent revolutionary movements, its lessons (interpreted according to taste) being incorporated into modern socialism and communism. *This is not to underestimate the influence of the American Revolution. It undoubtedly helped to stimulate the French, and in a narrower sense provided constitutional models--in competition and sometime alternation with the French--for various Latin American states, and inspiration for democratic-radical movements from time to time." Id at 60.).
Richard J. Evans, The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 (The Penguin History of Europe) (New York: Viking, 2016).
Richard J. Evans, The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 (The Penguin History of Europe) (New York: Viking, 2016).
