History became social in the twentieth century. It was then that it developed its analytical potential and shifted its interest to collective phenomena, society, groups, conflicts, living conditions, ways of thinking and representing, subordinate sectors, ordinary people. Eric Hobsbawm symbolises like few others the effort of historians to equip themselves with tools of knowledge and to explain change and continuity, and to do so with an increasingly deep attention to global history. Throughout his work, he put into practice the method of observing and analysing in conjunction the great and modest processes that transformed the ways of living and acting in society.
Through successive approximations, this book constitutes an attempt to reconstruct one of the most fertile lines of social history – and the major thinker responsible for its development.