Eric Hobsbaum’s new book The Age of Extremes: 1914 to 1991: A Comment

THE HEART OF HISTORY IN AN AGE OF EXTREMES

This morning on ABC Radio National I heard an interview with a Professor of Politics from La Trobe University. He was talking about Eric Hobsbaum’s new book The Age of Extremes: 1914 to 1991. His analysis of the twentieth century was a useful one to a person like myself who had grown up, according to Hobsbaum, in the period of the greatest prosperity and advancement in material conditions in the history of humankind: 1945-1970, but had seen a decline in traditional religion as the main psychological support structure for human beings in the West, in and after the 1960s; and the collapse of socialism/communism as a hope for civilization.

This piece of prose-poetry tries to place Hobsbaum’s analysis in the context of my life(1944-2008) and some of my personal perspectives on world history beginning in the post-WW2 period. -R Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 3/4/08.

I’d made contact with what seemed like

an unrevolutionary revolutionary Force

in the midst of an age of prosperity,

an epoch, among the earliest, in the morning

of my life, epochs which would stretch to the

fringes of a Golden Age, perhaps like the Greeks

But meanwhile, as part of that long history

of infinite toil, I would forge a post-war experience

in these days of a war so unlike the first two in this

century of horrors with its own type of light & wonder--

which were difficult to comprehend, when looking back

over these past six decades, the first stirrings of a

spiritual revolution. That, Eric, is at the heart

of my history in this Age of your Extremes.

Ron Price

9 December 1999
(up-dated for House of Politics
Forum: 3/4/08)