Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm has long been a frustrating figure - often insightful but at the same time a prisoner of his own eurocommunist past, an individual who possesses Gramsci's pessimism of the intellect in spades but often seems to lack the corresponding optimism of the will (other in the most diffuse fashion). Like many eurocommunists he never fully engaged with the nature of Stalinism, yet at the same time his critique of Labour and other social-democratic parties was, to say the very least, unsatisfying. However, as a left historian he has few modern peers and an interview with Hobsbawm is usually worth a read.