The New Century: In Conversation with Antonio Polito Book

The great Eric Hobsbawm's most recent excursion was The Age of Extremes, in which he reviewed the so-called "Short" 20th Century--the 80-odd years between the First World War and the fall of Communism. Now, in The New Century, he turns his attention to the future, to the world that is emerging from the convulsions of the Short Century. His topics in this brief but dense volume (drawn from interviews with Antonio Polito) are global: the future of the state, the ability of the world to feed itself, the shortcomings of the global free market, mankind's propensity to destroy itself and its environment. The prognosis is not particularly good. As the dust of the last millennium settles, Hobsbawm sees new and unfamiliar shapes emerging. War, peace, politics, nations, corporations, the family, newspapers and other organisations--the institutions that we have lived with are subject to tumultuous change or are disappearing altogether, and the nature of what will take their place is not at all clear. What seems certain, though, is that inequalities of all kinds, at all levels, will increase as the key gaps widen: between rich and poor, between governors and governed, between First and Third Worlds. Hobsbawm's scope is vast: necessarily, in compressing such a range of subject matter into so small a space, his tone can seem olympian and his remarks sometimes sweeping. Yet time and time again he zooms in on the most telling example or analogy to illuminate his arguments. Although its conclusions are bleak, this is a powerful, thought-provoking and humane book. --Robin DavidsonRead More