More than 30 years ago, historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote that most young people in the late 20th century “grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.” (Apparently an “intelligent American student” had asked him whether the phrase “Second World War” meant that there had been a first one.)
That’s not the only moment in Hobsbawm’s 1994 book “The Age of Extremes” that now reads as uncanny. He also foresaw that the global victory of American-style capitalism in the Cold War was not the “end of history,” but contained the seeds of a coming global crisis, notably in the form of worsening inequality and a reversion to “barbarism.”
