Eric Hobsbawm, sociólogo do milenarismo campesino

Abstract

A S A HISTORIAN interested in the social sciences, Eric Hobsbawm provided a very significant approach to the sociology of religions, thanks to his work on peasant millenarianism. It is one of the dimensions of his pioneering research into the so-called «primitive» forms of rebellion. A Jew of German culture born in Egypt in 1917, educated in Vienna and Berlin and later in Oxford and Cambridge, Hobsbawm is one of the greatest English historians of the twentieth century. A leftist intellectual, he represents, first and foremost, a man of the Enlightenment: Does he not define socialism as the last heir of the eighteenth century rationalism? So it is not surprising that the distinction between «modern» and «primitive» or «archaic» has an important place in his work.