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The Age of Extremes
Hobsbawm's 1994 study of the short twentieth century from 1914 to 1991, written from inside the catastrophes it documented, containing his prediction that distribution rather than growth would dominate the politics of the new millennium.
The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, published in 1994, completed the four-volume cycle Hobsbawm had begun with The Age of Revolution and concluded his systematic account of the modern world. Written by a historian who had lived through nearly the entire period he documented—born in 1917 during the First World War, a refugee from Nazism, a witness to the Cold War and the Soviet collapse—the book offered an unusually intimate perspective on the twentieth century's catastrophes and their relationship to the technological and economic transformations that produced them. The book's final chapters contained Hobsbawm's most prescient prediction: that "social distribution and not growth would dominate the politics of the new millennium," a claim that the AI transition has made acutely visible and politically urgent.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's structure organized the century into three phases: the Age of Catastrophe (1914–1945), the Golden Age (1945–1973), and the Landslide (1973–1991). Each phase was
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