Culture, Ideology, and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm (History Workshop Series)

First published in 1982, this book is inspired the ideas generated by Eric Hobsbawm, and has taken shape around a unifying preoccupation with the symbolic order and its relationship to political and religious belief. It explores some of the oldest question in Marxist historiography, for example the relationship of `base' and `superstructure', art and social life, and also some of the newest and most problematic questions, such as the relationship of dreams and fantasy to political action, or of past and present - historical consciousness - to the making of ideology. The essays, which range widely over period and place, are intended to break new ground and take on difficult questions.