Talk:The Age of Extremes

[2004 discussion]
I hope that others will agree with me about the value of such sharing. I asked and received the permission from the publisher, who requested that the appropriate credit is made, which I believe is not in contradition with the Copyright requirements of Wikipedia. Marc Girod 17:37, 6 Jan 2004 (UTC)


 * actually, it probably is. I doubt the publishers have licensed it under GFDL. -- Tarquin 17:40, 6 Jan 2004 (UTC)


 * this cannot be a strict requirement: no quote whatsoever could ever be made. We are under the realm of fair use, and, again, with the explicit agreement of the publishers. Quoting words implies indeed refraining from modifying them, but this restriction must be admissible. Anyway, for now, the issue is different since the page was unilaterally censored. Marc Girod 08:00, 10 Jan 2004 (UTC)

It depends on the full context but quotes from a book in the context of an article about the book are very likely to be fair use and entirely acceptable here, including for others who may use the text later. This is clearly within the sort of literary review and criticism fair use situation. Unlikely to infringe, even if they had been used without permission. Jamesday 07:14, 12 Jan 2004 (UTC)

After some discussion on the Village Pump and elsewhere, I have attempted to restore the bulk of Marc Girod's content, making it more of a wikipedia article and less a mere catalog of quotations. I'm not completely thrilled with the result, but I think it's at least decent. I hope this will be considered within the realm of an acceptable wikipedia article, and that we can go from here with the usual ways of editing a page.

Marc, I suggest that next time you want to get this much content into an article, you might take a look at how I've approached this. But, who knows, others might find this still too POV.

By the way, you say you had "permission from the publisher." Since the book has been through multiple editions from different publishers, I'd appreciate if you clarified that. -- Jmabel 22:30, 12 Jan 2004 (UTC)

From Current disputes over articles
I created the article with a list of excerpts, with permission from the publisher. This was criticized as being POV (and the author was actually criticized as well under the same terms), and was voted for deletion.

Someone else came and turned the article into a stub. I wish I can safely restore my quotes. User:Marc Girod 04:04, 11 Jan 2004
 * I cannot understand how a stub could possibly be preferable to my list of quotes.
 * I believe that a list of quotes has its place in an article about a book.
 * I believe that controversy should be addressed by contributing balanced opinion, not by censoring adverse one.


 * Can someone indicate where the discussion about deleting this page can be found? I went looking & can't find it. Seems to me like an appropriate topic for an article. On the other hand, Marc, it seems to me that just a list of quotes does not make a wikipedia article. You need to link them with some kind of narrative and probably some context.
 * Since I can't find the VfD discussion, I'm not sure what was going on here, but if the issue is how to link together the quotes into more of an article, I could try working with Marc on that. If there is a consensus that I should do this, let me know on my talk page. -- Jmabel 03:50, 12 Jan 2004 (UTC)
 * Delirium removed it from VfD on the 11th as there was no consensus to delete. Is there still a dispute over this now it's been rewritten? Angela. 23:39, Jan 13, 2004 (UTC)
 * As my question has gone unanswered for the last month, I'm assuming there is no longer a dispute and moving this here. Feel free to add it back to the Current disputes over articles if there really is still a need to. Angela. 13:45, Feb 21, 2004 (UTC)
 * I am sorry. I just went over the same problem in the French Wiki, with an other book. This painful experience has only strengthened my original point of view. Between saying that "X said Y", and saying that "X said that Y", I keep preferring the former, the latter being after all an interpretation -- as long as the quote refers to a precise page, offering to potentially interested readers a way to check by themselves what the context actually was. This relates to wider and deeper opinions about epistemology, and thus what an encyclopedia should attempt to present. My opinions are relativistic: I am ready to state that there are only opinions, no facts. I.e. a fact is only the relation of an experience, never the experience itself; it has to be offered with all the care making it reproducible to others, and clearly distinguishing between possible levels of objectivity. An encyclopedia has thus to link the original data if possible, to quote it if not, and to comment it last, and separately. With all the respect I owe to your work, Jmabel, which potentially saved this page from destruction, I still prefer my original presentation. Marc Girod 19:49, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Allegation of fascism
Fascism was used in the comment of a change. Just remember that Hobsbawm is himself both Jewish and communist. Marc Girod 14:19, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Uncited opinion cut from article
"One weakness of Hobsbawm's explanations is that, although he insists that the régimes which called themselves communist after 1929 were 'not really communist', he doesn't put forward another analysis of what they were. In particular he doesn't dialogue with those theoreticians who have seen in thes societies a new form of capitalism, state capitalism."

(Uncited opinion cut from article, verbatim.) - Jmabel | Talk 03:02, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

Popular culture
There's way too much on popular culture here. Is when or how particular figures died really important, just because Hobsbawm has a sentence about them? -- Danny Yee 23:04, 15 November 2006 (UTC)


 * If we are going to include his ignorant remark about them, we should indicate their actual causes of death. Holly and Marley died in ways that had nothing to do with anything like a decadent "life-style". I'd be just as glad to lose the section completely, but it's not appropriate to quote him saying something misleading and leave it at face value. - Jmabel | Talk 07:03, 18 November 2006 (UTC)


 * You're right, a lot of readers may not understand the background to the quote or its point, without some elaboration. It just seems a disproportionate presence in the article, so maybe cut the section.  Or can we critique Hobsbawm's knowledge of popular culture using a quote from someone else? -- I'll see if I can find a review or other source that comments on it. -- Danny Yee 07:14, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Title
Shouldn't we move this to the full title: The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991? While this has the longest title of the four, the two other books from the series we have articles on, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 and The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, do use full titles. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; talk to me 20:24, 4 September 2011 (UTC)


 * I agree. --Cheol (talk) 06:38, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Criticism
The article as currently written may suffer from lack of a criticism section. Hobsbawm's personal page has this commentary:

Brad DeLong strongly criticised Age of Extremes: "The remains of Hobsbawm's commitment to the religion of World Communism get in the way of his judgment, and twist his vision. On planet Hobsbawm, for example, the fall of the Soviet Union was a disaster, and the Revolutions of 1989 a defeat for humanity. On planet Hobsbawm, Stalin planned multi-party democracies and mixed economies for Eastern Europe after World War II, and reconsidered only after the United States launched the Cold War." After reading Age of Extremes, Kremlinologist Robert Conquest concluded that Hobsbawm suffers from a "massive reality denial" regarding the USSR, and John Gray, though praising his work on the nineteenth century, has described Hobsbawm's writings on the post-1914 period as "banal in the extreme. They are also highly evasive. A vast silence surrounds the realities of communism, a refusal to engage which led the late Tony Judt to conclude that Hobsbawm had 'provincialised himself'. It is a damning judgement".

Is there any reason not to include this sort of criticism of this book in a balanced way? TMLutas (talk) 15:19, 15 October 2012 (UTC)


 * I will add a section named "Appraisal" and put criticisms in there. Would be great if you have the time to contribute. --Greece666 (talk) 06:37, 28 September 2019 (UTC)

Danny Yee
Currently used for footnote 16, this is not a reliable source, it's a personal blog. Moreover, the footnote does not support the phrase it is attached to. I suggest it gets deleted. --Greece666 (talk) 10:29, 28 September 2019 (UTC)