Daily Inspiration Quote by Eric Hobsbawm

Hobsbawm’s line lands with the cool fatalism of someone who has watched the 20th century’s bright promises curdle into systems. He’s not sneering at “socially responsible scientists” so much as trimming the era’s favorite delusion: that ethical intention, appended to technical brilliance, can steer outcomes once knowledge leaves the lab. The sentence is engineered to deflate. “Not much” is doing heavy work, a small phrase that quietly demolishes the heroic myth of the lone conscientious expert. Then he widens the trap: “as individuals, or even as a group.” Even collective virtue, he implies, is structurally outmatched.

The subtext is institutional. Science doesn’t enter society as a moral agent; it enters as fuel. States, militaries, corporations, and bureaucracies decide what gets funded, deployed, scaled, and weaponized. In that world, the scientist becomes a node in a supply chain of consequences, not its author. Read against Hobsbawm’s Marxist sensibility and his lifelong attention to class power and state formation, the claim is less about personal failure than about who owns the lever.

Context matters: Hobsbawm wrote in the shadow of “big science,” the Cold War, nuclear weapons, and technocratic governance, when discoveries rapidly became infrastructure. His provocation is that “responsibility” is often staged at the wrong level. If consequences are social, the response has to be political: regulation, democratic oversight, labor organization, and public control of research agendas. The line is a rebuke to moral window-dressing that leaves the machinery untouched.