Daily Inspiration Quote by Eric Hobsbawm

Hobsbawm frames utopianism less as a blueprint than as political fuel: a deliberately oversized dream that can justify the punishing work revolutions actually demand. Coming from a Marxist-inflected historian of the "long 19th century" and the "short 20th", the line carries a cool-eyed pragmatism. He is not romanticizing utopias as end-states; he's describing them as instruments. "Necessary social device" is the tell: utopianism is technology for morale, a narrative machine that converts private exhaustion into public purpose.

The subtext is double-edged. Utopianism, in this view, is both sincere hope and useful fiction. It recruits people into "superhuman efforts" - strikes endured, prisons survived, shortages normalized - by promising that sacrifice will be transmuted into a world qualitatively better, not just marginally reformed. Hobsbawm also implies a harsh limit to purely rational politics. Data, grievances, and programmatic demands rarely mobilize at revolutionary scale; myth, horizon, and moral grandeur do.

Context matters: Hobsbawm lived through the century that tested utopian energies to destruction and to transformation. The Russian Revolution, anti-colonial struggles, the labor movement: each ran on visions that exceeded what any committee could deliver. The phrase "no major revolution is achieved" reads like a historian's weary concession: revolutions are not achieved by accurate forecasts but by mass conviction that history can be seized.

There's an implicit warning inside the diagnosis. If utopianism is a device, it can be engineered - and weaponized. The same mechanism that makes solidarity possible can also excuse coercion once reality refuses to match the dream.