Hobsbawm's books on the long nineteenth century remain foundational to quite a lot of broad interpretations of this period, and many of his ideas do hold up, though it would certainly be wrong to suggest that they have not been challenged since they were published, both in terms of the core theory they set out and the details they contain. They have also never really been replaced, not least because the way in which history is "done" and studied at university level has changed so much since Hobsbawm wrote. That any major academic would have the time, as well as the skill-set and the inclination, to write such broad-based works in a period in which careers are built and maintained on regular publication is in many ways lamentable, but seems increasingly old-fashioned. For this reason, the four titles Hobsbawm published on the period 1789-1991 are still very commonly set to students, and indeed I use this fact as a discussion point for my own students, noting that, for instance, the Oxford reading list for the period is otherwise almost entirely made up of books published since 1990.

A couple of years ago I was publisher of a short book by Tom Stammers of Durham University that re-examined Hobsbawm. Tom summarises the current status of Hobsbawm's magnum opus, Age of Revolution, like this:

Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 provided such a broad and persuasive outline that some other scholars simply adopted it and filled in missing parts of the picture. Despite the fact that Hobsbawm neglected women’s history, feminist historians have found his work useful. They took his claims about the growth of industrial capitalism to help explain the economic reasons behind the limiting of women’s freedoms in the early Victorian period from 1837. Men went to work, while women stayed at home. Similarly, the recent collection of essays edited by history professors Dror Wahrman and Colin Jones supports the idea that the late eighteenth century was indeed an “age of cultural revolutions,” and that developments in Britain and France need to be studied together. Hobsbawm remains an important source for all scholars who believe that the late eighteenth century was a key moment in the transition to the modern era. However, many now question his belief that these changes are fully explained by the growth of the bourgeoisie.

Critics of Hobsbawm’s Marxist view also question whether the conflicts of the period could have been avoided, and were as “revolutionary” as he claims. For revisionist historians like William Doyle, the overthrow of the French monarchy in 1789 was not due to long-term social conflicts, but short-term political mistakes. According to British historians like David Cannadine, the old landowning aristocratic families adapted to survive and kept much of their influence despite the growing importance of industry. Historians like Linda Colley, meanwhile, have talked about the common loyalties that tied many British people together. Despite belonging to different social classes, they all felt tied to the Protestant religion, to the nation-state, and to the expanding empire. This basic loyalty can be seen in the Chartist movement too. Its working-class supporters in the 1830s and 1840s demanded democratic change, but most had little interest in revolutionary socialism. Many scholars now question Hobsbawm’s view that this was a period when instability and conflict between social classes was unavoidable.

Hobsbawm’s “dual revolution” theory [which suggests that the French and the Industrial revolutions were the twin engines of change across the nineteenth century] has admirers today, not just because he presented the idea so elegantly, but also because it pushed scholars to think about connections across borders. Modern historian Jan Rüger wrote: “Eric Hobsbawm’s nineteenth century remains therefore not only exemplary in the broad sweep, the elegance and style, the sheer amount of knowledge it displays; it also continues to offer a rich encouragement to think Britain and Europe in one context.” Today many scholars accept the importance of producing histories of the revolutionary era in Britain and France that, if not comparative, at least explore connections between, the two countries.

For example, intellectual historians look at how thinkers from different backgrounds exchanged ideas on economics or republicanism. Social historians look at how artisans became involved in political fights. Political historians look at military mobilization in an age of war. And cultural historians look at wider communications between England and France.

Most scholars today, however, do not share Hobsbawm’s Marxist belief in the rise to power of the bourgeoisie. History professor Sarah Maza has further adapted the argument of Gareth Stedman Jones to go so far as to claim that the bourgeoisie never really existed as a group. She believes the term was used as a negative label to describe certain types of self-advancing behavior. This shift in the 1980s away from looking at class relations to looking at culture as a way to understand history worried Hobsbawm. He was convinced that Karl Marx had truly asked the most fundamental questions about social change and still agreed with his belief that conflicts between social classes moved history forwards.

Source

Tom Stammers with Patrick Glen, An Analysis of Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 (2017)