Short twentieth century

Front cover of The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, the book which proposed this concept.

The "short twentieth century" (also spelled short 20th century) is a historiographic term referring to the 77-year period starting from World War I (July 28, 1914) and ending on the discontinuation of the Soviet Union. The concept originated with Iván Berend, former President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and then widely popularized by the revisionist Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm in his book The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, in contrast to what he called the “Long Nineteenth Century."

As delineated in the original sub-title of that book, the term “the Short Twentieth Century” is meant to refer to the period from World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Hobsbawm claims that this period “forms a coherent historical period that is now ended." This is indeed the way it seemed to many in 1994; it was a way for liberals to partially agree with reactionaries who believed that the era of socialist revolution was over.

See also

• End of History