The vast expansion of an increasingly radicalised body of university students reinforced their influence and made "social history" as well as the more theoretical sociology into the weapon of choice of the intellectual young. The role of Marx and Marxism in these developments is difficult to assess, but they are far ahead of any other historian or historical school in the index of a survey of the field in 1971, and it was a Marxist work which, for the historian of British historiography of the century 1907–2007, "at last saw off, even from remoter library shelves, some of those dated textbooks of an earlier era".
Eric Hobsbawm
1917 - 2012