It Wasn’t Supposed to End This Way : A short and sad--but brilliant--history of the 20th Century : THE AGE OF EXTREMES: A History of World, 1914-1991, <i> By Eric Hobsbawm (Pantheon Books: $30; 628 pp.)</i>

You heard it here first: The 20th Century is over. Maybe not according to the calendar, where it still has a few years to run, but when future historians look back, they will say that from a political and economic point of view, the 20th Century was a short and a sad one, beginning in 1914 and petering out any day now.

That is Eric Hobsbawm’s claim in his new history, and few readers will come away unimpressed by the arguments with which he makes his case, or by the breadth and depth of learning he brings to this massive task.

For Hobsbawm, the 20th Century was divided into two halves: an Age of Catastrophe, which lasted from 1914 to 1945, and a Golden Age, which lasted from 1945 until recently. This is likely to be an enduring view among historians; few eras in human history have been as wretched as the first of Hobsbawm’s periods, and few more prosperous--at least in parts of the world--as the second.

Hobsbawm’s account of the Age of Catastrophe is a catalog of horrors: two World Wars, the Great Depression, the rise of Facism and the horrors of the Russian Revolution and Stalin’s regime. These are things every schoolchild knows, or should know; what Hobsbawm does is to remind us that things weren’t supposed to end this way.

The 19th Century wrapped up on an optimistic note. Democracy and prosperity seemed to be spreading through Europe; even autocratic Tsarist Russia was breathing the fresh air of reform. In the United States, the progressives were building a bipartisan coalition to democratize our political system and to provide new protection for the poor and the weak. In Britain, the Liberal Party was also committed to sweeping reforms. The progress of civilization seemed assured; people confidently wrote and spoke about the day, not far off, when the twin systems of capitalism and democracy would bring an end to poverty and war.

Then came Sarajevo. In 1914, a crazed Serbian nationalist with shadowy links to terrorist groups in the Serbian government murdered the son of the Austrian Emperor in downtown Sarajevo. Within weeks all of Europe was plunged into a senseless and barbarous war that killed millions of people and almost wrecked civilization. As Hobsbawm reminds us, the destruction and suffering of the war unleashed the Nazi and Communist demons, who tormented and murdered tens of millions more people in the next generation, as the West lurched from one disaster to the next.

By the early 1940s, democracy seemed headed for the scrapheap of history. Both Hitler and Stalin achieved better economic results than western democratic governments during the Depression. Hitler’s early victories seemed to show that the Nazis, though evil, were more efficient at waging war than the divided and paralyzed democracies. In 1941-42, when Axis power was at its height, and when only Stalin’s armed forces were holding Hitler at bay, many sober and serious people seriously concluded that democracy was dead.

Fortunately, they were as wrong as the optimists who, in 1910, were ready to declare democracy triumphant. Thanks to Russian blood and American industrial power, the Allies won the Second World War and, under American leadership, the western democratic nations of Europe went on to win the peace. Thanks to massive government intervention in the global economy, the world went on after 1945 to enjoy a generation of unprecedented growth until by 1973 the masses in the western world had reached levels of affluence no one had ever thought possible.

This, unfortunately, was not the end of the story. The next 20 years, Hobsbawm points out, saw the slow unraveling of those achievements. Unemployment rose across the West, wages fell in many countries (including the United States), and governments everywhere began to experience new budget and policy problems. Social values, too, began to weaken. Family ties started to unravel in many cases, and society in general became less willing to help the unfortunate.

This of course is only the briefest sketch of a book that itself--even at almost 600 pages!--is only a very cursory look at a very complicated century. Hobsbawm does his best to deal with Indian independence, the Chinese revolution, decolonization in Africa and development in South East Asia. As he did in his 1988 book “The Age of Empire” (Pantheon), he also writes well about both cultural and scientific history, and if he sometimes seems opinionated or even eccentric, that is surely the privilege of a man with his learning and experience.

Books of this kind--general narrative histories covering long sweeps of time and vast stretches of space--are getting harder and harder to write. History is getting so complicated, and so much is changing so quickly, that it is becoming impossible for a single human intelligence to wrap itself around the material. No one could write a genuinely comprehensive history of the 20th Century, but Hobsbawm has come as close as anybody is likely to get.

Histories of this kind tend to be both too long and too short. Too long, because to get everything mentioned at all they must run into hundreds of pages; and too short, because they cannot get into enough detail about most of their topics to be really enlightening. The reader who is already familiar with 20th Century history will read for style and to relish Hobsbawm’s settling of old intellectual and political scores. The younger reader who is just grounding her or himself in the facts of the 20th Century will sometimes feel overwhelmed by the cataracts of erudition and detail that tumble over one another in the course of Hobsbawm’s tightly constructed, sometimes dense, narrative.

But all cavils aside, this book is a magnificent achievement of a very rare and remarkable kind: It is the serious, deeply engaged attempt of an honest, brilliant and profoundly learned historian to come to grips with the issues of his time. With its vivid details, its humane sympathies, its engagement in great issues and its clear style, it reminds us once again why Eric Hobsbawm is so widely considered one of the most distinguished historians now working in English.