Paradoxically, the mystic and the romantic artist need to be appreciated to understand the entire cultural process. William Blake was a man who was both mystic and romantic artist, and even the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has warned his colleagues about the dangers of ignoring the artists and slipping into the simple-mindedness of economic and technological reductionism:Few men saw the social earthquake caused by machine and factory earlier than William Blake in the 1790s, who had yet little except a few London steam-mills and brick-kilns to go by.