Tony Judt

Tony Robert Judt (2 January 1948 – 6 August 2010) was a British historian, essayist, and university professor who specialized in European history.

Quotes

• My concern tonight is the following: Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?
  • "What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?" (2009)

• On the contrary, we live in the long shadow of a debate with which most people are altogether unfamiliar. If we ask who exercised the greatest influence over contemporary Anglophone economic thought, five foreign-born thinkers spring to mind: Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Popper, and Peter Drucker. The first two were the outstanding “grandfathers” of the Chicago School of free-market macroeconomics. Schumpeter is best known for his enthusiastic description of the “creative, destructive” powers of capitalism, Popper for his defense of the “open society” and his theory of totalitarianism. As for Drucker, his writings on management exercised enormous influence over the theory and practice of business in the prosperous decades of the postwar boom. […] All were forced into exile by these events and all—Hayek in particular—were to cast their writings and teachings in the shadow of the central question of their lifetime: Why had liberal society collapsed and given way—at least in the Austrian case—to fascism? Their answer: the unsuccessful attempts of the (Marxist) left to introduce into post-1918 Austria state-directed planning, municipally owned services, and collectivized economic activity had not only proven delusionary, but had led directly to a counterreaction.
  • "What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?" (2009)

• What, then, is to be done? We have to begin with the state: as the incarnation of collective interests, collective purposes, and collective goods. If we cannot learn to “think the state” once again, we shall not get very far. But what precisely should the state do? Minimally, it should not duplicate unnecessarily: as Keynes wrote, “The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.” And we know from the bitter experience of the past century that there are some things that states should most certainly not be doing.
  • "What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?" (2009)

• I see what you mean about the tragic vision. But you can’t have a tragic vision in politics—not if you wish to intervene and convince (with the exception of grand turning points, from which one should not generalize). What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run. I think that in order to sustain such irenic visions one has to have been born at very particular historical moments and in fortunate places. Just now I think we have very good grounds for pessimism. And as you noted, I’ve tried to write an intervention that turns pessimism into a political program rather than a despairing sceptical dismissal of all possible programs.

  One of the very few things that I know I believe strongly is that we must learn how to make a better world out of usable pasts rather than dreaming of infinite futures. It’s a very late-Enlightenment view that says that the only way to make a better future is to believe that the future will be better. Smarter people than me used to believe very differently and I think it is time to listen to them once again.

  • in Tony Judt: the last interview by Peter Jukes (2010)

• Where does that leave me? Trying, as usual, to square general truths with particular circumstances. That’s the difference between pure ethics and political theory; but it isn’t resolved by simply abandoning the tension and sliding to one end of the pole.
  • in Tony Judt: the last interview by Peter Jukes (2010)

• God knows I can think of enough things that I did wrong both personally and as part of my cohort. But I never abandoned what I thought of as the benefits of the postwar consensus in favour of sectional advantage. Actually, I was always a bit awkward in this as other respects. As you know, I was against root-and-branch school comprehensivization on the grounds that the postwar arrangements combining meritocracy with opportunity, while imperfect and logically indefensible, were better than the radical schemes on offer – which have trashed much of the pedagogical gains of the early postwar decades.
  • in Tony Judt: the last interview by Peter Jukes (2010)

• I am, I discover in late middle age, a work in progress.
  • quoted in Samuel Moyn, "Intellectuals, Reason, and History: In Memory of Tony Judt", H-France Salon (2012)

Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (1992)

• In practice, the writer or scholar who aspires to that public position which defines intellectuals and distinguishes them from mere scribblers has always had to choose between being the apologist for rulers or an advisor to the people; the tragedy of the twentieth century is that these two functions have ceased to exist independently of one another, and intellectuals like Sartre who thought they were fulfilling one role were inevitably drawn to play both. If their successors, in France or elsewhere, are truly to put this past behind them, it will not be enough to recognize past mistakes. It will also be necessary to accept that entailed in the very meaning for modern society of the term intellectual are a number of roles that writers and scholars today may no longer wish to fulfill; indeed, a refusal to occupy the post of the (engaged) intellectual may be the most positive of the steps modern thinkers can take in any serious effort to come to terms with their own responsibility for our common recent past.
  • p. 319

The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (1998)

• History is not written as it was experienced, nor should it be. The inhabitants of the past know better than we do what it was like to live there, but they were not well placed, most of them, to understand what was happening to them and why.
  • Introduction: The Misjudgment of Paris

• From the end of World War I until the middle of the middle of the 1970s, French public life was shaped and misshaped by three overlapping and intersecting forms of collective and individual irresponsibility. The first of these was political. Reading the history of interwar France, one is struck again and again by the incompetence, the insouciance and the culpable negligence of the men who governed the country and represented its citizens. This is not a political observation, in the partisan sense, but rather a cultural one.
  • Introduction: The Misjudgment of Paris

• If the era of political irresponsibility in France lasted from 1918 to 1958, the age of moral irresponsibility may be said to have begun in the mid-thirties and endured for the best part of four decades.
  • Introduction: The Misjudgment of Paris

• This book is about three Frenchmen who lived and wrote against the grain of these three ages of irresponsibility. They were very different men and would have been surprised to think of themselves as a group, yet they have something rather distinctive in common. All three played an important role in the France of their lifetime but lived at a slightly awkward tangent to their contemporaries. For much of his adult life each was an object of dislike, suspicion, contempt, or hatred for many of his peers and contemporaries; only at the end of their long lives were Léon Blum and Raymond Aron, for quite different reasons, able to relax into the comfort of near-universal admiration, respect, and, in some quarters, adulation. Camus, who had experienced all three by the age of thirty-five, died twelve years later an insecure and much-maligned figure; it would be thirty years before his reputation would recover.
  • Introduction: The Misjudgment of Paris

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)

• Europe is the smallest continent. It is not really even a continent—just a subcontinental annexe to Asia. The whole of Europe (excluding Russia and Turkey) comprises just five and a half million square kilometers: less than two thirds the area of Brazil, not much more than half the size of China or the US. It is dwarfed by Russia, which covers seventeen million square kilometers. But in the intensity of its internal differences and contrasts, Europe is unique.
  • Preface & Acknowledgements

• Europe is not re-entering its troubled wartime past—on the contrary, it is leaving it. Germany today, like the rest of Europe, is more conscious of its twentieth-century history than at any time in the past fifty years. But this does not mean that it is being drawn back into it. For that history never went away.
  • Einführung

• Sixty years after Hitler's death, his war and its consequences are entering history. Postwar in Europe lasted a very long time, but it is finally coming to a close.
  • Einführung

Ill Fares the Land (2010)

Einführung

• Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

• The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears ‘natural’ today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth

• For thirty years students have been complaining to me that ‘it was easy for you’: your generation had ideals and ideas, you believed in something, you were able to change things. ‘We’ (the children of the ’80s, the ’90s, the ‘aughts’) have nothing. In many respects my students are right. It was easy for us—just as it was easy, at least in this sense, for the generations who came before us. The last time a cohort of young people expressed comparable frustration at the emptiness of their lives and the dispiriting purposelessness of their world was in the 1920s: it is not by chance that historians speak of a ‘lost generation’.

• In short, the practical need for strong states and interventionist governments is beyond dispute. But no one is ‘re-thinking’ the state. There remains a marked reluctance to defend the public sector on grounds of collective interest or principle. It is striking that in a series of European elections following the financial meltdown, social democratic parties consistently did badly; notwithstanding the collapse of the market, they proved conspicuously unable to rise to the occasion.
  If it is to be taken seriously again, the Left must find its voice. There is much to be angry about: growing inequalities of wealth and opportunity; injustices of class and caste; economic exploitation at home and abroad; corruption and money and privilege occluding the arteries of democracy. But it will no longer suffice to identify the shortcomings of ‘the system’ and then retreat, Pilate-like: indifferent to consequences. The irresponsible rhetorical grandstanding of decades past did not serve the Left well.

• We have entered an age of insecurity—economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity. The fact that we are largely unaware of this is small comfort: few in 1914 predicted the utter collapse of their world and the economic and political catastrophes that followed. Insecurity breeds fear. And fear—fear of change, fear of decline, fear of strangers and an unfamiliar world—is corroding the trust and interdependence on which civil societies rest.

• All change is disruptive. We have seen that the specter of terrorism is enough to cast stable democracies into turmoil. Climate change will have even more dramatic consequences. Men and women will be thrown back upon the resources of the state. They will look to their political leaders and representatives to protect them: open societies will once again be urged to close in upon themselves, sacrificing freedom for ‘security’. The choice will no longer be between the state and the market, but between two sorts of state. It is thus incumbent upon us to re-conceive the role of government. If we do not, others will.

Quotes about Judt

• As right-wing politicians and pundits call us stooges for Osama bin Laden, Tony Judt charges, in a widely discussed and heatedly debated essay in the London Review of Books, that American liberals -- without distinction -- have "acquiesced in President Bush's catastrophic foreign policy." Both claims are nonsense on stilts.

  Clearly this is a moment for liberals to define ourselves. The important truth is that most liberals, including the undersigned, have stayed our course throughout these grim five years. We have consistently and publicly repudiated the ruinous policies of the Bush administration, and our diagnosis, alas, has been vindicated by events. The Bush debacle is a direct consequence of its repudiation of liberal principles. And if the country is to recover, we should begin by restating these principles.

  • Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin, "We Answer to the Name of Liberals" (October 22, 2006)

• Judt's critique of the role of liberal intellectuals in politics is wide-ranging and unsparing. If his tone is sharp it is because, despite everything, he writes as one of these intellectuals. When he takes seriously a one-state solution for the Palestine/Israel conflict, or suggests looking to Europe for a 21st-century model of the good society, he is as remote from historically realisable possibilities as the writers he criticises. Even when he is wrong, however, Judt writes with fearless integrity and moral seriousness. Like Raymond Aron, the subtle and relentless French polemicist whose spirit breathes through these pages, Judt is a liberal thinker dedicated to demystifying liberal illusions. Reappraisals is an indispensable tract for the times by one of the great political writers of the age.
  • John Gray (philosopher), "The years the locusts ate", The Guardian (26 April 2008)

• Tony had so far made his name as an academic bruiser. His default position was forensic: not the judge’s but the barrister’s, whose objective is neither truth nor truthfulness, but winning the case. To inquire into the possible weaknesses of one’s own position is not crucial, though this is what the historian of large spaces, long periods and complex processes must do. Yet his formative decades as an intellectual prosecutor did not prevent Tony’s transformation into a mature, thoughtful and well-informed historian. His major work as such was undoubtedly the door-stopping Postwar, a history of Europe after 1945. It was and is an ambitious though on occasion unbalanced book. I am not sure that its perspective will seem adequate to those who read it now for the first time, seven years after its original publication. Nevertheless I can assure you from personal experience that large works of historical synthesis based on secondary reading and the observation of contemporary history can only be written in maturity. Very few historians have the ability to tackle so vast a subject or to bring it to a conclusion. Postwar is a very impressive achievement. If only because any work taking the story up to the present has obsolescence built in, its future is uncertain. But it may have a longer lifespan as a critical narrative work of reference because it is written with verve, wit and style. Postwar established him for the first time as a major figure in the profession.

  Yet already he was ceasing to operate as one. His 21st-century stance was not that of a historian so much as a ‘public intellectual’, a brilliant enemy of self-delusion garnished with theoretical jargon, with the short temper of the natural polemicist, an independent and fearless critical commentator on world affairs. He seemed all the more original and radical for having been a fairly orthodox defender of the ‘free world’ against ‘totalitarianism’ during the Cold War, especially in the 1980s. Faced with governments and ideologues who read victory and world domination into the fall of communism, he was honest enough with himself to recognise that the old verities and slogans needed to be junked after 1989. Probably only in the ever nervous US could such a reputation have been built so quickly on the basis of a few articles in journals of modest circulation addressed exclusively to academic intellectuals. The pages of the mainstream press had long been open to a Raymond Aron in France (clearly one of Tony’s inspirations), or a Habermas in Germany, and their impact had long been discounted. He was well aware of the risks, personal and professional, he ran in attacking the combined forces of US global conquest, the neocons and Israel, but he had plenty of what Bismarck called ‘civilian bravery’ (Zivilcourage) – a quality notably lacking in Isaiah Berlin, as Tony himself noted, perhaps not without malice. Unlike the ex-Marxist scholiasts and intellocrates on the Left Bank who, as Auden said of poets, made ‘nothing happen’, Tony understood that a struggle with these new forces could make a difference. He launched himself against them with evident pleasure and zest.

  This was the figure who came into his own after the end of the Cold War, widening his courtroom technique to flay the likes of Bush and Netanyahu rather than some political absurdity in the Fifth Arrondissement or a distinguished professor in New Jersey. It was a magnificent performance, a class act; he was hailed by his readers not only for what he said, but what many of them would not have had the courage to say themselves. It was all the more effective because Tony was both an insider and an outsider: English, Jewish, French, eventually American, but plurinational rather than cosmopolitan. Yet he was aware of the limits of what he was doing. As he points out himself, the people who succeed in telling the truth to power are not columnists but reporters and photographers, through the omnipresent media.

  • Eric Hobsbawm, "After the Cold War", London Review of Books (2012)

• One of these pasts is the lost role of the public intellectual: well-informed but willing to range beyond the ghetto of expertise—who doesn’t just observe but also tries to intervene or provoke. The economic background to Ill Fares the Land might be incomplete but the reappraising anger is just. Tony’s willingness to take on this topic—to use his fast-depleting energies on this particular stage at this particular time—is yet another dramatic intervention, combining a personal voice with a knowledge of history and sense of occasion in a way that is both responsive and responsible, timely and moral.
  • Peter Jukes, "Tony Judt: a man of his word" (2010)

• The excellence of “Postwar” was no doubt hard to achieve—Judt says that he began planning the book in 1989—but it is easy to describe. The writing is vivid; the coverage—of little countries as well as of great ones—is virtually superhuman; and, above all, the book is smart. Every page contains unexpected data, or a fresh observation, or a familiar observation freshly turned. And there are more than eight hundred pages.
  • Louis Menand, "From the Ashes", New Yorker (2005)

• “Postwar” is first-rate political, economic, and social history. The only sections that are unworthy of the author’s talents are the brief ventures into intellectual history, and the proverbial British prudishness about abstract ideas may have something to do with this. As a reference to the philosopher Jacques Derrida as “the literary critic Jacques Derrida” suggests, Judt has no patience for Continental thought, whose prominence, such as it was, he tends to attribute to a combination of fashionableness and ambition. He suggests, for instance, that Michel Foucault was signally aided by the invention of the television: in an earlier age, Judt says, Foucault might have been just “a drawing-room favorite, a star of the Parisian lecture circuit, like Henri Bergson fifty years earlier,” a statement that is both silly (American readers of Foucault never saw him on television) and an insult to Bergson, who was an internationally celebrated philosopher.

  This kind of thing is not criticism; it’s sneering. “Herbert Marcuse, a Weimar-era intellectual who had ended up in Southern California—where he handily adapted his old epistemology to his new environment—offered a helpful conflation of all these strands of thought.” What is trying to get said here? Marcuse was a German Jew (and anti-Communist) who, along with the rest of the Institute for Social Research—the Frankfurt School—went into exile after the rise of Hitler. He “ended up” in Southern California because, after a long career as a professor at Brandeis, he took a job at the University of California at San Diego. And his “helpful conflation” (as though being helpful were mere opportunism) concerned a project on which the Frankfurt School intellectuals had been engaged since the nineteen-thirties, the revision of Marxism by the lights of psychoanalytic theory. Not trusty stone-kicking British empiricism, it’s true; but in a historian generosity should be part of the equipment. (Leave the pettiness to reviewers.) Judt is so suspicious of intellectualism that at one point he suggests that the British are immune to it. “The species has always been uncommon in Britain,” he says of the public intellectual. This is almost comical. What about, in the period covered in Judt’s own book, Bertrand Russell, C. P. Snow, and the man who was arguably the most influential public intellectual of the Cold War era, George Orwell?

  • Louis Menand, "From the Ashes", New Yorker (2005)

• The conversion of Tony Judt has been less radical but more interesting. He made his name excoriating French left-wing intellectuals for their failure to champion rights–a failure he saw as rooted in their nation’s revolutionary tradition, especially when measured against Anglo-American political wisdom. Rights have an “extrapolitical status,” he wrote thirteen years ago, diagnosing as French pathology the error of making them “an object of suspicion.” Now he says that universalistic invocations of rights often mask particular interests–and never more so than in America’s current wars–even though he once chastised opponents of rights who took this very position. Formerly treating them as an intellectual talisman, Judt now complains in passing about “the abstract universalism of ‘rights’–and uncompromising ethical stands taken against malign regimes in their name.” He warns that such abstractions can all too easily lead those who invoke them to “readily mistake the US president’s myopic rigidity for their own moral rectitude.” Of course, Judt still understands himself to be a committed liberal intellectual, at a time when he thinks practically all other liberals have disappeared. But not just the world has changed; he has too, and most strikingly in his acknowledgment that his old standard can hallow many causes.
  • Samuel Moyn, "On the Genealogy of Morals", The Nation (Mar 29, 2007)

Samuel Moyn, "Intellectuals, Reason, and History: In Memory of Tony Judt" (2012)

Samuel Moyn, "Intellectuals, Reason, and History: In Memory of Tony Judt", H-France Salon (2012)

• Tony’s move beyond the antitotalitarian critique of intellectuals to more programmatic concerns was very much to be welcomed, and he was unsparing toward former allies who failed to make the same move—especially towards those antitotalitarians in Eastern Eastern, Western Europe, and the United States who rallied to George W. Bush’s cause as if it followed directly from their antitotalitarianism. Tony’s evolution was not totally unforeseeable, though it was still quite surprising. As he reminded me in his letter to the editor, even before Past Imperfect and its celebration of rights against the state, Tony had admonished his cherished East European dissidents for thinking they could do with human rights alone—“living in truth,” as Václav Havel put it. After all, Tony observed, it very much mattered what sort of state they hoped to build on the ruins of the totalitarian one they were facing down. Toward the end of his life, Tony revived what had begun as a passing critique of dissident “antipolitics” for neglecting the programmatic demand for social alternatives—and began searching for some alternatives himself.

• I know Tony was concerned by the intellectual problem of Marxism’s disappearance because he cited over and over again in his career the following sentence by a French thinker who made serious mistakes but, Tony eventually acknowledged, best formulated the risk of opacity when intellectuals have no social theory.

• Tony ultimately recognized that Marxism had never been about flights of fancy or irresponsible fun—it was about understanding the world as a condition for changing it (whatever the last of Karl Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” may have said). Significantly, in this piece on Leszek Kolakowski, originally published not long before Tony’s illness, he went so far as to say that social democracy like the left in general had depended on Marxism because of Marxism’s unique claim to discern meaning in history as well as to make the meaning of history connect with hope for its victims.

• Tony knew that the disappearance of social theory, our common fate today, is not to be remedied so easily. The programmatic alternative to the present Tony came to favor— imagining a different future—depends, as he saw, on a social theory underlying it. And in spite of the fact that Marxism towered over the modern landscape, there are other possibilities. Keynes—Tony’s apparent hero at the end—presupposed a social theory too, though so did Friedrich Hayek, and the point is not just to revive their dispute simply to take sides but rather to understand their contention as the clash of philosophical visions it was, both broadly about the nature of social life and more narrowly about the place of modernity in it.