Review by New York Times Review
TONY JUDT was known to many people as the public intellectual who aroused a firestorm of criticism for an article he wrote in The New York Review of Books in 2003, calling for Israel to become a binational state and to lose its specifically Jewish character. That essay, as well as biting critiques of the Iraq war and the Israel lobby, earned him considerable enmity in some quarters, mitigated perhaps by the subsequent news that he had developed Lou Gehrig's disease, to which he succumbed in August 2010. This public persona is unfortunate because it obscures a much more interesting figure. As a historian of 20th-century Europe, Judt both chronicled and himself represented the huge ideological transformations that occurred between the beginning and end of that century. This life has now been documented in the quasiautobiographical "Thinking the Twentieth Century." Conceived after Judt's illness had already been diagnosed, the book consists of transcriptions of his conversations with Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian who is the distinguished author of a number of well-regarded books on Eastern and Central Europe. Snyder, highly erudite and opinionated himself, is not your typical journalistic interviewer; the book is more a dialogue than an autobiography. Judt's story is in many ways very familiar: His forebears were Eastern European Jews who ended up in Britain, where they assimilated into English life. He was not brought up in a religious home - his father was a Marxist - but consciousness of the Holocaust was central to his identity; he was named after a cousin who died at Auschwitz. He attended Cambridge and began a career as a Marxist historian in the mold of his idols Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, writing initially on obscure topics like French socialism in Provence. Intellectually, he was as French as he was English, participating in the événements of 1968 and spending a year at the École Normale Supérieure, where he befriended Marxist luminaries like the historians Annie Kriegel and Boris Souvarine. Whatever Judt's initial ideological commitments, he later concerned himself with a stark and important question: "how so many smart people could have told themselves such stories with all the terrible consequences that ensued." The story was that of Communism, which perpetrated "the intellectual sin of the century: passing judgment on the fate of others in the name of their future as you see it, . . . concerning which you claim exclusive and perfect information." Looking back at the history of left-wing figures from the 1930s like the French socialist Léon Blum, he saw their central failing as the lack of "any appreciation of the possibility of evil as a constraining, much less a dominating, element in public affairs." This was to become the theme of his 1992 book "Past Imperfect," which chronicled French intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre who publicly supported Stalinism while remaining willfully blind to its horrors. Judt's journey from Marxism to "East European liberal" came in several stages. He read the revisionist Marxist writings of the Polish intellectual Leszek Kolakowski, became friends with the Polish sociologist Jan Gross, and met in the 1980s with dissidents on the other side of the Iron Curtain, whose fates he realized he had previously ignored. He threw himself into this newfound interest with abandon, learning Czech and making himself an expert on contemporary Eastern European thought. His knowledge of the two halves of Europe was reflected in the sweeping narrative of his 2005 book "Postwar." Judt's unhappiness with the contemporary left extended to the practitioners of cultural studies in the 1970s. This group, he argues, simply replaced Marx's proletariat with "women; or students, or peasants, or blacks, or - eventually - gays, or indeed whichever group had sound reason to be dissatisfied with the present disposition of power and authority." Identity politics made it impossible to create a master narrative of social development and sidetracked progressives into particularistic dead-ends. The prolonged discussion of public intellectuals toward the end of the book shows off Judt's least pleasant side. He argues that it is an intellectual's duty to "speak truth to power" no matter what, and there is no doubt of his willingness to endure withering castigation for his own views. In return, he skewers many people - Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Michael Mandelbaum, Judith Miller, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Ignatieff, myself included - for being ignorant at best and willing dupes of power at worst, never conceding that his opponents could be honestly wrong or that his own views might deserve more introspection. All of these characteristics come out in the above-mentioned critique of Israel. He argues that Israelis and their American supporters have used the Holocaust as a "Get Out of Jail Free card for a rogue state," but seems to think that his own Jewishness and the fact that he lived in Israel at one point give him the authority to be as morally obtuse in return. Judt seems intent on transferring the lessons learned in Eastern Europe, where genuine liberalism mostly replaced ethnic nationalism, to a part of the world where such liberalism just won't work. His proposal for a binational state was put forward with the self-certainty of an intellectual who has never had to deal with the realities of practicality and power. But he remained little inclined to give ground to critics he believed could be motivated only by bad intentions. Perhaps as compensation for his embrace of Eastern European anti-Communism, Judt makes it clear that he wants his legacy to be on the left. It was "unjust as well as unfortunate" that social democracy collapsed along with Communism in the age of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. He spends a great deal of time attacking Friedrich Hayek and defending John Maynard Keynes. "Thinking the Twentieth Century" concludes with a recapitulation of the defense of the welfare state made in his 2010 book "Ill Fares the Land," as well as a prolonged castigation of the Bush administration for the Iraq war and rising inequality. In the end, what is striking about this book is the great difference between the 20th-century world it describes and the present Totalitarianism has disappeared, except in a few small countries like Cuba and North Korea; a risen Asia represents as much a cultural as an ideological challenge; religion has made a political comeback everywhere. The undergraduate students I teach were all born after the fall of the Berlin Wall; for them, the huge ideological battles among Communism, fascism and liberalism are neither meaningful nor interesting. They are fortunate not to live in a world where ideas could be translated into monstrous projects for the transformation of society, and where being an intellectual could often mean complicity in enormous crimes. Documenting this 20th century, then, is an important achievement of a scholar and intellectual whose premature passing we should all regret. The 'intellectual sin of the century' was deciding the 'fate of others in the name of their future as you see it.' Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and author of "The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 5, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
Over the past half-century, a few notable historians have garnered almost as much visibility as their subjects. In U.S. history, recent examples include David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Edmund Morris; in European history, Tony Judt certainly qualifies. The Cambridge-educated New York University professor, head of NYU's Remarque Institute and author of Postwar (2005), a Pulitzer Prize finalist, was diagnosed in 2008 with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and died in August 2010 at age 62. During 2009, as Judt's devastating disease progressed, Yale historian Snyder whom Samuel Moyn, in a Nation review of his Bloodlands (2010), called perhaps the most talented younger historian of modern Europe working today spent Thursdays with Tony, conversing at Judt's Manhattan home about twentieth-century intellectual history. Perhaps inevitably, their discussions featured Judt's unusual, often outsider approach to his eclectic subjects, and the genre-bending book that results combines in each chapter strong elements of memoir/biography as well as penetrating historical analysis of intellectual developments on both sides of the Iron Curtain that split Europe for two generations.--Carroll, Mary Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this scintillating series of conversations undertaken as he was dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease, British-American historian Judt (The Memory Chalet) and his interlocutor Snyder (Bloodlands) survey the triumphs and barbarities of the past century through the lens of the thinkers and ideologues who shaped it. Interleaving autobiographical sketches with fluent, freewheeling discussions of history, politics, and culture, Judt revisits crucial 20th-century intellectual currents: the impact of two world wars and the Great Depression on politics and philosophy; the development of and rivalry between communist and fascist dogmas; the success of social democracy and Keynesian economics in bringing liberal government, broad-based growth, and social equality to the post-war world; and the retreat from those achievements prompted by free-market fundamentalism's attack on the activist state. (He also reprises his criticism of Israel after recalling summers on the kibbutz.) Judt's ability to distill heaps of erudition into lucid, pithy conversation, even when on a breathing apparatus, is astonishing; he's as engaging on the religious dimensions of Marxism and Freudianism as on Obama and the Iraq War. Snyder, a historian and former student of Judt's, contributes probing interjections that stimulate and test his mentor's ideas. The result is a lively, browsable, deeply satisfying meditation on recent history by a deservedly celebrated public intellectual. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Judt (Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945), who died last year, never got to write the intellectual history of the 20th century that was to have been his next project. Before he died, though, Snyder (history, Yale Univ., Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin) sat with him over the course of several months. Together they talked through the complicated history of the past century, a history that Judt, in particular, knew well. The result is part memoir (the chapters start with Judt's reminiscences) and part historical analysis. Judt's particular strength was his ability to draw connections between the political and what public persons, including intellectuals, said and did about politics, explaining complicated things lucidly but never oversimplifying. This posthumous volume is informed by Judt's exceptional sensitivity and sense of irony; every page has a bon mot. VERDICT We may never have the full history Judt intended to write, but this marvelous precis, vibrantly alive, rich, and piquant, is one last gift from an exceptional public intellectual. Not only academics and fans of Judt, but also those who enjoy the New York Review of Books and The New Yorker will flock to read it. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/11.]-David Keymer, Modesto, CA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The Memory Chalet, 2010, etc.) and Snyder (History/Yale Univ.; Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2010, etc.), who spent most of 2009 talking about, in Snyder's summary, "the limitations (and capacity for renewal) of political ideas, and the moral failures (and duties) of intellectuals in politics." The authors consider these questions within the framework of 20th-century history and the biography of Judt, who died in 2010. Born in London in 1948, the son of immigrant Jews, Judt grew up with the modern welfare state, benefiting from its meritocratic educational system to attend Cambridge and pursue academic studies focused first on French history, then Eastern Europe after World War II. He was an ardent youthful Zionist who later severely criticized Israeli policies, creating a furor in 2003 with an essay arguing for a one-state solution to the Palestinian problem. Judt reluctantly took on the role of public intellectual because of a sense--clearly shared by Snyder, their conversations reveal--that the problems currently plaguing America in particular and the advanced industrial economies in general cannot be meaningfully addressed without understanding their deep roots in a history that stretches back to World War I. This history includes the ravages inflicted by unrestrained capitalism, the appeal and very similar failings of communism and fascism, the misguided uses to which the Holocaust has been put and the post-WWII social bargain that unraveled in the '70s. Judt and Snyder analyze these and many other historical issues with lofty erudition matched by unabashed polemicism--Judt skewers David Brooks as a know-nothing and characterizes Thomas Friedman's support of the Iraq war as "contemptible"). Social democracy has rarely had better-informed, more ethically rigorous advocates than these two distinguished men. For readers who like to be challenged, this searching look at our recent history provides a firm intellectual and moral foundation for understanding the dilemmas of our time.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
