Tony Judt’s Final Communiqué
On August 6, historian, teacher and public intellectual (a term he viewed with suspicion) Tony Judt died. Tony Judt was the kind of cultured, highly literate, broadly cosmopolitan and expansive public intellectual that inspires awe, if not envy, in those of us with lesser gifts. Already a masterful thinker and writer in both English and French, as a response to his self-confessed “mid-life crisis” he taught himself Czech. His untimely death turned off a scintillating mind—a mind that was being progressively entrapped in a bodily prison. Diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2008, Judt spent his last two years in determined efforts to communicate with us while he still could. This is a compounded tragedy on many levels, but it must be mentioned because it perhaps explains the somewhat frantic tone of his final book. Tony Judt was a man in a hurry. He had much he wanted to tell us—while he still could.
Already paralyzed below the neck, Judt had to dictate his final manuscript to assistants, who transcribed his stream-of-consciousness thoughts and turned them into a coherent book. The book actually began as his last public lecture, delivered in October 2009 (when he was already confined to a wheelchair and breathing with a machine) before a capacity audience at New York University. He prepared the lecture entirely in his memory, leaving his assistants to later add in the appropriate footnotes and detailed references. Under the circumstances, the publication of Tony Judt’s last book is something of a heroic event.
Judt has been one of the most important liberal intellectuals of the past thirty or so years, although some have thought him a conservative. This is because he failed to bend at the waist in the presence of the prevailing academic gods. He was contemptuous of what he so nicely called the “communitarian solipsism” of the fad of academic sub-specialties: in women’s history, black history, LGBT history, etc. As he once put it: “within the university many colleagues look upon me as a reactionary dinosaur. Understandably so: I teach the textual legacy of long-dead Europeans; have little tolerance for ‘self-expression’ as a substitute for clarity; regard effort as a poor substitute for achievement; treat my discipline as dependent in the first instance upon facts, not ‘theory’; and view with skepticism much that passes for historical scholarship today. By prevailing academic mores, I am incorrigibly conservative.” This misidentification of Judt’s politics is, in my view, symptomatic of the general postmodern declension of the history profession. We can’t even get our politics straight anymore.
A specialist in European history, Judt’s monumental Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, was a runner-up for the 2006 Pulitzers and was named by the New York Times Book Review as one of the ten most important books of 2005. The author of nearly a dozen previous books, he was the kind of author whose name appears on the cover of his books in type several times the size of his title.
Educated at Cambridge and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Judt’s early academic work focused mostly on narrow subjects in French cultural and intellectual history. However, he eventually came to be seen as a prominent public intellectual, willing to enter the fray of contemporary controversies (reluctantly he claims, although the claim is somewhat undermined by the zeal with which he approached the role). A critic of the French left, he accused many prominent French intellectuals of a misguided fondness for communism and an attendant unwillingness to deal honestly with the complicity of the French in wartime Vichy. He also mocked and ridiculed the postmodernism of the French intellectual class, as well as their fey “revolutionary” ideologies. His attacks on the preening left in France has caused some to see him as a conservative, even a reactionary—which is an odd notion, given Judt’s own intellectual roots.
Born in London to a middle-class family of Jewish “anti-communist Marxists,” Judt became an ardent Zionist after spending a teenage summer on a kibbutz in Israel. He was so committed to Israel’s cause that he volunteered to serve as a translator on the Golan Heights in the aftermath of the 1967 war. He was shocked and surprised to discover that many Israelis he met were in fact blatant racists and that Israel "had turned from a sort of narrow-minded pioneer society into a rather smug, superior, conquering society." Judt became an early and vocal advocate of the “two-state solution” in the Middle East, long before this view became the fashionable establishment view. For this he was duly vilified. Growing more and more disillusioned with Israel’s conduct over the years, in 2004 he shocked the intellectual elite when he penned an essay in the New York Times arguing for a one-state solution. Judt had decided that Israel would never treat its Arab populations fairly, and would never allow a viable Palestinian state to arise, so he concluded that the whole region must be one state with full democratic participation by all residents—Arab and Jew alike. This heresy earned him something like excommunication from the Jewish intellectual community, and no end of personal and professional troubles.
A gifted essayist—with a fondness for the nasty but telling phrase—over the years he trained his rhetorical aim on a very diverse set of targets: from Sartre, Foucault and Derrida in the early days; to the never-say-die contingent of British pro-communist historians (Eric Hobsbawm, et. al.); to the liberals who supported the Iraq War (calling them “Bush’s Useful Idiots”); to such conservative lions of the academy as John Lewis Gaddis; and to such popular writers as Thomas Friedman, whose work he described as “always carefully road tested for middle-brow political acceptability.” His protean sense of who needed deflating was unconstrained by the conventional political map, and seemed only to be unified by his desire to be a critic of the conventional pieties.
Judt’s last interview was with TV host Charlie Rose. It was painful to watch. Judt was unable to move any part of body except his head; he had a large plastic breathing tube jammed up his nose and he could only manage to pour out a sentence or two before taking a quick gasp of bubbly air and launching non-stop into his next thought. Rose asked him, of course, about dying. He was dying, he said, bit by bit, from the extremities up through his torso until only his head was free of the grip of the disease. It was rather like he was being chased out of his own body and he had arrived at his last place of refuge. But he reported that he still found life worth living because he could still communicate—he could still talk and dictate. And that ability—the ability to communicate—was for him the essence of what it meant to be alive. Within a week, that last refuge too had been taken away.
The poignancy of that final interview was raised to notational powers when Rose followed it with clips from Judt’s earlier appearances on his show over the years. In these earlier interviews we saw a mind that sparkled and danced. Judt’s mind was alight with energy and moved always a pace or two faster than most of us could accommodate. Even in that last lecture at Columbia he was still able to offer deep thoughts in an instant on rather profound questions, like one asked from the audience by his twelve-year-old son, who wanted to know what the implications were of so much loose talk of “socialism” this and “socialism” that. In the final Charlie Rose interview, his communications were Zen-like: brief little spurts of thought, with little room for clever word-play or flashes of charming wit. Even the communicating mind seemed to be in the process of being squeezed into an ever-smaller space.
Not only did he produce a last book after the onset of his disease, but Judt had been contributing a regular column to the New York Review of Books. The NYRB essays were something else again. Here was time and space enough to add the verve and wit and style that were a hallmark of his prose. He wrote charmingly of his childhood fondness for train travel; of English food; of the culture of an Oxford undergraduate. He wrote stingingly of various academic follies. He wrote fondly of intellectual friends he admired. He wrote unstintingly of Israel and his own Jewishness. He wrote unflinchingly of his own illness. This set of columns is the closest Judt ever came to giving us an autobiography, and we may expect sometime in the future to see the NYRB gather them into book form. At least, we can hope so.
Ill Fares the Land-
Tony Judt’s last book is entitled Ill Fares the Land. Although he pronounced himself not a polemicist, this book is certainly polemical—indeed, almost frantic in its tone. The title of the book is taken from a passage from Oliver Goldsmith: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey; Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.” Those lines are a pretty fair summary of the theme of the book.
His last book written before the onset of his disease, and published in 2008, is a compilation of his essays on the variety of topics that captured his wide-ranging interest. This book—Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century—will I think be the book that will define his reputation as a leading public intellectual of our time. In Reappraisals Judt was still swinging the heavy wood, hitting soaring fly-balls deep into the outfield. Ill Fares the Land is more like a series of stinging line-drives behind the shortstop.
In his final book, who Tony Judt was politically should be clear. He was an old-fashioned pre-postmodern liberal. The liberal pieties of the New Deal era would mostly suit him fine. More precisely, he was a liberal social democrat in the European tradition, and his final message to us was that it is to these values and ideals that we desperately need to return.
An irreligious Jew, Judt was not expecting any personal salvation in the afterlife, but he was clearly worried about our salvation in this one. Tony Judt was concerned in his last days with the state of America’s soul—as he was faced with contemplating his own. With our accumulating wealth, he was telling us, we have begun to decay. By itself, this is hardly a new thought. Various tub-thumpers throughout American history had made a great noise with this same message, but Judt, of course, was far from a routine Cassandra.
The opening lines of the book open the crack in the present consensus that Judt wanted to exploit: “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.”
Judt saw our troubles as dating from about 1980, when the liberal social-democratic model of the social contract was suddenly overrun by a new consensus.
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.
Judt deployed an array of charts and statistics (in one brief section) that document the vast and growing gap between rich and poor in America, and elsewhere in most of the developed world, and he attempted to correlate these measures with measures of well-being. His basic finding was that it is not how prosperous a country is that determines its well-being, but rather how narrow the gap between its richest and its poorest citizens. A small gap=high well-being, a large gap, the contrary. (An oddly discomforting fact: the Gini coefficient for the U.S. is about the same as that of China!)
Judt reminded us of one of the stinging ironies of the present worship of free markets and the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith. Smith—like almost all the early economists—was a moral philosopher. Smith was not concerned with maximizing marginal utilities, or with producing the most efficient economic scheme, or even with expanding prosperity. He was centrally concerned with moral questions of social justice. His theories about economic behavior were his answer to the moral conundrum of how to provide the most economic equality among the members of society. As it happened, he believed that the freer the markets the more equality they would produce—but it was the equality rather than the freedom that was his goal. Today’s freedom fetishists have Smith upside down.
Each section of Judt’s book is introduced with spicy little peppercorns of quotation. An early one from Adam Smith is apt: “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” The problem that concerned Smith in his day—the worship of wealth—is the same one, Judt argued, that should concern us today. Smith put it thusly: “The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition . . . [is] . . . the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”
Economics in general, Judt argued, has become sterile and detached from its moral moorings—a tendency Judt called “economism.” We have come to see economics as a sort of neutral commentator on events: “For the last thirty years, when asking ourselves whether we support a policy . . . we have restricted ourselves to . . . economic questions in the narrowest sense. But this is not an instinctive human condition: it is an acquired taste.”
The social consensus of the pre-war years embodied the ideals of communal purpose and social justice, it was progressivism triumphant. In the post-1945 period the consensus prevailed until the upheavals of the 1960s, which counterpoised a narcissistic and unreflective individualism only made possible by the achievements of the old consensus. The Old Right had already discredited itself by (in America) its opposition to the New Deal and (especially in Europe) by its accommodation with the wartime fascists. According to Judt, the New Left consensus that prevailed after 1960 was of a piece with that of the New Right in that both had become detached from any sense of communal purpose and had embraced contrary forms of individualism. Thus the decline and fall of the West’s tradition of liberal social democracy.
One central theme of Judt’s book is his distrust of utopian ideologies that seek to remake the world into one conforming pattern—whether that pattern be from the right or from the left. “If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century,” he wrote, “we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.”
Tony Judt was an expert in the history of Europe in the twentieth century. He was thus deeply acquainted with all the terrible ideologies that raked that continent during that fraught century. A main theme of this last book is that the institutions and programs of the liberal social democratic state are not just what makes a more prosperous life available to us, but these institutions and programs are the central bulwark against the extremism that so very recently engulfed much of our world. And his basic admonition to us is that we need to stand up for these institutions and programs lest they be undermined, to the vast detriment of all of us.
His critique of encompassing ideologies was applied not just to the defeated regimes from the early part of the century, but also to the unthinking worship of the market and the excessive focus on individualism and the obsessive pursuit of personal freedom to the detriment of collective purpose. He applied this lesson, in particular, to the institutions of early 20th century social democracy, which he saw as being undermined by the libertarian ideology of recent decades: “Others have spent the last three decades methodically unraveling and destabilizing them. . . why have been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes so laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?”
Judt saw his viewpoint as being that of the classic liberal, with its balanced respect for both the past—with its customs and its institutions—and a determined progressivism that worked hard for the traditional liberal virtues: equality, justice, and freedom.
Judt took a few whiffs along with his line drives, especially in his wild overswing at welfare reform. His critique of modern welfare reform efforts (e.g., the 1996 abolition of AFDC) as Dickensian, is itself rather dated. It is also strident, unmeasured, and too glib by far more than half. In his zeal to counter the idea that free markets are the only concern of free societies, he undervalues the role of work-incentive directed public policies and overvalues the idea of social welfare as a “right” which society is obliged to recognize without much question. Judt seemed to think that in valuing work over welfare Americans are being hard-hearted and old-fashioned. He likened the 1996 welfare law to the English Poor Law of 1834. Nowhere did he acknowledge the problem of welfare dependency, nor did he attempt to assess whether our actual decade-and-a-half of experience with the 1996 changes have in fact led to the dire consequences he imagined. In short, his take on needs-based social welfare programs is outdated—even in “old Europe.”
He also was not immune from the occasional myopic concern. Judt wrote lovingly in the NYRB series of his boyhood love of trains, with their ability to create in the young Judt a sense of freedom and movement that he found deeply gratifying. But in this book he goes on at length at one point about how the train and the train station are the defining symbols of a healthy society, and how the decline in passenger rail usage is a kind of graph of our decline as a culture. In this respect, I think Judt was letting his biography run away with his philosophy.
But these piddling complaints notwithstanding, overall the work is commendable. It is Tony Judt’s final message to us. That it took such a heroic effort to produce is stunning. That it is full of important ideas and clever insights is no surprise. That Tony Judt was a great public intellectual and his death a huge tragedy for our collective intellectual life, is undeniable. This is Tony Judt’s final communiqué. We would do well to pay attention. And, given the effort it took to write it, it is only fitting that I let Tony Judt have the last word:
“We take for granted the institutions, legislation, services and rights that we have inherited from the great age of twentieth-century reform. It is time to remind ourselves that all of these were utterly inconceivable as recently as 1929. We are the fortunate beneficiaries of a transformation whose scale and impact was unprecedented. . . . To abandon the labors of a century is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come.”