Reappraisals

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

ALSO BY TONY JUDT

La Reconstruction du Parti Socialiste, 1921-1926

Socialism in Provence, 1871-1914

Resistance and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe, 1939-1948
(editor)

Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956

A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe

The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath
(with Jan Gross and Istvan Deak)

Language, Nation and State
(with Denis Lacorne)

With Us or Against Us: Studies in Global Anti-Americanism
(with Denis Lacorne)

Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945

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First published in 2008 by The Penguin Press,
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Copyright © Tony Judt, 2008

All rights reserved

The original publishers of these essays are acknowledged on page 433.

“The Social Question Redivivus” is (volume 76, no. 5, September/October 1997). Copyright 1997 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.

Excerpt from “MCMXIV” from
Collected Poems
by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. ., and Faber and Faber Ltd.

Excerpt from “The Survivor” from
Collected Poems
by Primo Levi, translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann. English translation copyright © 1988 by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann. ., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC.

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For AK and GL

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With few exceptions these essays were written at the invitation of a journal or newspaper editor. So much the better: left to himself, an author—or at any rate, this author—would in all likelihood stick to familiar material. So I am grateful to those who over the years have urged me to address fresh subjects in unfamiliar formats and milieux: Michael Handelsaltz of
HaAretz
, Adam Shatz (formerly at
The Nation
, now
The London Review of Books
), Mary-Kay Wilmers (
The London Review of Books
), Leon Wieseltier (
The New Republic
), and Fareed Zakaria (formerly at
Foreign Affairs
, now with
Newsweek International
). I owe special thanks, once more, to Robert Silvers of
The New York Review of Books
, who emboldened me to write about United States foreign policy and who was the first to encourage me to address the problem of Israel.

It is a pleasure once again to express my gratitude to Sarah Chalfant and Andrew Wylie at The Wylie Agency for their advice and encouragement, and to Scott Moyers at the Penguin Press for his continuing support and interest. This book is dedicated to the memory of Annie Kriegel and George Lichtheim, two outstanding historians, polemicists, and interpreters of their century: she in Paris, he in London. Without their motivating example—and their support at a crucial juncture—it is unlikely that I would have embarked upon an academic career. The publication of these essays affords a welcome opportunity to acknowledge that debt.

—New York, September 2007

INTRODUCTION

The World We Have Lost

The essays in this book were written over a span of twelve years, between 1994 and 2006. They cover quite a broad swath of subject matter—from French Marxists to American foreign policy, from the economics of globalization to the memory of evil—and they range in geography from Belgium to Israel. But they have two dominant concerns. The first is the role of ideas and the responsibility of intellectuals: The earliest essay reproduced here discusses Albert Camus, the most recent is devoted to Leszek Kołakowski. My second concern is with the place of recent history in an age of forgetting: the difficulty we seem to experience in making sense of the turbulent century that has just ended and in learning from it.

These themes are of course closely interconnected. And they are intimately bound up with the moment of their writing. In decades to come we shall, I think, look back upon the half generation separating the fall of Communism in 1989-91 from the catastrophic American occupation of Iraq as the years the locust ate: a decade and a half of wasted opportunity and political incompetence on both sides of the Atlantic. With too much confidence and too little reflection we put the twentieth century behind us and strode boldly into its successor swaddled in self-serving half-truths: the triumph of the West, the end of History, the unipolar American moment, the ineluctable march of globalization and the free market.

In our Manichaean enthusiasms we in the West made haste to dispense whenever possible with the economic, intellectual, and institutional baggage of the twentieth century and encouraged others to do likewise. The belief that
that
was then and
this
is now, that all we had to learn from the past was not to repeat it, embraced much more than just the defunct institutions of Cold War-era Communism and its Marxist ideological membrane. Not only did we fail to learn very much from the past—this would hardly have been remarkable. But we have become stridently insistent—in our economic calculations, our political practices, our international strategies, even our educational priorities—that
the past has nothing of interest to teach us
. Ours, we insist, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent.

Writing in the nineties, and again in the wake of September 11, 2001, I was struck more than once by this perverse contemporary insistence on
not
understanding the context of our present dilemmas, at home and abroad; on
not
listening with greater care to some of the wiser heads of earlier decades; on seeking actively to
forget
rather than to remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion. This always seemed a trifle solipsistic. And as the international events of the early twenty-first century have begun to suggest, it might also be rather imprudent. The recent past may yet be with us for a few years longer. This book is an attempt to bring it into sharper focus.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY is hardly behind us, but already its quarrels and its dogmas, its ideals and its fears are slipping into the obscurity of mis-memory. Incessantly invoked as “lessons,” they are in reality ignored and untaught. This is not altogether surprising. The recent past is the hardest to know and understand. Moreover, the world has undergone a remarkable transformation since 1989, and such transformations always bring a sense of distance and displacement for those who remember how things were before. In the decades following the French Revolution the
douceur de vivre
of the vanished
ancien régime
was much regretted by older commentators. One hundred years later, evocations and memoirs of pre-World War I Europe typically depicted (and still depict) a lost civilization, a world whose illusions had quite literally been blown apart: “Never such innocence again.”
¹

But there is a difference. Contemporaries might have regretted the world before the French Revolution, or the lost cultural and political landscape of Europe before August 1914. But they had not
forgotten
them. Far from it: For much of the nineteenth century Europeans were obsessed with the causes and meaning of the French revolutionary transformations. The political and philosophical debates of the Enlightenment were not consumed in the fires of revolution. On the contrary, the French Revolution and its consequences were widely attributed to that same Enlightenment, which thus emerged—for friend and foe alike—as the acknowledged source of the political dogmas and social programs of the century that followed.

In a similar vein, while everyone after 1918 agreed that things would never be the same again, the particular shape that a postwar world should take was everywhere conceived and contested in the long shadow of nineteenth-century experience and thought. Neoclassical economics, liberalism, Marxism (and its Communist stepchild) “revolution,” the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, imperialism and “industrialism”—in short, the building blocks of the twentieth-century political world— were all nineteenth-century artifacts. Even those who, along with Virginia Woolf, believed that “in or about December 1910, human character changed”—that the cultural upheaval of Europe’s fin de siècle had radically shifted the terms of intellectual exchange—nonetheless devoted a surprising amount of energy to shadowboxing with their predecessors.
²
The past hung heavy across the present.