Tony Judt lost his courageous battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Shortly before his death, he appeared on the Charlie Rose program, strapped to a chair, speaking through an enabling device with astonishing force and clarity on a wide range of subjects. I can’t imagine anyone, whether critic or admirer, unmoved by the scene. Judt was a historian of distinction (see his impressive history of post World War II Europe). He was also prominent and controversial as a commentator on contemporary political and cultural events. His 2008 collection of occasional pieces, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (Penguin Books, 2008), presents us with an opportunity to reflect on his role as public intellectual.
The book begins with essays devoted to a remarkable group of twentieth-century writers: Arthur Koestler, Primo Levi, Manes Sperber, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Louis Althusser, Eric Hobsbawm, Leszek Kolakowski and Edward Said. In reappraising them, Judt tries to sort out what is of continuing value in their work and what is only of historical interest. The “Marxist” Althusser (the inverted commas are Judt’s), “a mediocre philosopher,” is the only writer in whom he finds nothing of value and rightly so. Indeed, he is appalled by his continuing influence in the academy. “What does it say about modern academic life that such a figure can have trapped teachers and students for so long in the cage of his insane fictions, and traps them still”(115). The writers whom Judt admires with little or no qualification are Levi, Camus, Kolakowski and Said. Levi is the preeminent witness of the Holocaust, transcending cynical and despairing Taduesz Borowski, angry, vengeful Jean Amery, analytical and literary Jorge Semprun and spiritual and reflective Elie Wiesel. “Levi’s account is complex, sensitive, composed. It is usually ‘cooler’ that the other memoirs—which is why, when it does grow suddenly warm and glow with the energy of suppressed anger, it is the most devastating of them all”(56). Camus may have engaged in “philosophical speculations of a kind to which he was ill-suited,” but he was “the best man in France” (the subtitle of Judt’s essay) for the honesty and clarity with which he wrote and spoke. Judt links Camus to Levi in citing Czeslaw Milosz: “Camus [like Levi} had the courage to make elementary points.” Judt exalts him as Camus the Just, citing another critic who called him “the most noble critic of an ignoble age” (104). In perhaps the least convincing essay in the group, Said, “the rootless cosmopolitan” is viewed as the preeminent public intellectual of his time, mainly for “the decades in which he wedged open a conversation in America about Israel, Palestine and the Palestinians”(176). Here is an example in which Judt’s agreement with Said’s support for a one state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict skews judgment. Kolakowski is for Judt the exemplary critic of Marxism, its pretensions and catastrophic political manifestations, most vividly displayed in Kolakowski’s exchange with the English Marxist historian, E. P. Thompson in which Thompson chastises Kolakowski for betraying his erstwhile comrades in his demystification of Marxism. “Kolakowski’s response, ‘My Correct Views on Everything,’ may be the most perfectly executed demolition in the history of political argument: No one who reads it will ever take E.P. Thompson seriously again”(136).
It is curious that Eric Hobsbawm, more culpable in his Marxist convictions than Thompson, who, unlike Hobsbawm, repudiated Soviet totalitarianism, gets off rather lightly, because of his superior status in the historical guild. Judt’s final rather tame judgment: “Eric Hobsbawm is the most naturally gifted historian of our time; but rested and untroubled, he has somehow slept through the terror and shame of the age”(126). What is missing is the adverb “inexcusably.” Hannah Arendt may have been “every bit as diffuse and muddled as her critics claim” 74), but “she got the big things right [in particular on the great matter of totalitarian evil], and for this she deserves to be remembered”(90). Koestler “has ceased to be a living source of ideas and has become a historical object”(41). Judt finds that his “genius lay not in his analysis of Communism, but in his polemical brilliance when engaging with Communists (or Fascists) and their admirers”(42). Koestler was “an uncomfortable presence, someone who brought disruption and conflict in his train”(42). Judt cavalierly passes over Koestler’s “predatory sexuality” in claiming for him “a steady current of moral concern and political insight that charges his best writing with a lasting glow”(43).
In Judt’s reappraisals, we see the qualities that he sought to exemplify in his own work: courage, forthrightness, clarity, complexity, moral fervor, a willingness to be an uncomfortable presence and to stir things up. We also see prejudices that allow him to downplay the vices of those whom he admires, those of Hobsbawm and Koestler, and exaggerate the achievement of the politics of someone he endorses, that of Said. What motivates the reappraisals is conveyed in the subtitle of the book, “Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth-Century.” In his essay on “The Jewish Europe of Manes Sperber,” Judt speaks of the extermination of the past—by design, by neglect, by good intentions—[as] what characterizes the history of our time,” and this self-revealing remark: “you don’t have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the twentieth-century, but it helps”(72).
How does Judt measure up when he directs his attention to contemporary characters and events? The word that best represents his judgment of Europe’s “forgotten” past is “severity.” Judt convincingly places blame for France’s catastrophic fall in 1940 not only on the incompetence of the military, but also on the internecine political conflicts that sapped national morale. One is startled to learn that the Communists in their resentment toward the Socialists led by Leon Blum for failing to “intervene on behalf of the Spanish loyalists in 1936… approached the Vichy government in 1940 with an offer to testify against Blum at his forthcoming show trial” (192). In his essay on Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de Memoire, he laments “the virtual disappearance of narrative history from the curriculum in school systems… What is new, at least in the modern era, is the neglect of history”(215). Turning to Britain, Judt has nothing but disdain for Tony Blair’s lack of “authenticity.” In repudiating Old Labour, which “stood for the working class,” Blair’s New Labour is in Judt’s eyes little more than a repackaging of Thatcherite conservatism. Blair, in Judt’s account, has not reversed the deterioration of the public sector that resulted from Thatcher’s program of privatization. He does concede that old Labor’s “last leader, Michael Foot, led it to electoral catastrophe in 1983 with a program so fatuously anachronistic that one of Labour’s own spokesmen famously called it ‘the longest suicide note in history’” (221). So what would an authentic New Labour program look like? The question is not raised and therefore not answered. As a public intellectual with no political responsibilities, he feels no obligation to get beyond complaint. He enjoys the freedom to make the most sweeping judgments, not always informed by empirical evidence, when, for instance, he indicts the English electorate in these rebarbative terms. “The English are actually contented with their deteriorating lot. They are the only people who can experience schadenfreude at their own misfortunes”(230). Matthew Arnold’s judgment of a contemporary writer applies here to Judt: “too much force without justification.” Belgium and Romania, subjects of two essays, receive low marks, Belgium for having feared too much state has as consequence “too little” state, Romania for its “shipwrecked” past, which it has not been able to overcome. The essays on France, Belgium and Romania are written with assurance, whereas the essay on England alerts us to Judt’s tendency to rashness masking itself as forthrightness.
This tendency becomes more troubling when he takes on the conflicts that confront us today. On the war in Iraq, he has nothing but contempt for the liberal hawks who supported it: “useful idiots” he calls them, adopting Lenin’s phrase. He is right that they were wrong, terribly wrong (which a number of them came to realize), but since they were neither idiots nor knaves, shouldn’t he as a historian make some effort to understand without scorn how they arrived at the support for the war? Motives for supporting the war ranged from genuine fear of WMDs to humanitarian concern about the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the kind of concern that earlier led to action against Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Failure to intervene during the Rwanda genocide also played a role. None of these motives if held in good faith was contemptible, though the actions that they helped produce were deplorable. Similarly, on the war against terror, Judt is right to point out its excesses and misdirection, but so great is his revulsion from the miscarriages of American justice that he seems relatively indifferent to the pathology of suicide bombers aimed at civilian targets and, indeed, the dangerous and reactionary character of political Islam. He simply has nothing to say about a strategy for coping with the threat that Islamic terrorism poses to civilized society. He has suspended his perspective as historian and become an activist, which means a focusing on the deplorable and criminal behavior of one side. It is as if having to use the phrases “on the one hand” and “on the other” would betray his self-image as a brave and forthright critic.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the subject that brings out most vividly Judt’s proclivity for “disruption and conflict.” An ally of Said, Judt views Israel without qualification as a callous imperial power. His perspective, one might say, is Manichean. He rightly condemns Israel for expanding its settlements and ruthlessly destroying Palestinian homes, but the Palestinian celebration of its terrorist heroes receives scant attention. From a modern multi-ethnic democratic perspective, Israel as a Jewish state is an anachronism (a problem for me as well as Judt), but the anachronism of Muslim states is ignored—as if one could hardly expect better of the Muslim states. Judt sees no future for a two state solution, which, in his view, would only perpetuate the anachronism of ethnically or religiously defined states. His proposal of a one state solution is a fine idea, but one anathema to most Palestinians and Israelis. How is it possible or desirable to create a single state when the two peoples who inhabit it are at war? There is simply no consensus in the populations of either side for a one state solution. We have sufficient evidence in the Balkans and Sudan of the violent effect of trying to unite in a single nation ethnic groups engaged in internecine conflict.
So great is Judt’s animus against Israel that he loses all sense of proportion in his judgments, surprising from a historian of such distinction. He begins an essay on Israel on the occasion of its fifty-eighth anniversary with the following analogy: “By the age of fifty eight a country—like a man—should have achieved a certain maturity”(286). Really? The analogy makes as much sense as the following: “By the age of five a man–like a dog—should have achieved a certain maturity.” A country is not a human organism. It has a much longer life and the relations among its parts are more complex and problematic than the relations of parts within a human organism. Granting, for the purposes of argument, the analogy of a nation to a human organism, imagine someone growing up surrounded by enemies with virtually no friends in the neighborhood, would you expect it to feel comfortable and always act reasonably at any age? Fifty-eight is childhood for a nation. It is a question of whether the idea of maturing, applicable to its citizens, is relevant to a nation. (It is a curious fact that for all the putative immaturity of Israel, its citizens, on Judt’s own account, were more measured in their criticism of him than his intemperate critics in the more “mature” United States.) I have already suggested sympathy with the view that Israel will have to evolve to a point where Jew and Arab can live together in a condition of genuine equality, but this will take time. Should it occur, it would be the result not of imposition or pressure from the outside (Judt’s solution), but from evolution within Israeli society.
Judt is at his best as a public intellectual when he combines the role with that of historian, as in the concluding essay on “The Social Question,” which Judt defines as follows: “How could the virtues of economic progress be secured in light of the political and moral threat posed by the condition of the working class? Or more cynically, how was social upheaval to be headed off in a society wedded to the benefits that came from the profitable exploitation of a large class of low-paid and existentially discontented persons” (418). He approaches the question from the Left with the knowledge, derived from the experience of the Soviet Union, that a command economy is not the solution. “[T]he state is a strikingly inefficient actor”(419), so he commends “the reconciliation between the European Left and capitalism”(426). But he does not give up on the state, which he views as an “intermediary institution”(424) that necessarily compensates for the failures of the market to provide for “the large class of low-paid and existentially discontented persons.” This, of course, is a hardly original argument for the Welfare State. But Judt is not comfortable with this view. He is acutely aware of the gap between economic change, which is rapid and social change, which is slow, and he laments the fact that “the Left has no sense of what its own political success, if achieved, would mean; it has not articulated a vision of a good, or even better, society. In the absence of such a vision, to be on the left is simply to be in a state of permanent protest”(427).
All positions left, right and center are at a loss of how to reduce the gap between economic and social change. So that all that remains for those troubled by the gap is protest. Judt is rightly convinced that the state must have an active role in solving the problem, but he himself cannot articulate a vision of exactly what that role should be. In his capacity as public intellectual, he can only point to the problem. He admits that “we don’t know what degree of regulation, public ownership, or distributive monopoly is appropriate across the board, only what works or is required in each case”(430). The solutions must come from political actors and it is not clear that they are forthcoming. The essay was originally published in 1997. In a note that appends the republication in 2008 and concludes the collection, Judt says that “nothing that has happened in the intervening decade has led me to moderate my gloomy prognostications—quite the contrary”(432). It would be hyperbole to characterize Judt as a modern Jeremiah, but the jeremiad is a strain in his writing. The best of Judt are moments when the force of his critique is qualified by an awareness of complication and difficulty for which there is as yet no rational solution.
From October, 2010