Tony Judt

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

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"The three quarters of century that followed Austria’s collapse in the 1930s can be seen as a duel between Keynes and Hayek. Keynes, as I was saying, begins with the observation that under conditions of economic uncertainty we would be imprudent to assume stable outcomes and therefore had better devise ways to intervene in order to bring these about. Hayek, writing quite consciously against Keynes and from the Austrian experience, argues in the The Road to Serfdom that intervention—planning, however benevolent or well-intentioned and whatever the political context—must end badly. His book was published in 1945 and is most remarkable for its prediction that the post–World War II British welfare state already in the making should anticipate a fate similar to that of the socialist experiment in post-1918 Vienna. Starting with socialist planning, you would end with Hitler or a comparable successor. For Hayek, in short, the lesson of Austria and indeed the disaster of interwar Europe at large boiled down to this: don’t intervene, and don’t plan. Planning hands the initiative to those who would, in the end, destroy society (and the economy) to the benefit of the state. Three quarters of a century later, this remains for many people (especially here in the U.S.) the salient moral lesson of the twentieth century."

- Tony Judt

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"Judt never explained why postwar French thought and especially ’68-era theory “proved irresistibly appealing to a new generation.” Not without a certain charm, he was stubbornly out of touch with intellectual developments that “bored” him. One can understand what seemed to him so maddening, for instance, about Althusserian “theoretical practice.” By the same token, however, it was Judt’s failing not to understand why such a concept might appeal to some of us growing up in the shadow of the sixties and coming of age within the constricted political possibilities of the fin de siècle. To speak for myself, academic research, especially the intellectual history of France, has in part seemed worthwhile precisely because of the imaginative, unbound, and even critical possibilities such thinking affords. May 1968 and French theory are obviously not more important than the Prague Spring or the critique of fellow traveling, but Judt did a disservice to historical understanding through his consistent dismissal of the former. If in the end one ought to be entirely sympathetic to his criticisms of the insularity, pettiness, and narrowness of intellectuals in France, French intellectual history nevertheless involves much more than silly people saying silly things. The understanding of French intellectual life is not furthered by the assertion that significant strains of it are not worth appreciating."

- Tony Judt

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"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."

- Tony Judt

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