"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."