Tony Judt (1948–2010)
Author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
About the Author
Tony Judt was born in London, England on January 2, 1948. He was educated at King's College, Cambridge University and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris. He taught at numerous colleges and universities including Cambridge University; St. Anne's College, Oxford; the University of California, show more Berkeley and New York University. He was the author or editor off over fifteen books including Ill Fares the Land, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, and Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award. He was also a frequent contributor to numerous journals including The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, and The New York Times. He was diagnosed with ALS in 2008. He died on August 6, 2010 at the age of 62. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Works by Tony Judt
Thinking the Twentieth Century: Intellectuals and Politics in the Twentieth Century (2012) 682 copies, 14 reviews
The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (1998) 182 copies, 1 review
Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France, 1830-1981 (1986) 34 copies, 1 review
Associated Works
Daedalus, Winter 1990: Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Europe (1990) — Contributor — 15 copies, 1 review
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Judt, Tony
- Legal name
- Judt, Tony Robert
- Birthdate
- 1948-01-02
- Date of death
- 2010-08-06
- Gender
- male
- Education
- King's College, Cambridge (BA|1969|Ph.D|1972)
École Normale Supérieure - Occupations
- historian
essayist
professor - Organizations
- New York University
Remarque Institute
St Anne's College, Oxford University
University of California, Berkeley
King's College, University of Cambridge - Awards and honors
- Hannah Arendt Prize (2007)
Orwell Prize (Lifetime Achievement ∙ 2009)
British Academy (Fellow, 2007)
American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Fellow, 1996) - Relationships
- Homans, Jennifer (wife)
- Cause of death
- ALS
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- London, Middlesex, England, UK
- Places of residence
- New York, New York, USA
Paris, Île-de-France, France
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK
London, Middlesex, England, UK - Place of death
- New York, New York, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- England, UK
Members
Discussions
A parting shot from Tony Judt in Pro and Con (September 2010)
Reviews
Before his death from ALS, Tony Judt unexpectedly blossomed into an intellectual titan: penning a history of post-WWII Europe, writing essays for the New York Review of Books, and collecting reminiscences of his lifetime. And just as luckily for us, all of those found print—Europe in the critically-acclaimed Postwar, his last essays in Ill Fares the Land, and his memoir in The Memory Chalet.
Yet Thinking the Twentieth Century is an altogether stranger beast: Judt's last work, which by show more necessity took the form of a conversation between himself and fellow-historian Timothy Snyder. Interspersed with Judt's own remembrances of his personal/professional trajectory and other topics, he and Snyder begin to trace how exactly liberalism won out over totalitarianism—first in the form of fascism, and then in the long grind against communism. This victory was by no means assured, and seemed impossible at points in the 30s and 40s. Yet it happened, and they tease out how exactly that victory was won.
It's not a book for everyone to be sure, and you'd be better-served tackling one of Judt's other more traditional works first. But it's a marvelous chronicle of a mind at work, and sadly the last one we'll get. show less
Yet Thinking the Twentieth Century is an altogether stranger beast: Judt's last work, which by show more necessity took the form of a conversation between himself and fellow-historian Timothy Snyder. Interspersed with Judt's own remembrances of his personal/professional trajectory and other topics, he and Snyder begin to trace how exactly liberalism won out over totalitarianism—first in the form of fascism, and then in the long grind against communism. This victory was by no means assured, and seemed impossible at points in the 30s and 40s. Yet it happened, and they tease out how exactly that victory was won.
It's not a book for everyone to be sure, and you'd be better-served tackling one of Judt's other more traditional works first. But it's a marvelous chronicle of a mind at work, and sadly the last one we'll get. show less
Een buitengewoon helder en overtuigend pleidooi om de sociaaldemocratie van de ondergang te redden. Judt legt uit hoe het zo ver is kunnen komen dat het neo-liberalisme in steeds meer westerse landen bon ton geworden is en levert een krachtige bewijsvoering dat een losgeslagen vrije markt tot rampzalige maatschappelijke conflicten zal leiden. Maar hij zegt ook hoe het democratische debat (dat nu verworden is tot hol geschreeuw) opnieuw een debat kan worden: als de verzwakte sociaaldemocratie show more die nu in het defensief zit, opnieuw een krachtige tegenstem kan laten horen. show less
Really great pacing, and maintains the difficult balance of emotional horror of various genocides and massacres while maintaining a journalistic gloss remove. Absolutely not a single good person in the whole 960 pages except for the people of Missouri who hated Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech and whatever writer managed to get the bare minimum of anti colonial language attached to the Marshall Plan. England comes out looking especially bad. Worse than I thought, if that is possible.
‘Postwar’ is one of those books that merits the term magisterial. It certainly demands commitment from the reader. A mere glance conveys its length, but I didn’t notice until I began reading that the text is also in an unusually small font. Thus my usual reading speed was much reduced, provoking the usual fears of forgetting how to read properly, brain decay, etc. The time it demands is nonetheless richly rewarded. Judt is a consummate synoptic writer. He covers a vast amount of ground show more and commands a huge array of material, synthesising a coherent narrative that nonetheless avoids becoming simplistic or reductive. I learned a great deal of substance from this history, while also finding his choices of focus fascinating.
As I am British and was taught history in the UK school system, my view of European history is highly Western-centric. Judt avoids this and achieves an excellent balance between East and West, while conceding the ambiguous and debatable limits of continental Europe. This is first and foremost a political history, with secondary economic and socio-cultural considerations. Thus it traces how the Iron Curtain came to divide Europe, the differences either side of it, the circumstances of its fall, and what succeeded it. I don’t think I’ve read such a detailed account before. Judt is admirably wary of generalisations and thus explains the differences in experiences of communism across different Eastern European countries, something I previously knew practically nothing about. Britain comes off as marginal and largely unimportant which, of course, it is. If only our political culture could begin to accept that. There were some resonances with a book I dismissed as ridiculous while reading it years ago: [b:Going South: Why Britain will have a Third World Economy by 2014|13721647|Going South Why Britain will have a Third World Economy by 2014|Larry Elliott|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344317052l/13721647._SY75_.jpg|19354448]. That argued Britain has been in economic decline since the 1870s which, despite the title’s hyperbole, does have some plausibility.
'Postwar' begins, of course, with the state of Europe immediately after the end of the Second World War. The portrait of a continent in ruins is vivid and horrifying. Some surprising paradoxes emerge: a vast amount of housing was destroyed, requiring decades of rebuilding. Yet Germany lost hardly any industrial machinery, facilitating an impressively swift economic recovery. Of the European countries (and Russia), only Britain and Germany suffered more military than civilian casualties. I’m sure that the British (English?) nostalgia for the ‘Blitz Spirit’ is influenced by this fact, which is also linked our not being invaded. One thing that stuck with me amongst the litany of disaster was the sheer number of refugees moving between European countries after the end of the war, numbering in the millions. And the fact that Germany’s currency was cigarettes, allowing American GIs to profit from arbitrage. Of course, it was also American money that helped Europe come back from complete collapse.
The broad structure of ‘Postwar’ is intriguing in itself. The four parts cover 1945-1953, 1953-1971, 1971-1989, and 1989-2005. I was surprised to find Judt much more interested in the 1970s than the 1960s. In general, he treats the 60s as a time of comfortable prosperity and cultural change in Europe, while not considering the 1968 upheavals as particularly transformative. He does not dispute that they had impacts, but devotes much more attention to the growing political and social cynicism of the 70s. I got the impression of Europe being complacent in the 60s, then losing its confidence in the 70s, both in the East and West. The subsequent account of how the USSR collapsed from within in 1989 is really moving. As in the rest of the book, Judt’s writing is clear, specific, and humane.
Two areas of history that I was particularly glad to learn more about were the Irish Troubles (which I shamefully have never read a whole book about) and the wars in Yugoslavia. Both had a vague and distant familiarity from the TV news during my childhood, yet I was too young and unaffected by them to understand what was actually happening. Judt provides elegant and thorough summaries, a reminder that postwar Europe has not been entirely peaceful. He also compares the sectarian violence in Ireland with that of ETA and German paramilitary organisations during the same period, something I hadn’t come across before. The complexity of Yugoslavia’s descent into multiple wars is difficult to explain given the web of historical, linguistic, and religious dynamics involved. I feel better informed, albeit probably not able to describe the conflicts to someone else.
While reading ‘Postwar’, my mind often strayed to the issue currently consuming UK politics in a collective nervous breakdown: Brexit. The genesis and somewhat erratic evolution of the EU is woven throughout the book, with the relationship between France and Germany presented as the greatest influence. It’s very ironic to read that Britain’s original interest in joining the European Community was purely economic, as it began as a customs union. Now the UK has a hopelessly fanatical government that refuses to contemplate Northern Ireland remaining in the European customs union, let alone Great Britain. Indeed, the government has just spent millions on an advertising campaign stating authoritatively that the UK will leave the EU in just over two weeks. On what terms? Who the fuck knows!
As ‘Postwar’ ends in 2005, it does not cover the financial crisis or its legacy of austerity across Europe. Searching for evidence of how it all came to this, however, still turned up highly relevant insights. On the EU as an institution:
This is striking to read in 2019. During the aftermath of the financial crisis, the European Central Bank definitely no longer relied entirely upon consent when it came to heavily indebted member states. I recall both Greece and Italy having their governments essentially replaced at the ECB’s behest. Both countries are more closely linked to the EU, and thus limited in their economic policy options, by the euro. Still, the UK is the only country to apparently think that leaving the EU would solve more problems than the myriad it would cause. I find it notable how rarely the idea is raised in British politics that we need to be in the EU whether we like it or not. On the continent, as Judt writes, this is taken for granted. Flawed as it is, the EU cannot be ignored and interacting with it somehow forms the only viable economic option on offer in the vicinity.
This passage also reads very differently now than it would have in 2005. It's rather bittersweet:
When the ECB subsequently wielded debt relief as an instrument of coercion, I think it demonstrated the continuing strength of Germany as the heart of the EU. National government remained instrumental, albeit in penalising other such governments.
By the time ‘Postwar’ was published, nationalist and neo-fascist parties with no policies beyond hysterical opposition were already rising in Western Europe, among them UKIP and the National Front in France. Judt presents these as in part the political heirs of communist parties before the fall of the USSR, while also linking them with growing wealth inequality and anti-immigrant and islamophobic racism. He points out that far-right parties have been able to wield influence disproportionate to their electoral support, which is how the UK ended up with the bloody referendum on EU membership in the first place. On Blair’s restriction of access to social security for immigrants:
Although this was not dissimilar to events across Western Europe, I think in the UK case at least part of the blame should be placed on the Murdoch-owned tabloid newspapers. Judt also comments on the EU’s encouragement of regionalism, which he explicitly links to the rise of Welsh and Scottish nationalist identification.
Perhaps the most immediately relevant part, though, reflects upon Britain’s toxic nostalgia, which I consider a major influence on Brexit:
While these quotations are all to be found in the last hundred pages of the book, the continuity with previous decades is shown beautifully. The final chapter is a stand alone essay on the centrality to European identity of remembering and memorialising the Holocaust. This implies that the English tendency to nostalgic forgetting represents a philosophical schism with the rest of Europe. When observing British politics in Autumn 2019, what’s in evidence from the government is this tendency at its most extreme, manifesting as Boris Johnson’s constant lies and contradictions or denials of previous statements. I found reading ‘Postwar’ much more enlightening as to what’s happening than following the livetweeted mayhem in real time. Judt recounts not just the legacy of the Second World War but how it has been remembered very differently across Europe, sometimes with destructive consequences. show less
As I am British and was taught history in the UK school system, my view of European history is highly Western-centric. Judt avoids this and achieves an excellent balance between East and West, while conceding the ambiguous and debatable limits of continental Europe. This is first and foremost a political history, with secondary economic and socio-cultural considerations. Thus it traces how the Iron Curtain came to divide Europe, the differences either side of it, the circumstances of its fall, and what succeeded it. I don’t think I’ve read such a detailed account before. Judt is admirably wary of generalisations and thus explains the differences in experiences of communism across different Eastern European countries, something I previously knew practically nothing about. Britain comes off as marginal and largely unimportant which, of course, it is. If only our political culture could begin to accept that. There were some resonances with a book I dismissed as ridiculous while reading it years ago: [b:Going South: Why Britain will have a Third World Economy by 2014|13721647|Going South Why Britain will have a Third World Economy by 2014|Larry Elliott|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344317052l/13721647._SY75_.jpg|19354448]. That argued Britain has been in economic decline since the 1870s which, despite the title’s hyperbole, does have some plausibility.
'Postwar' begins, of course, with the state of Europe immediately after the end of the Second World War. The portrait of a continent in ruins is vivid and horrifying. Some surprising paradoxes emerge: a vast amount of housing was destroyed, requiring decades of rebuilding. Yet Germany lost hardly any industrial machinery, facilitating an impressively swift economic recovery. Of the European countries (and Russia), only Britain and Germany suffered more military than civilian casualties. I’m sure that the British (English?) nostalgia for the ‘Blitz Spirit’ is influenced by this fact, which is also linked our not being invaded. One thing that stuck with me amongst the litany of disaster was the sheer number of refugees moving between European countries after the end of the war, numbering in the millions. And the fact that Germany’s currency was cigarettes, allowing American GIs to profit from arbitrage. Of course, it was also American money that helped Europe come back from complete collapse.
The broad structure of ‘Postwar’ is intriguing in itself. The four parts cover 1945-1953, 1953-1971, 1971-1989, and 1989-2005. I was surprised to find Judt much more interested in the 1970s than the 1960s. In general, he treats the 60s as a time of comfortable prosperity and cultural change in Europe, while not considering the 1968 upheavals as particularly transformative. He does not dispute that they had impacts, but devotes much more attention to the growing political and social cynicism of the 70s. I got the impression of Europe being complacent in the 60s, then losing its confidence in the 70s, both in the East and West. The subsequent account of how the USSR collapsed from within in 1989 is really moving. As in the rest of the book, Judt’s writing is clear, specific, and humane.
Two areas of history that I was particularly glad to learn more about were the Irish Troubles (which I shamefully have never read a whole book about) and the wars in Yugoslavia. Both had a vague and distant familiarity from the TV news during my childhood, yet I was too young and unaffected by them to understand what was actually happening. Judt provides elegant and thorough summaries, a reminder that postwar Europe has not been entirely peaceful. He also compares the sectarian violence in Ireland with that of ETA and German paramilitary organisations during the same period, something I hadn’t come across before. The complexity of Yugoslavia’s descent into multiple wars is difficult to explain given the web of historical, linguistic, and religious dynamics involved. I feel better informed, albeit probably not able to describe the conflicts to someone else.
While reading ‘Postwar’, my mind often strayed to the issue currently consuming UK politics in a collective nervous breakdown: Brexit. The genesis and somewhat erratic evolution of the EU is woven throughout the book, with the relationship between France and Germany presented as the greatest influence. It’s very ironic to read that Britain’s original interest in joining the European Community was purely economic, as it began as a customs union. Now the UK has a hopelessly fanatical government that refuses to contemplate Northern Ireland remaining in the European customs union, let alone Great Britain. Indeed, the government has just spent millions on an advertising campaign stating authoritatively that the UK will leave the EU in just over two weeks. On what terms? Who the fuck knows!
As ‘Postwar’ ends in 2005, it does not cover the financial crisis or its legacy of austerity across Europe. Searching for evidence of how it all came to this, however, still turned up highly relevant insights. On the EU as an institution:
The levers of the Union’s economic machinery depend for their efficiency upon the consent of all constituent parts. Where everyone more or less concurs on the principle and benefits of a given policy - on open internal borders, or unrestricted markets for goods and services - the EU has made remarkable progress. Where there is real dissent from a handful of members (or even just one, particularly if it is a major contributor), policy stalls: tax harmonisation, like the reduction in agricultural supports, has been on the agenda for decades.
This is striking to read in 2019. During the aftermath of the financial crisis, the European Central Bank definitely no longer relied entirely upon consent when it came to heavily indebted member states. I recall both Greece and Italy having their governments essentially replaced at the ECB’s behest. Both countries are more closely linked to the EU, and thus limited in their economic policy options, by the euro. Still, the UK is the only country to apparently think that leaving the EU would solve more problems than the myriad it would cause. I find it notable how rarely the idea is raised in British politics that we need to be in the EU whether we like it or not. On the continent, as Judt writes, this is taken for granted. Flawed as it is, the EU cannot be ignored and interacting with it somehow forms the only viable economic option on offer in the vicinity.
This passage also reads very differently now than it would have in 2005. It's rather bittersweet:
If a clearly articulated ‘European project’, describing the goals and institutions of the Union as they later evolved, had ever been put to the separate voters of the states of Western Europe it would surely have been rejected.
The advantage of the European project in the decades following World War Two had thus lain precisely in its imprecision. Like ‘growth’ or ‘peace’ - with both of which it was closely associated in the minds of its proponents - ‘Europe’ was too benign to attract effective opposition. [...]
For all its faults as a system of indirect government, the Union has certain interesting and original attributes. Decisions and laws may be passed at a transgovernmental level, but they are implemented by and through national authorities. Everything has to be undertaken by agreement, since there are no instruments of coercion: no EU tax collectors, no EU policemen. The European Union thus represents an unusual compromise: international governance undertaken by national governments.
When the ECB subsequently wielded debt relief as an instrument of coercion, I think it demonstrated the continuing strength of Germany as the heart of the EU. National government remained instrumental, albeit in penalising other such governments.
By the time ‘Postwar’ was published, nationalist and neo-fascist parties with no policies beyond hysterical opposition were already rising in Western Europe, among them UKIP and the National Front in France. Judt presents these as in part the political heirs of communist parties before the fall of the USSR, while also linking them with growing wealth inequality and anti-immigrant and islamophobic racism. He points out that far-right parties have been able to wield influence disproportionate to their electoral support, which is how the UK ended up with the bloody referendum on EU membership in the first place. On Blair’s restriction of access to social security for immigrants:
It says something about the mood of the time that a New Labour government with an overwhelming parliamentary majority and nearly 11 million voters in the 2001 election should nonetheless have been moved to respond in this was to the propaganda of a neo-Fascist clique [the BNP] which attracted the support of just 48,000 electors in the country at large.
Although this was not dissimilar to events across Western Europe, I think in the UK case at least part of the blame should be placed on the Murdoch-owned tabloid newspapers. Judt also comments on the EU’s encouragement of regionalism, which he explicitly links to the rise of Welsh and Scottish nationalist identification.
Perhaps the most immediately relevant part, though, reflects upon Britain’s toxic nostalgia, which I consider a major influence on Brexit:
In its place there emerged a country incapable of relating to its immediate past except through the unintentional irony of denial, or else as a sort of disinfected, disembodied ‘heritage’. [...] Thus the real, existing British railways were an acknowledged national scandal; but by the year 2000 Great Britain had more steam railways and steam-railway museums than all the rest of Europe combined: one hundred and twenty of them, ninety-one in England alone. Most of the trains don’t go anywhere, and even those that do manage to interweave reality and fantasy with a certain marvellous insouciance [...]
In contemporary England, then, history and fiction blend seamlessly. Industry, poverty, and class conflict have been officially forgotten and paved over. Deep social contrasts are denied or homogenised. And even the most recent and contested past is available only in nostalgic plastic reproduction. [...] The English capacity to plant and tend a Garden of Forgetting, fondly invoking the past while strenuously denying it, is unique.
While these quotations are all to be found in the last hundred pages of the book, the continuity with previous decades is shown beautifully. The final chapter is a stand alone essay on the centrality to European identity of remembering and memorialising the Holocaust. This implies that the English tendency to nostalgic forgetting represents a philosophical schism with the rest of Europe. When observing British politics in Autumn 2019, what’s in evidence from the government is this tendency at its most extreme, manifesting as Boris Johnson’s constant lies and contradictions or denials of previous statements. I found reading ‘Postwar’ much more enlightening as to what’s happening than following the livetweeted mayhem in real time. Judt recounts not just the legacy of the Second World War but how it has been remembered very differently across Europe, sometimes with destructive consequences. show less
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