Decline of an interesting voice

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Trials-of-Tony-Judt/63449/
(via Marginal Revolutions)


An interesting and frequently controversial voice in history, international politics,
and political science is in slow decline.

Excerpt follows:

"If the state was held at a safe distance," Judt said, "then extremists of right and left alike would be kept at bay." Public responsibilities have been drastically shifted to the private sector. Americans and, to a lesser extent, Europeans have forgotten how to think politically and morally about economic choices, Judt warned, his fragile, British-accented voice growing louder. To abandon the gains made by social democrats—the New Deal, the Great Society, the European welfare state—"is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come."

The lecture, which lasted nearly two hours, yoked together a few themes that have long preoccupied Judt: the role of intellectuals and ideas in political life, and the failure of both Americans and Europeans to understand and learn from the past century. (We live, Judt has written, in an "age of forgetting.") He concluded his remarks on a pragmatic note. "It would be pleasing—but misleading—to report that social democracy, or something like it, represents the future that we would paint for ourselves in an ideal world," he said, carefully pronouncing each word. "It does not even represent the ideal past. But, among the options available to us in the present, it is better than anything else to hand."

...

"We have watched the decline of 80 years of great investment in public services," he says. "We are throwing away the efforts, ideas, and ambitions of the past." It is plainly difficult for him to speak, but he is doggedly eloquent. His eyes, forced to do the work of his entire body, are strikingly expressive; when he gets excited, he arches his brows high and opens them wide, which he does when he says, "Communism was a very defective answer to some very good questions. In throwing out the bad answer, we have forgotten the good questions. I want to put the good questions back on the table."