Reappraisals Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  Part One - THE HEART OF DARKNESS

  CHAPTER 1 - Arthur Koestler, the Exemplary Intellectual

  CHAPTER II - The Elementary Truths of Primo Levi

  CHAPTER III - The Jewish Europe of Manès Sperber

  CHAPTER IV - Hannah Arendt and Evil

  Part Two - THE POLITICS OF INTELLECTUAL ENGAGEMENT

  CHAPTER V - Albert Camus: “The best man in France”

  CHAPTER VI - Elucubrations: The “Marxism” of Louis Althusser

  CHAPTER VII - Eric Hobsbawm and the Romance of Communism

  CHAPTER VIII - Goodbye to All That? Leszek Kołakowski and the Marxist Legacy

  CHAPTER IX - A “Pope of Ideas”? John Paul II and the Modern World

  CHAPTER X - Edward Said: The Rootless Cosmopolitan

  Part Three - LOST IN TRANSITION: PLACES AND MEMORIES

  CHAPTER XI - The Catastrophe: The Fall of France, 1940

  CHAPTER XII - À la recherche du temps perdu: France and Its Pasts

  CHAPTER XIII - The Gnome in the Garden: Tony Blair and Britain’s “Heritage”

  CHAPTER XIV - The Stateless State: Why Belgium Matters

  CHAPTER XV - Romania between History and Europe

  CHAPTER XVI - Dark Victory: Israel’s Six-Day War

  CHAPTER XVII - The Country That Wouldn’t Grow Up

  Part Four - THE AMERICAN (HALF-) CENTURY

  CHAPTER XVIII - An American Tragedy? The Case of Whittaker Chambers

  CHAPTER XIX - The Crisis: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Cuba

  CHAPTER XX - The Illusionist: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy

  CHAPTER XXI - Whose Story Is It? The Cold War in Retrospect

  CHAPTER XXII - The Silence of the Lambs: On the Strange Death of Liberal America

  CHAPTER XXIII - The Good Society: Europe vs. America

  ENVOI

  PUBLICATION CREDITS

  INDEX

  ALSO BY TONY JUDT

  La Reconstruction du Parti Socialiste, 1921-1926

  Socialism in Provence, 1871-1914

  Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics

  in France, 1830-1982

  Resistance and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe, 1939-1948 (editor)

  Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956

  A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe

  The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron,

  and the French Twentieth Century

  The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath

  (with Jan Gross and Istvan Deak)

  Language, Nation and State (with Denis Lacorne)

  With Us or Against Us: Studies in Global Anti-Americanism

  (with Denis Lacorne)

  Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2008 by The Penguin Press,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Tony Judt, 2008

  All rights reserved

  The original publishers of these essays are acknowledged on page 433.

  “The Social Question Redivivus” is (volume 76, no. 5, September/October 1997). Copyright 1997 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.

  Excerpt from “MCMXIV” from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. ., and Faber and Faber Ltd.

  Excerpt from “The Survivor” from Collected Poems by Primo Levi, translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann. English translation copyright © 1988 by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann. ., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC.

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With few exceptions these essays were written at the invitation of a journal or newspaper editor. So much the better: left to himself, an author—or at any rate, this author—would in all likelihood stick to familiar material. So I am grateful to those who over the years have urged me to address fresh subjects in unfamiliar formats and milieux: Michael Handelsaltz of HaAretz, Adam Shatz (formerly at The Nation, now The London Review of Books), Mary-Kay Wilmers (The London Review of Books), Leon Wieseltier (The New Republic), and Fareed Zakaria (formerly at Foreign Affairs, now with Newsweek International ). I owe special thanks, once more, to Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books, who emboldened me to write about United States foreign policy and who was the first to encourage me to address the problem of Israel.

  It is a pleasure once again to express my gratitude to Sarah Chalfant and Andrew Wylie at The Wylie Agency for their advice and encouragement, and to Scott Moyers at the Penguin Press for his continuing support and interest. This book is dedicated to the memory of Annie Kriegel and George Lichtheim, two outstanding historians, polemicists, and interpreters of their century: she in Paris, he in London. Without their motivating example—and their support at a crucial juncture—it is unlikely that I would have embarked upon an academic career. The publication of these essays affords a welcome opportunity to acknowledge that debt.

  —New York, September 2007

  INTRODUCTION

  The World We Have Lost

  The essays in this book were written over a span of twelve years, between 1994 and 2006. They cover quite a broad swath of subject matter—from French Marxists to American foreign policy, from the economics of globalization to the memory of evil—and they range in geography from Belgium to Israel. But they have two dominant concerns. The first is the role of ideas and the responsibility of intellectuals: The earliest essay reproduced here discusses Albert Camus, the most recent is devoted to Leszek Kołakowski. My second concern is with the place of recent history in an age of forgetting: the difficulty we seem to experience in making sense of the turbulent century tha
t has just ended and in learning from it.

  These themes are of course closely interconnected. And they are intimately bound up with the moment of their writing. In decades to come we shall, I think, look back upon the half generation separating the fall of Communism in 1989-91 from the catastrophic American occupation of Iraq as the years the locust ate: a decade and a half of wasted opportunity and political incompetence on both sides of the Atlantic. With too much confidence and too little reflection we put the twentieth century behind us and strode boldly into its successor swaddled in self-serving half-truths: the triumph of the West, the end of History, the unipolar American moment, the ineluctable march of globalization and the free market.

  In our Manichaean enthusiasms we in the West made haste to dispense whenever possible with the economic, intellectual, and institutional baggage of the twentieth century and encouraged others to do likewise. The belief that that was then and this is now, that all we had to learn from the past was not to repeat it, embraced much more than just the defunct institutions of Cold War-era Communism and its Marxist ideological membrane. Not only did we fail to learn very much from the past—this would hardly have been remarkable. But we have become stridently insistent—in our economic calculations, our political practices, our international strategies, even our educational priorities—that the past has nothing of interest to teach us. Ours, we insist, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent.

  Writing in the nineties, and again in the wake of September 11, 2001, I was struck more than once by this perverse contemporary insistence on not understanding the context of our present dilemmas, at home and abroad; on not listening with greater care to some of the wiser heads of earlier decades; on seeking actively to forget rather than to remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion. This always seemed a trifle solipsistic. And as the international events of the early twenty-first century have begun to suggest, it might also be rather imprudent. The recent past may yet be with us for a few years longer. This book is an attempt to bring it into sharper focus.

  THE TWENTIETH CENTURY is hardly behind us, but already its quarrels and its dogmas, its ideals and its fears are slipping into the obscurity of mis-memory. Incessantly invoked as “lessons,” they are in reality ignored and untaught. This is not altogether surprising. The recent past is the hardest to know and understand. Moreover, the world has undergone a remarkable transformation since 1989, and such transformations always bring a sense of distance and displacement for those who remember how things were before. In the decades following the French Revolution the douceur de vivre of the vanished ancien régime was much regretted by older commentators. One hundred years later, evocations and memoirs of pre-World War I Europe typically depicted (and still depict) a lost civilization, a world whose illusions had quite literally been blown apart: “Never such innocence again.”1

  But there is a difference. Contemporaries might have regretted the world before the French Revolution, or the lost cultural and political landscape of Europe before August 1914. But they had not forgotten them. Far from it: For much of the nineteenth century Europeans were obsessed with the causes and meaning of the French revolutionary transformations. The political and philosophical debates of the Enlightenment were not consumed in the fires of revolution. On the contrary, the French Revolution and its consequences were widely attributed to that same Enlightenment, which thus emerged—for friend and foe alike—as the acknowledged source of the political dogmas and social programs of the century that followed.

  In a similar vein, while everyone after 1918 agreed that things would never be the same again, the particular shape that a postwar world should take was everywhere conceived and contested in the long shadow of nineteenth-century experience and thought. Neoclassical economics, liberalism, Marxism (and its Communist stepchild) “revolution,” the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, imperialism and “industrialism”—in short, the building blocks of the twentieth-century political world— were all nineteenth-century artifacts. Even those who, along with Virginia Woolf, believed that “in or about December 1910, human character changed”—that the cultural upheaval of Europe’s fin de siècle had radically shifted the terms of intellectual exchange—nonetheless devoted a surprising amount of energy to shadowboxing with their predecessors. 2 The past hung heavy across the present.

  Today, in contrast, we wear the last century rather lightly. To be sure, we have memorialized it everywhere: museums, shrines, inscriptions, “heritage sites,” even historical theme parks are all public reminders of “the Past.” But there is a strikingly selective quality to the twentieth century that we have chosen to commemorate. The overwhelming majority of places of official twentieth-century memory are either avowedly nostalgio-triumphalist—praising famous men and celebrating famous victories—or else, and increasingly, opportunities for the acknowledgment and recollection of selective suffering. In the latter case they are typically the occasion for the teaching of a certain sort of political lesson: about things that were done and should never be forgotten, about mistakes that were made and should not be made again.

  The twentieth century is thus on the path to becoming a moral memory palace: a pedagogically serviceable Chamber of Historical Horrors whose way stations are labeled “Munich” or “Pearl Harbor,” “Auschwitz” or “Gulag,” “Armenia” or “Bosnia” or “Rwanda,” with “9-11” as a sort of supererogatory coda, a bloody postscript for those who would forget the lessons of the century or who never properly learned them. The problem with this lapidary representation of the last century as a uniquely horrible time from which we have now, thankfully, emerged is not the description—the twentieth century was in many ways a truly awful era, an age of brutality and mass suffering perhaps unequaled in the historical record. The problem is the message: that all of that is now behind us, that its meaning is clear, and that we may now advance— unencumbered by past errors—into a different and better era.

  But such official commemoration, however benign its motives, does not enhance our appreciation and awareness of the past. It serves as a substitute, a surrogate. Instead of teaching children recent history, we walk them through museums and memorials. Worse still, we encourage citizens and students to see the past—and its lessons—through the particular vector of their own suffering (or that of their ancestors). Today, the “common” interpretation of the recent past is thus composed of the manifold fragments of separate pasts, each of them (Jewish, Polish, Serb, Armenian, German, Asian-American, Palestinian, Irish, homosexual . . . ) marked by its own distinctive and assertive victimhood.

  The resulting mosaic does not bind us to a shared past, it separates us from it. Whatever the shortcomings of the older national narratives once taught in school, however selective their focus and ruthlessly instrumental their message, they had at least the advantage of providing a nation with past references for present experience. Traditional history, as taught to generations of schoolchildren and college students, gave the present a meaning by reference to the past: Today’s names, places, inscriptions, ideas, and allusions could be slotted into a memorized narrative of yesterday. In our time, however, this process has gone into reverse. The past now has no agreed narrative shape of its own. It acquiresmeaning only by reference to our many and often contrasting present concerns.

  This disconcertingly alien character of the past—such that it has to be domesticated with some contemporary significance or lesson before we can approach it—is doubtless in part the result of the sheer speed of contemporary change. “Globalization,” shorthand for everything from the Internet to the unprecedented scale of transnational economic exchange, has churned up people’s lives in ways that their parents or grandparents would be hard put to imagine. Much of what had for decades, even centuries, seemed familiar and permanent is now passing rapidly into oblivion.

  The expansion of communication, together with the fragmentation of information, offers a striking contrast with communities
of even the quite recent past. Until the last decades of the twentieth century, most people in the world had limited access to information; but within any one state or nation or community they were all likely to know many of the same things, thanks to national education, state-controlled radio and television, and a common print culture. Today, the opposite applies. Most people in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa have access to a near infinity of data. But in the absence of any common culture beyond a small elite, and not always even there, the particular information and ideas that people select or encounter are determined by a multiplicity of tastes, affinities, and interests. As the years pass, each one of us has less in common with the fast-multiplying worlds of our contemporaries, not to speak of the world of our forebears.

  All of this is surely true—and it has disturbing implications for the future of democratic governance. Nevertheless, disruptive change, even global transformation, is not in itself unprecedented. The economic “globalization” of the late nineteenth century was no less disruptive, except that its implications were initially felt and understood by far fewer people. What is significant about the present age of transformations is the unique insouciance with which we have abandoned not just the practices of the past—this is normal enough and not so very alarming—but their very memory. A world just recently lost is already half forgotten.

  What, then, is it that have we misplaced in our haste to put the twentieth century behind us? Curious as it may seem, we (or at least we Americans) have forgotten the meaning of war. In part this is, perhaps, because the impact of war in the twentieth century, though global in reach, was not everywhere the same. For most of continental Europe and much of Asia, the twentieth century, at least until the 1970s, was a time of virtually unbroken war: continental war, colonial war, civil war. War in the last century signified occupation, displacement, deprivation, destruction, and mass murder. Countries that lost wars often lost population, territory, security, and independence. But even those countries that emerged formally victorious had similar experiences and usually remembered war much as the losers did. Italy after World War I, China after World War II, and France after both wars might be cases in point. And then there are the surprisingly frequent instances of countries that won a war but “lost the peace”: gratuitously wasting the opportunities afforded them by their victory. Israel in the decades following its victory in June 1967 remains the most telling example.