"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair
Tony Judt died over the weekend. the first article is written by him and the second is an obituary published in the Guardian.
Wealth, wellbeing and change
Tony Judt,
9 August 2010
OPEN DEMOCRACY
About the author
Tony Judt, historian, social thinker and essayist, was Director of the Remarkue Professor of European Studies at
Tony Judt has died. In his important last book, Ill Fares The Land, dictated under the impact of his fatal motor-neurone illness, he reflects on why social democracy has failed to offer effective resistance to the onslaught of late 20th century capitalism, let alone organise an alternative to it. In a striking section he argues that in the late 18th century the revolution had already been won as enlightenment arguments changed the language and terms of debate in which society was conceived.
Here in
Most critics of our present condition start with institutions. They look at parliaments, senates, presidents, elections and lobbies and point to the ways in which these have degraded or abused the trust and authority placed in them. Any reform, they conclude, must begin here. We need new laws, different electoral regimes, restrictions on lobbying and political funding; we need to give more (or less) authority to the executive branch and we need to find ways to make elected and unelected officials responsive and answerable to their constituencies and paymasters: us.
All true. But such changes have been in the air for decades. It should by now be clear that the reason they have not happened, or do not work, is because they are imagined, designed and implemented by the very people responsible for the dilemma. There is little point in asking the US Senate to reform its lobbying arrangements: as Upton Sinclair famously observed a century ago, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." For much the same reasons, the parliaments of most European countries—now regarded with sentiments ranging from boredom to contempt—are ill-placed to find within themselves the means to become relevant once again.
We need to start somewhere else. Why, for the past three decades, has it been so easy for those in power to convince their constituents of the wisdom—and, in any case, the necessity—of the policies they want to pursue? Because there has been no coherent alternative on offer. Even when there are significant policy differences among major political parties, these are presented as versions of a single objective. It has become common- place to assert that we all want the same thing, we just have slightly different ways of going about it.
But this is simply false. The rich do not want the same thing as the poor. Those who depend on their job for their livelihood do not want the same thing as those who live off investments and dividends. Those who do not need public services—because they can purchase private transport, education and protection—do not seek the same thing as those who depend exclusively on the public sector. Those who benefit from war—either as defense contractors or on ideological grounds—have different objectives than those who are against war.
Societies are complex and contain conflicting interests. To assert otherwise—to deny distinctions of class or wealth or influence—is just a way to promote one set of interests above another. This proposition used to be self-evident; today we are encouraged to dismiss it as an incendiary encouragement to class hatred. In a similar vein, we are encouraged to pursue economic self-interest to the exclusion of all else: and indeed, there are many who stand to gain thereby.
However, markets have a natural disposition to favor needs and wants that can be reduced to commercial criteria or economic measurement. If you can sell it or buy it, then it is quantifiable and we can assess its contribution to (quantitative) measures of collective well-being. But what of those goods which humans have always valued but which do not lend them-selves to quantification?
What of well-being? What of fairness or equity (in its original sense)? What of exclusion, opportunity—or its absence—or lost hope? Such considerations mean much more to most people than aggregate or even individual profit or growth. Take humiliation: what if we treated it as an economic cost, a charge to society? What if we decided to 'quantify' the harm done when people are shamed by their fellow citizens as a condition of receiving the mere necessities of life?
In other words, what if we factored into our estimates of productivity, efficiency, or well-being the difference between a humiliating handout and a benefit as of right? We might conclude that the provision of universal social services, public health insurance, or subsidized public transportation was actually a cost-effective way to achieve our common objectives. I readily concede that such an exercise is inherently contentious: how do we quantify 'humiliation'? What is the measurable cost of depriving isolated citizens of access to metropolitan resources? How much are we willing to pay for a good society?
Even 'wealth' itself cries out for redefinition. It is widely asserted that steeply progressive rates of taxation or economic redistribution destroy wealth. Such policies undoubtedly constrict the resources of some to the benefit of others—though the way we cut the cake has little bearing on its size. If redistributing material wealth has the long-term effect of improving the health of a country, diminishing social tensions born of envy or increasing and equalizing everyone's access to services hitherto preserved for the few, is not that country better off?
As the reader may observe, I am using words like 'wealth' or 'better off' in ways that take them well beyond their current, strictly material application. To do this on a broader scale—to recast our public conversation—seems to me the only realistic way to begin to bring about change. If we do not talk differently, we shall not think differently.
There are precedents for this way of conceiving political change. In late 18th century
Unable to confront the monarchy head-on, they set about depriving it of legitimacy by imagining and expressing objections to the way things were and positing alternative sources of authority in whom 'the people' could believe. In effect, they invented modern politics: and in so doing quite literally discredited everything that had gone before. By the time the Revolution itself broke out, this new language of politics was thoroughly in place: indeed, had it not been, the revolutionaries themselves would have had no way to describe what they were doing. In the beginning was the word.
Today, we are encouraged to believe in the idea that politics reflects our opinions and helps us shape a shared public space.
Politicians talk and we respond—with our votes. But the truth is quite other. Most people don't feel as though they are part of any conversation of significance. They are told what to think and how to think it. They are made to feel inadequate as soon as issues of detail are engaged; and as for general objectives, they are encouraged to believe that these have long since been determined.
The perverse effects of this suppression of genuine debate are all around us. In the US today, town hall meetings and 'tea parties' parody and mimic the 18th century originals. Far from opening debate, they close it down. Demagogues tell the crowd what to think; when their phrases are echoed back to them, they boldly announce that they are merely relaying popular sentiment. In the
Meanwhile, across the Channel in republican
We need to re-open a different sort of conversation. We need to become confident once again in our own instincts: if a policy or an action or a decision seems somehow wrong, we must find the words to say so. According to opinion polls, most people in
Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt was published by
Tony Judt
Obituary
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/08/tony-judt-obituary
Outstanding historian of the modern world with a trenchantly clear-sighted take on international politics
In the 1960s,
In his guise as a political and historical essayist, he was a fearless critic of narrow orthodoxies and bullying cliques, from communist apologists to the
He was born in the Jewish East End of London. Judt's grandparents had all been Yiddish speakers from eastern Europe; his father had reached
After the family had moved west across
Escape came through King's College,
They therefore encouraged Tony to join the small socialist-Zionist youth group Dror. This became the "all-embracing engagement" of his teenage years, making his later change of course all the more striking. An ardent activist and organiser, he spent summers working on kibbutzim, alongside comrades who rebuked him for singing Beatles songs, and he flew to
After hostilities had ended, Judt acted as an interpreter for volunteers on the
Although he missed the expected first in history in 1969, he was encouraged to continue in academic life, and eventually returned to King's, where he gained his PhD in 1972. Before that he had studied at the École Normale Supérieure in
By the time the fruits of his stay in the south were published in 1979 as Socialism in
Nor was he enraptured by "the small change of
Then, in 1988, he was appointed to a professorship at
These were very fertile years for Judt. In 1990 he published Marxism and the French Left: Studies On Labour and Politics in
Not all clever Frenchmen and women had bowed down before that "pyramid-builder" in the Kremlin. The phrase was Raymond Aron's, the political writer who was one of a trinity of French heroes to whom Judt devoted the lectures which became his 1999 book The Burden of Responsibility, along with Léon Blum and Albert Camus. By his later years, Judt's adherence to scholarly standards, along with his contempt for charlatans such as Louis Althusser and for academic fashion, made him seem a conservative figure to more modish colleagues. But far from making the notorious journey to the right, he was preaching social democracy to the end of his life. He was a reactionary only in reacting against intellectual dishonesty and imposture.
By now Judt was writing widely for newspapers and journals. In particular he had been encouraged by Robert Silvers at the New York Review of Books, where many of his best essays appeared, although he also wrote for the
In 1995 Judt lectured at the Johns Hopkins Centre in
In a brilliant passage he compared the Brussels Eurocracy with the "enlightened despotisms" of the 18th century under Frederick II of
That sparkling essay was by way of being a trailer for the history of
On the one hand Judt had an eye for telling detail, whether it was the fact that in 1951 only one French household in 12 possessed a motorcar, or that in 1982 the state corporation IRI controlled a quarter of Italian ice-cream production. On the other, his judgments could be pointed: the 1970s was intellectually the bleakest decade of the century: structuralism and deconstructionism came to the fore because their "inherently difficult vocabulary had achieved a level of expressive opacity that proved irresistibly appealing to a new generation of students and their teachers".
But the larger theme of this great book is "the withering away of the 'master narratives' of European history", from the narrative of Christendom to the narrative of national greatness to the narrative of dialectical materialism. Two hundred years after the French Revolution, the "cycle of ideological politics in
Before that, in 2003, and wearing his polemicist's hat, Judt had published in the New York Review the single most controversial of all his essays,
He was contemptuous of the way a powerful lobby had manipulated Jewish American opinion, although this compared with the way "the Greek, Armenian, Ukrainian and Irish diasporas have all played an unhealthy role in perpetuating ethnic exclusivism and nationalist prejudice in the countries of their forebears". This essay set off a storm of abuse: lectures by Judt were cancelled under pressure and he was dropped by magazines he had written for.
But the essay now seems prophetic as well as brave, as did another he wrote in 2006. The Country That Wouldn't Grow Up dealt in passing with the accusation that criticism of
In Bush's Useful Idiots he took apart the soi-disant liberals who had supported Bush's catastrophic foreign policy. He derided those members of the liberal intelligentsia who had supported the
His last book was written in extraordinary circumstances. In the late summer of 2008, Judt was diagnosed with the variant of motor neurone disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – or in America as Lou Gehrig's disease, after a famous prewar baseball player – a wasting malady that gradually, and sometimes rapidly, destroys the use of all muscles; in Judt's own phrase, it was like being imprisoned in a cell that shrank by six inches every day.
In the spring of 2009 he won a special Orwell prize for his lifetime's body of work, and in the autumn of 2009, he gave a lecture in
Rather then resign himself to slow extinction in that prison cell, Judt began, as a mental exercise, to recall all his life, from childhood onwards, and turned this into a series of beautiful short "windows of memory" which were published in the New York Review. Some of them dealt with Cambridge, Paris and Switzerland, while those on his upbringing were not only delightful but almost intolerably poignant to anyone of his generation: rationing, London fogs, trolleybuses, the local Sainsbury's which still had sawdust on its floor and "assistants in starched blue-and-white aprons", not to mention the way that "girls in those days came buttressed in an impenetrable Maginot Line of hooks, belts, girdles, nylons, roll-ons, suspenders, slips and petticoats".
Judt was twice married and divorced, and had several other women friends, before he met Jennifer Homans, the American dancer turned ballet writer, whom he married in 1993, with whom he found domestic tranquillity, and to whom he dedicated Postwar.
She sustained him during his final ordeal, and survives him with their two sons, Daniel and Nicholas, the dedicatees of Ill Fares the Land.
In two books, Judd used lines from Camus as epigraphs: "If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it," and "Every wrong idea ends in bloodshed, but it's always the blood of others." They could stand as the mottoes of his own sadly abbreviated but splendid life's work.
Peter Kellner writes: To those who did not know him well, Tony Judt was a bundle of contradictions: an idealist who could be scathingly critical of those who shared his ideals; a Jew, immensely proud of his heritage, who came to be hated by many Zionists; a very European social democrat who preferred to live in America.
To his friends, the contradictions disappeared. As with so many 20th-century Diaspora Jews, education provided the key to Tony's character: in his case, not education to serve the interests of any tribe or ideology, but education to understand and improve the world about him. His driving passions were evidence, rigour and truth. If his pursuit of those passions led him to reject earlier views, or to offend erstwhile allies, so be it.
Hence his disillusion with kibbutz life and, later, the moral basis of the state of
His spell in
His love affair with
This approach led him to be wary of the enthusiasms that blinded others. He was as ardent as any Democrat to see the back of George Bush, but was never swept up in Obamania. At the time of the new president's inauguration, Tony told me he was no more than "cautiously optimistic", and fearful that he would compromise too far on issues as diverse as the
Tony's emotional home remained
Tony's greatest work, Postwar, is a monument to his knowledge and understanding of the continent in which he grew up. He returned to
To some, that would be another contradiction: a lifelong social democrat who believed that universities should not be wholly reliant on state funding. But it was no contradiction to a man who believed always that a healthy society required both public purpose and private initiative.
• Tony Robert Judt, historian, born 2 January 1948; died 6 August 2010
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