Tony Judt was among the great historians of Europe of the past century. This book is essentially his autobiography, formatted as an interview with Timothy Snyder, an historian of Ukraine and one of the fiercest advocates of Western support for Ukraine following Russia's 2022 invasion.

The first quarter of this book is worth reading for the lovely account of Judt's childhood in England, where he grew up in a family and community of Holocaust survivors. The years between 1945 and the mid-60s are a fascinating time in the history of Holocaust memorialization, because so little memorialization was going on. The memories of the camps were almost lost among the huge number of survivors who preferred not to discuss what they'd lived through, at least not for the first couple decades after the war.

I don’t care as much about Judt's time in France, Israel, or America, even though he has plenty of strong insights about France and Israel. His insights about the domestic culture and politics of America are...less insightful, and they reveal a bit of bicoastal myopia (which is probably inevitable when you're a famous professor from England who teaches at elite institutions and mostly hangs out with Eastern European expats).

If, however, you're interested in vigorous arguments in defense of social democracy by one of its most eminent historians, then you'll probably enjoy this book. The narrative comprises Judt's long, thoughtful answers to questions posed by Snyder as Judt was dying of ALS. The book's title comes from a memorable moment late in narrative: “Those who got the twentieth century right, whether in anticipation like Kafka or as contemporary observers, had to be able to imagine a world for which there was no precedent. They had to suppose that this unprecedented and ostensibly absurd situation was actually the case-rather than supposing with everyone else that it was grotesquely unthinkable. To be able to think the twentieth century in this way was extraordinarily difficult for contemporaries.”

Throughout this book, Judt provided plenty of soundbites about the virtues of liberalism, pluralism, and social democracy: "The good society, like goodness itself, cannot be reduced to a single source; ethical pluralism is the necessary precondition for an open democracy." Judt, a one-time Zionist with Marxist sympathies, grew to identify "the intellectual sin of the [twentieth] century: passing judgment on the fate of others in the name of their future as you see it, a future in which you may have no investment, but concerning which you claim exclusive and perfect information.” Elsewhere, Judt described his life's work: "Despite my close attention to a particular historical time and place, my argument was essentially conceptual and even ethical: the intellectual impropriety and political imprudence of assigning to any one institution, any monopolistic historical narrative, any single political party or person, the authority and resources to regulate and determine all the norms and forms of a well-ordered public life."

The above sentences grated on me a bit. Neoconservatives labeled the impulse to plan a society in the people's best interest a "road to serfdom." They used rhetoric like this to oppose the social democracy that Judt advocated. But, from an Eastern European perspective, it's difficult to disagree with him.

Judt took the ethical responsibilities of intellectuals deadly seriously, and this book packed with little nuggets of advice for present-day intellectuals. For him, total ideological skepticism is necessary: "Can someone who has accepted a Larger political truth, or narrative truth, redeem himself as an intellectual or as a human being by staying close to smaller truths, or to truthfulness itself?" Elsewhere:

"I think that in one form or another, this is the challenge facing any serious intellectual today: how to be a consistent universalist. It is not just a simple matter of saying: I believe in rights, freedoms or this or that norm. Because if you believe in people's freedom to choose, but you also believe that you know better than others what is good for them, then you face a potential contradiction. How can one as a consistent universalist impose one culture or one set of preferences on another-but how can one decline to do so if one takes one's own values seriously? And even if we allow that this problem could be resolved, how can we be sure that we have avoided other contradictions in a necessarily complex political world? Ethical universalists like Václav Havel or André Glucksmann or Michael Ignatieff, all of whom favored the 2003 Iraq War on general principles, found themselves facing contradictory practical consequences for which their tidy abstract absolutes had not prepared them."

Elsewhere: "I see the present [twenty-first] century as one of growing insecurity brought about partly by excessive economic freedom, using the word in a very specific sense, and growing insecurity also brought about by climate change and unpredictable states. We are likely to find ourselves as intellectuals or political philosophers facing a situation in which our chief task is not to imagine better worlds but rather to think how to prevent worse ones. And that's a slightly different sort of situation, where the kind of intellectual who draws big pictures of idealized, improvable situations may not be the person who is most worth listening to."

In quotes like the one above, Judt's reflections on history, ideas, and politics may prove useful as we begin to contemplate the history of the twenty-first century (twenty-three years of it so far).

The twenty-first century is the shadow protagonist in this book. (The American invasion of Iraq looms large.) As he looked ahead, Judt feared that “the great achievements of the social-democratic consensus of the mid-twentieth century—meritocratic schooling, free higher education, subsidized public transportation, a workable national health service, state support for the arts and much else—could all be undone.”

As I quoted above, Judt argued that the most prescient thinkers and actors of the twentieth century "had to be able to imagine a world for which there was no precedent." I increasingly feel that the most prescient thinkers and actors of the twenty-first century are those who imagine a world that is entirely precedented. The precedent is not only the twentieth century but (perhaps more so) the centuries that preceded it.

As Snyder claimed in a recent roundtable, the empires of the nineteenth century are back. Nations in Eastern Europe are responding to Russia's aggression in Ukraine based on whether they were historically colonized by Russia or the Ottomans. (Poland and the Baltics oppose Russia; Bulgaria is more wary of taking a side, because Russia historically defended Bulgaria against the Ottomans.)

In other words: everything in the twentieth century seemed unprecedented, so contemporaries assumed it couldn't happen. Everything ahead of us in the twenty-first century seems precedented, and so we often believe it can't happen. We will be forced to realize that we are not, historically, an exception to anything.

Eccentric but good and highly readable! But bogs down in the later chapters in the current concerns of 2009ish, blurring the Twentieth Century focus and rendering itself quickly dated.

An occasionally interesting and entertaining read, though like "Postwar", breaks down the closer it gets to the current day. Can't say I particularly recommend it, though - as the author basically admits in the postscript, he's not a particularly self-reflective person, and it shows through in many places here.

I was moved to begin reading this after I read an essay about the author written by his wife after his death from ALS at the age of 62. The book is a compilation/transcription of a series of conversations between the author and Timothy Snyder, each prominent historians, but of different generations. I consider it one of the top 5 books I've read this year. A challenging book to read if you're European history-challenged, like myself, but I could follow the line of reasoning and argument despite the unfamiliar territory.
The book follows Tony's development from his early years growing up in a Marxist family, through his experience with Zionism and his education as a French intellectual. The Cold War years through the fall of the Berlin Wall all contribute to his exploration of liberalism and social democracy ideas, and he has become well-known for his brilliant and, at times, controversial historical writing. He puts each period of his life into a context of what was happening politically, economically, and socially, then discusses with Snyder the questions he was seeking to answer at that time and where his answers led him. Snyder does the job of drawing out and getting clarification for these ideas, and we are treated to a real sense of two amazing minds playing off each other.

I'm glad I read this book just for the glimpse into what being a historian is like, the purpose of history and what's possible with good scholarship and writing. I'm also thrilled that I was introduced to both these authors, and they have other books for me to check out.

Both the story of one scholar, Tony Judt, and the larger intellectual conversation of the 20th century (if we limit that conversation almost exclusively to the Left), "Thinking" is an impressive attempt at finding a larger sweep to atomized concerns. Highly recommended for those interested in intellectual thought, political thought, and other such things.

Super interesting. Felt like I was treading water in the beginning, with few proper nouns to grab hold of in an unfamiliar seascape. But as the book progressed into history I was more familiar with, I was much better able to follow the conversation. Worth reading, though Judt’s dismissal of “hyphenated history” and the like comes off as shortsighted and elitist. Still, very accurately predicted some of the turns our history has recently experienced - far better than others who should have known better.

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 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.

I give very few books 5 stars. This book united the historical, political, economic and intellectual threads of the late 19th through early 21st centuries into a seamless garment. There are issues of structure (well documented elsewhere) but I do not believe one person could write this book without this kind of pushback from another well-versed intellectual. I became aware of Judt through the NYRB and his fearless criticism of both the left and right--and more importantly, his reasons behind the criticism--were a joy to read. I miss him. There are few others with his breadth of knowledge.

As someone who loves history and wants to study it for the rest of my life, this was like gold. Incredibly insightful, wise and brilliant. It's like sitting down with a preeminent scholar in your field and letting them pour into you. Tony, who had been diagnosed with ALS decided to sit down with Timothy Snyder and talk about thought in the 20th century, the ethics of history and being an intellectual. Timothy added to the great subject matter and they are very compatible scholars. In their conversation, they agree, they disagree and they clarify each other. The format is not like a book, it flows differently however, they set themselves up in a helpful structure so the themes unfolds.

There were a few sections I felt they were less effective but the last two chapters, I took copious notes and I have to say, it gave my own thoughts perspective and context in a such a meaningful way.
There's not many books like this.



Premise: A+
Research and Accuracy: A+
Writing: B+