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A review by studeronomy
Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt
3.0
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.
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.