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5376145
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Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good Is it fair Is it just Is it right Will it help bring about a better socie..
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Tony Judt |
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b8e77a4
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Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies.... The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves - thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine.
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Tony Judt |
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b7796e2
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We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.
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Tony Judt |
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5658266
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Love, it seems to me, is that condition in which one is most contentedly oneself. If this sounds paradoxical, remember Rilke's admonition: love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which the self may flourish. As a child, I always felt uneasy and a little constrained around people, my family in particular. Solitude was bliss, but not easily obtained. Being always felt stressful- wherev..
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Tony Judt |
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7d06619
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If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.
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Tony Judt |
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45100da
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But precisely because history is not foreordained, we mere mortals must invent it as we go along--and in circumstances, as old Marx rightly pointed out, not entirely of our own making. We shall have to ask the perennial questions again, but be open to different answers.
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Tony Judt |
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9b3434e
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Whatever Americans fondly believe, their government has always had its fingers in the economic pie. What distinguishes the USA from every other developed country has been the widespread belief to the contrary.
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Tony Judt |
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3dc4a2f
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Evil, above all evil on the scale practiced by Nazi Germany, can never be satisfactorily remembered. The very enormity of the crime renders all memorialisation incomplete. Its inherent implausibility--the sheer difficulty of conceiving of it in calm retrospect--opens the door to diminution and even denial. Impossible to remember as it truly was, it is inherently vulnerable to being remembered as it wasn't.
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Tony Judt |
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22b7275
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Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today's Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety.
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Tony Judt |
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34d2326
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But the disposition to disagree, to reject and to dissent - however irritating it may be when taken to extremes - is the very lifeblood of an open society. We need people who make a virtue of opposing mainstream opinion. A democracy of permanent consensus will not long remain a democracy.
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Tony Judt |
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27431b6
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Markets do not automatically generate trust, cooperation or collective action for the common good. Quite the contrary: it is in the nature of economic competition that a participant who breaks the rules will triumph--at least in the short run--over more ethically sensitive competitors.
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Tony Judt |
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8180a29
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We no longer have political movement. While thousands of us may come together for a rally or march, we are bound together on such occasions by a single shared interest. Any effort to convert such interests into collective goals is usually undermined by the fragmented individualism of our concerns. Laudable goals - fighting climate change, opposing war, advocating public healthcare or penalizing bankers - are united by nothing more than the ..
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Tony Judt |
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8fdf72b
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The moral courage required to hold a different view and to press it upon irritated readers or unsympathetic listeners remains everywhere in short supply.
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Tony Judt |
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619a0b6
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If it is to be taken seriously again, the Left must find its voice. There is much to be angry about: growing inequalities of wealth and opportunity; injustices of class and caste; economic exploitation at home and abroad; corruption and money and privilege occluding the arteries of democracy.
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Tony Judt |
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2554bf2
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Familiarity reduces insecurity, so we feel more comfortable describing and combating the risks we think we understand: terrorists, immigrants, job loss or crime. But the true sources of insecurity in decades to come will be those that most of us cannot define: dramatic climate change and its social and environmental effects; imperial decline and its attendant 'small wars'; collective political impotence in the face of distant upheavals with..
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Tony Judt |
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7488603
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'exist because there are no longer any , settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience.' And what are ? [They] are . . . vestiges . . . the rituals of a ritual-less society.
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milieux-de-memoire
vestiges
rituals
memory
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Tony Judt |
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1cf69ec
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The only thing worse than too much government is too little: in failed states, people suffer at least as much violence and injustice as under authoritarian rule, and in addition their trains do not run on time.
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Tony Judt |
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8d7d35f
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Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
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Tony Judt |
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0cd52e9
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We are all familiar with intellectuals who speak only on behalf of their country, class, religion, 'race,' 'gender,' or 'sexual orientation,' and who shape their opinions according to what they take to be the interest of their affinity of birth or predilection. But the distinctive feature of the intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional identification but ..
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intellectual
liberal
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Tony Judt |
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6b9def8
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in a constitutionally ordered state, where laws are derived from broad principles of right and wrong and where those principles are enshrined and protected by agreed upon procedures and practices, it can never be in the long-term interest of the state or its citizens to flout those procedures at home or associate too closely overseas with the enemies of your founding ideals.
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wrong
ideals
right
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Tony Judt |
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e753473
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Finding a homeland is not the same as dwelling in the place where our ancestors once used to live." --KRZYSZTOF CZYZEWSKI"
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Tony Judt |
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06208b3
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When Communism fell in 1989, the temptation for Western commentators to gloat triumphantly proved irresistible. This, it was declared, marked the end of History. Henceforth, the world belonged to liberal capitalism - there was no alternative - and we would all march forward in unison towards a future shaped by peace, democracy and free markets. Twenty years on this assertion looks threadbare. There can be no question that the fall of the B..
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Tony Judt |
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6dad585
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ask . . . what it is about all-embracing 'systems' of thought that leads inexorably to all-embracing 'systems' of rule.
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systems
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Tony Judt |
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a43717b
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the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
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society
nation
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Tony Judt |
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0155753
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Love, it seems to me, is the condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.
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Tony Judt |
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2552fdc
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Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing.
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Tony Judt |
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f0dca52
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dialectics, as a veteran communist explained . . . 'is the art and technique of always landing on your feet.
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Tony Judt |
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fced9f6
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Those who got the twentieth century right, whether in anticipation [..] or as contemporary observations, had to be able to imagine a world for which there was no precedent.
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Tony Judt |
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4a28aeb
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We must distinguish better than some of our predecessors between desirable ends and unacceptable means.
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Tony Judt |
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607631d
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Thinking 'economistically', as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans.
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Tony Judt |
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7fcf81c
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All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues.
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presidency
president
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Tony Judt |
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dcc7618
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Western intellectual enthusiasm for Communism tended to peak not in times of 'goulash Communism' or 'Socialism with a human face', but rather at the moments of the regime's worst cruelties: 1935-39 and 1944-56. Writers, professors, artists, teachers and journalists frequently admired Stalin not in spite of his faults, but because of them. It was when he was murdering people on an industrial scale, when the show trials were displaying Soviet..
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Tony Judt |
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77aed4c
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What an enormous longing for a new human order there was in the era between the world wars, and what a miserable failure to live up to it.'(Arthur Koestler)
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Tony Judt |
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a014e05
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Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better ..
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Tony Judt |
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f1abd86
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The absence of trust is clearly inimical to a well-run society. The great Jane Jacobs noted as much with respect to the very practical business of urban life and the maintenance of cleanliness and civility on city streets. If we don't trust each other, our towns will look horrible and be nasty places to live. Moreover, she observed, you cannot institutionalize trust. Once corroded, it is virtually impossible to restore.
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Tony Judt |
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c9f1b22
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What, then, should we have learned from 1989? Perhaps, above all, that nothing is either necessary or inevitable.
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Tony Judt |
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d46cac1
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A closed circle of opinion or ideas into which discontent or opposition is never allowed--or allowed only within circumscribed and stylized limits--loses its capacity to respond energetically or imaginatively to new challenges.
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Tony Judt |
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4da900b
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There were no disagreements in Stalin's universe, only heresies; no critics, only enemies; no errors, only crimes. The trials served both to illustrate Stalin's virtues and identify his enemies' crimes. They also illuminate the extent of Stalin's paranoia and the culture of suspicion that surrounded him.
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Tony Judt |
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8a7bdb5
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What did trust, cooperation, progressive taxation and the interventionist state bequeath to western societies in the decades following 1945? The short answer is, in varying degrees, security, prosperity, social services and greater equality. We have grown accustomed in recent years to the assertion that the price paid for these benefits--in economic inefficiency, insufficient innovation, stifled entrepreneurship, public debt and a loss of p..
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Tony Judt |
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4f388b1
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Elio Vittorini observed in 1957 that ever since Napoleon, France had proved impermeable to any foreign influence except German philosophy: and that was still true two decades later... By the time German philosophy had passed through Parisian social thought into English cultural criticism, its difficult vocabulary had achieved a level of expressive opacity that proved irresistible to a new generation of students.
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Tony Judt |
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5f3e437
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Finally, Europe's post-war history is a story shadowed by silences; by absence. The continent of Europe was once an intricate, interwoven tapestry of overlapping languages, religions, communities and nations. Many of its cities--particularly the smaller ones at the intersection of old and new imperial boundaries, such as Trieste, Sarajevo, Salonika, Cernovitz, Odessa or Vilna--were truly multicultural societies avant le mot, where Catholics..
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postwar
minority
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Tony Judt |
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2c1888f
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Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within.
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Tony Judt |
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23ad645
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The history of the two halves of post-war Europe cannot be told in isolation from one another. The legacy of the Second World War--and the pre-war decades and the war before that--forced upon the governments and peoples of east and west Europe alike some hard choices about how best to order their affairs so as to avoid any return to the past. One option--to pursue the radical agenda of the popular front movements of the 1930s--was initially..
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postwar
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Tony Judt |
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5ab8386
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In the first place, this is a history of Europe's reduction. The constituent states of Europe could no longer aspire, after 1945, to international or imperial status. The two exceptions to this rule--the Soviet Union and, in part, Great Britain--were both only half-European in their own eyes and in any case, by the end of the period recounted here, they too were much reduced. Most of the rest of continental Europe had been humiliated by def..
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postwar
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Tony Judt |