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b3858d3
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Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation; thus the progress of historical studies is often a danger for national identity . . . The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things'. Ernest Renan
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Tony Judt |
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944fe83
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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, Orthodox, Muslims, Jews and others lived in familiar juxtaposition. We should not idealise this old Europe. What the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski called 'the incredible, almost comical melting-pot of peopl..
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Tony Judt |
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84acbc5
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And once we cease to value the public over the private, surely we shall come in time to have difficulty seeing just why we should value law (the public good par excellence) over force.
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Tony Judt |
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bd0610f
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In the eyes of Hayek and his contemporaries, the European tragedy had thus been brought about by the shortcomings of the Left: first through its inability to achieve its objectives and then thanks to its failure to withstand the challenge from the Right. Each of them, albeit in different ways, arrived at the same conclusion: the best--indeed the only--way to defend liberalism and an open society was to keep the state out of economic life.
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Tony Judt |
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f865703
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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.
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Tony Judt |
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e9ebf59
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Edmund Burke in his critique of the French Revolution. Any society, he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, which destroys the fabric of its state, must soon be "disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality"."
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Tony Judt |
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348e418
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Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime labors. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another.
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Tony Judt |
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3f4332b
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Contrary to a widespread assumption that has crept back into Anglo-American political jargon, few derive pleasure from handouts: of clothes, shoes, food, rent support or children's school supplies. It is, quite simply, humiliating.
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Tony Judt |
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0439d91
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O amor e aquele estado em que somos nos proprios com mais satisfacao. O amor consiste em deixar aos amados espaco para que sejam eles proprios ao mesmo tempo que se lhes da a seguranca no seio da qual esse eu possa florescer.
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Tony Judt |
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5dbed68
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Dissent and dissidence are overwhelmingly the work of the young. It is not by chance that the men and women who initiated the French Revolution, like the reformers and planners of the New Deal and postwar Europe, were distinctly younger than those who had gone before. Rather than resign themselves, young people are more likely to look at a problem and demand that it be solved.
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Tony Judt |
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eaa44e4
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Ovsem psat a vyjadrovat se s plnym vedomim o svem omezenem vlivu je u intelektualu, alespon podle prvniho zdani, vyjimecne bezucelny podnik - a pritom je to to nejlepsi, v co muzeme doufat.
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Tony Judt |
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740fc7b
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I prefer the edge: the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another--where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life. Such places once abounded. Well into the twentieth century there were many cities comprising multiple communities and languages--often mutually antagonistic, occasionally clashing, but somehow coexisting. Sarajevo was one, Al..
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Tony Judt |
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8b5b4ad
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We need to rediscover how to talk about change: how to imagine very different arrangements for ourselves, free of the dangerous cant of 'revolution'.
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Tony Judt |
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40f3842
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But republics and democracies exist only by virtue of the engagement of their citizens in the management of public affairs. If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants.
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Tony Judt |
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4933ec8
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Our problem is to work out a social organization which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life." --JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES"
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Tony Judt |
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dbf9bf6
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A democracy of permanent consensus will not long remain a democracy.
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Tony Judt |
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e8469b2
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True, many radicals of the '60s were quite enthusiastic supporters of imposed choices, but only when these affected distant peoples of whom they knew little.
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Tony Judt |
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79469d7
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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?
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Tony Judt |
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8ebef10
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War, in short, concentrated the mind. It had proven possible to convert a whole country into a war machine around a war economy; why then, people asked, could something similar not be accomplished in pursuit of peace? There was no convincing answer.
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Tony Judt |
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04de102
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However, poverty--whether measured by infant mortality, life expectancy, access to medicine and regular employment or simple inability to purchase basic necessities--has increased steadily since the 1970s
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Tony Judt |
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55b3462
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The social question is back on the agenda.
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Tony Judt |
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6a287eb
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The Iraq war saw the overwhelming majority of British and American public commentators abandon all pretense at independent thought and toe the government line.
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Tony Judt |
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7a594dd
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During the long century of constitutional liberalism, from Gladstone to LBJ, Western democracies were led by a distinctly superior class of statesmen.
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Tony Judt |
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a494cfb
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People who live in private spaces contribute actively to the dilution and corrosion of the public space. In other words, they exacerbate the circumstances which drove them to retreat in the first place.
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Tony Judt |
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ca31a9d
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It is perhaps worth noting here that even Hayek cannot be held responsible for the ideological simplifications of his acolytes. Like Keynes, he regarded economics as an interpretive science, not amenable to prediction or precision.
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Tony Judt |
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5bb081d
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If we don't respect public goods; if we permit or encourage the privatization of public space, resources and services; if we enthusiastically support the propensity of a younger generation to look exclusively to their own needs: then we should not be surprised to find a steady falling-away from civic engagement in public decision-making.
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Tony Judt |
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933054c
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The victory of conservatism and the profound transformation brought about over the course of the next three decades was thus far from inevitable: it took an intellectual revolution.
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Tony Judt |
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af0e3f4
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Why does this matter? Because--as the Greeks knew--participation in the way you are governed not only heightens a collective sense of responsibility for the things government does, it also keeps our rulers honest and holds authoritarian excess at bay.
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Tony Judt |
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be77de3
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Why are we so sure that some planning, or progressive taxation, or the collective ownership of public goods, are intolerable restrictions on liberty; whereas closed-circuit television cameras, state bailouts for investment banks 'too big to fail', tapped telephones and expensive foreign wars are acceptable burdens for a free people to bear?
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Tony Judt |
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df0ca5c
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All collective undertakings require trust. From the games that children play to complex social institutions, humans cannot work together unless they suspend their judgments of one another.
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Tony Judt |
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76fe71e
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Keynes knew perfectly well that fascist economic policy could never have succeeded in the long-run without war, occupation and exploitation.
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Tony Judt |
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a9883e3
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Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime labors. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another. And since the experience of the interwar years had clearly revealed the inability of capitalists to protect their own best interests, the liberal eral state would have to do it for them whether they liked it or not.
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Tony Judt |
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ac76d8c
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Behind every cynical (or merely incompetent) banking executive and trader sits an economist, assuring them (and us) from a position of unchallenged intellectual authority that their actions are publicly useful and should in any case not be subject to collective oversight.
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Tony Judt |
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bd390cb
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in the arena of economic policy, the citizens of today's democracies have learned altogether too much modesty. We have been advised that these are matters for experts: that economics and its policy implications are far beyond the understanding of the common man or woman--a point of view enforced by the increasingly arcane and mathematical language of the discipline.
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Tony Judt |
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f6c0fb0
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Silence over Europe's recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future.
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Tony Judt |
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3ea8510
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When the Red Army finally reached central Europe, its exhausted soldiers encountered another world. The contrast between Russia and the West was always great--Czar Alexander I had long ago regretted allowing Russians to see how Westerners lived--and it had grown even sharper during the war. While German soldiers wreaked devastation and mass murder in the East, Germany itself remained prosperous--so much so that its civilian population had v..
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Tony Judt |
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67f13aa
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Selfishness is uncomfortable even for the selfish. Hence the rise of gated communities: the privileged don't like to be reminded of their privileges - if these carry morally dubious connotations.
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Tony Judt |
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fc6013e
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The more varigated and complicated a society, the greater the chance that those at the top will be ignorant of the realities at the bottom. Efficiency should not be adduced to justify gross inequality.
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Tony Judt |
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51d163e
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Motor scooters appeared on the scene--in France and especially Italy, where the first national motor-scooter rally, held in Rome on November 13th 1949, was followed by an explosive growth in the market for these convenient and reasonably priced symbols of urban freedom and mobility, popular with young people and duly celebrated--the Vespa model in particular--in every contemporary film from or about Italy.
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Tony Judt |
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db29ad6
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Our disability is discursive: we simply do not know how to talk about these things any more. For the last thirty years, when asking ourselves whether we support a policy, a proposal or an initiative, we have restricted ourselves to issues of profit and loss - economic questions in the narrowest sense. But this is not an instinctive human condition: it is an acquired taste.
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Tony Judt |
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5eb96bf
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An era was over and a new Europe was being born. This much was obvious. But with the passing of the old order many longstanding assumptions would be called into question. What had once seemed permanent and somehow inevitable would take on a more transient air. The Cold-War confrontation; the schism separating East from West; the contest between 'Communism' and 'capitalism'; the separate and non-communicating stories of prosperous western Eu..
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communism
europe
postwar
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Tony Judt |
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0a90897
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The characteristic tone of the '60s was that of overweening confidence: we knew just how to fix the world. It was this note of unmerited arrogance that partly accounts for the reactionary backlash that followed; if the Left is to recover its fortunes, some modesty will be in order.
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Tony Judt |
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62f0585
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somewhat different. Many European countries have long practiced something resembling social democracy: but they have forgotten how to preach it. Social democrats today are defensive and apologetic. Critics who claim that the European model is too expensive or economically inefficient have been allowed to pass unchallenged. And yet, the welfare state is as popular as ever
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Tony Judt |
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87ad04d
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The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despite, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.
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Tony Judt |