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fceb253
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open societies will once again be urged to close in upon themselves, sacrificing freedom for 'security'.
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Tony Judt |
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df336d2
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Without idealism, politics is reduced to a form of social accounting, the day-to-day administration of men and things. This too is something that a conservative can survive well enough. But for the Left it is a catastrophe.
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Tony Judt |
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6475dae
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fewer still in America continue to believe in what was once thought of as a 'public service mission': the duty to provide certain sorts of goods and services just because they are in the public interest.
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Tony Judt |
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a4b9173
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the 20th century morality tale of 'socialism vs. freedom' or 'communism vs. capitalism' is misleading. Capitalism is not a political system; it is a form of economic life, compatible in practice with right-wing dictatorships (Chile under Pinochet), left-wing dictatorships (contemporary China), social-democratic monarchies (Sweden) and plutocratic republics (the United States).
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Tony Judt |
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b1f23b8
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Keynes himself had taken the view that capitalism would not survive if its workings were reduced to merely furnishing the wealthy with the means to get wealthier. It was
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Tony Judt |
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46c7135
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while many people were irritated at over-mighty trade unions or insensitive bureaucrats, they were unwilling to countenance a wholesale retreat. The social democratic consensus and its institutional incarnations might be boring and even paternalist; but they worked and people knew it.
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Tony Judt |
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e385cf1
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How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else? Perhaps we might start by reminding ourselves and our children that it wasn't always thus.
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Tony Judt |
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b2149b1
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George Kennan, the American diplomat, described the scene in his memoirs: 'The disaster that befell this area with the entry of the Soviet forces has no parallel in modern European experience. There were considerable sections of it where, to judge by all existing evidence, scarcely a man, woman or child of the indigenous population was left alive after the initial passage of Soviet forces . . . The Russians . . . swept the native population..
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Tony Judt |
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1484922
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However: the predictable consequence of the nanny state, even the post-ideological nanny state, was that for anyone who had grown up knowing nothing different it was the duty of the state to make good on its promise of an ever better society--and thus the fault of the state when things did not turn out well.
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Tony Judt |
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521f614
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The result in all these cities, from Berlin to Stalingrad, was the classic Soviet-era housing solution: mile upon mile of identical gray or brown cement blocks; cheap, poorly-constructed, with no distinguishing architectural features and lacking any aesthetic indulgence (or public facilities).
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Tony Judt |
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363bbd0
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Ever since 1792 the Revolutionary and counter-Revolutionary poles of French public life exemplified and reinforced the two-fold division of the country: for and against the Monarchy, for and against the Revolution, for and against Robespierre, for and against the Constitutions of 1830 and 1848, for and against the Commune. No other country had such a long and unbroken experience of bipolar politics, underscored by the conventional historiog..
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Tony Judt |
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f0d8e59
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By the end of the 1970s, a clear majority of the employed population of Britain, Germany, France, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia and the Alpine countries worked in the service sector--communications, transport, banking, public administration and the like. Italy, Spain and Ireland were very close behind. In Communist Eastern Europe, by contrast, the overwhelming majority of former peasants were directed into labour-intensive and technolo..
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Tony Judt |
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daafcfa
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Broadly speaking, affairs that were urgently political in Europe aroused only intellectual interest in Britain; while topics of intellectual concern on the Continent were usually confined to academic circles in the UK, if indeed they were noticed at all. The
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Tony Judt |
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0eb14a0
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Under Khrushchev, Stalin-era laws restricting job mobility were abandoned, the official workday was shortened, minimum wages were established and a system of maternity leave introduced, along with a national pension scheme (extended to collective farmers after 1965). In short, the Soviet Union--and its more advanced satellite states--became embryonic welfare states, at least in form.
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Tony Judt |
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71f0dab
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In a certain sense the country of 'Russia' as such did not exist: it had for centuries been an empire, whether in fact or in aspiration. Spread across eleven time zones and encompassing dozens of different peoples, 'Russia' had always been too big to be reduced to a single identity or common sense of purpose.14 During and after the Great Patriotic War the Soviet authorities had indeed played the Russian card, appealing to national pride and..
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Tony Judt |
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8b900e0
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The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
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Tony Judt |
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b390a88
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Broken eggs make good omelettes. But you cannot build a better society on broken men.
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Tony Judt |
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713a8dc
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The EEC was grounded in weakness, not strength. As Spaak's 1956 report emphasized, 'Europe, which once had the monopoly of manufacturing industries and obtained important resources from its overseas possessions, today sees its external position weakened, its influence declining and its capacity to progress lost in its divisions.' It was precisely because the British did not--yet--understand their situation in this light that they declined t..
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Tony Judt |
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9a19615
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In September 1944 there were 7,487,000 foreigners in Germany, most of them there against their will, and they constituted 21 percent of the country's labour force.
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Tony Judt |
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78f69c7
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Srebrenica was officially 'protected' not just by UN mandate but by a 400-strong peacekeeping contingent of armed Dutch soldiers. But when Mladic's men arrived the Dutch battalion laid down its arms and offered no resistance whatsoever as Serbian troops combed the Muslim community, systematically separating men and boys from the rest. The next day, after Mladic had given his 'word of honor as an officer' that the men would not be harmed, hi..
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srebrenica
genocide
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Tony Judt |
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2a2d074
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As in the past, therefore, eastern Europeans have had to compete with the West on a markedly uneven playing field, lacking local capital and foreign markets and able to export only low-margin foods and raw materials or else industrial and consumer goods kept cheap thanks to low wages and public subsidy.
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Tony Judt |
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c04a578
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After Greece, Portugal, rural Spain, southern Italy, and the former Communist Lander of Germany, the UK in 2000 was the largest beneficiary of European Union structural funds--which is a way of saying that parts of Britain were among the most deprived regions of the EU.
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Tony Judt |
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692109f
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Overtaken by demographic transformation and two generations of socio-geographic mobility, France's once-seamless history seemed set to disappear from national memory altogether. The anxiety of loss had two effects. One was an increase in the range of the official patrimoine, the publicly espoused body of monuments and artifacts stamped 'heritage' by the authority of the state. In 1988, at the behest of Mitterrand's Culture Minister Jack Lan..
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Tony Judt |
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4ae16f5
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Far from addressing the Soviet nationalities question, the Afghan adventure had, as was by now all too clear, exacerbated it. If the USSR faced an intractable set of national minorities, this was in part a problem of its own making: it was Lenin and his successors, after all, who invented the various subject 'nations' to whom they duly assigned regions and republics. In an echo of imperial practices elsewhere, Moscow had encouraged the emer..
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nation-state
war-in-afghanistan
ussr
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Tony Judt |
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33b9948
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He [Gorbachev] did initially oppose the absorption of a united Germany into NATO; and even after conceding the point in principle* continued to insist that NATO troops not be allowed to move 300 kilometers east to the Polish border--something US Secretary of State James Baker actually promised to his Soviet counterpart in February 1990. But when that promise was later broken Gorbachev was helpless to intervene." *There is some evidence that..
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Tony Judt |
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7a7a558
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Maastricht had three significant side-effects. One of them was the unforeseen boost it gave to NATO. Under the restrictive terms of the Treaty it was clear (as the French at least had intended) that the newly liberated countries of eastern Europe could not possibly join the European Union in the immediate future--neither their fragile legal and financial institutions nor their convalescent economies were remotely capable of operating under ..
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nato
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Tony Judt |
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43941d3
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Until 1957 the West German Ministry of the Interior banned any screenings of Wolfgang Staudte's (East German) film of Heinrich Mann's Der Untertan ('Man of Straw', 1951)--objecting to its suggestion that authoritarianism in Germany had deep historical roots. This might seem to confirm the view that post-war Germany was suffering from a massive dose of collective amnesia; but the reality was more complex. Germans did not so much forget as se..
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Tony Judt |
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9c34610
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The Socialist social contract was tartly summed up in the popular joke: 'you pretend to work, we pretend to pay you'. Many workers, especially the less-skilled, had a stake in these arrangements, which--in return for political quiescence--offered social security and a low level of pressure at the workplace. As East Germany's official Small Political Dictionary put it, with unintended irony, 'in socialism, the contradiction between work and ..
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Tony Judt |
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07bfbd1
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Eastern Europe--from the Austrian border to the Ural Mountains, from Tallinn to Tirana--doesn't fit. Its post-war decades were certainly peaceful when contrasted with what went before, but only thanks to the uninvited presence of the Red Army: it was the peace of the prison-yard, enforced by the tank. And if the satellite countries of the Soviet bloc engaged in international cooperation superficially comparable to developments further west,..
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Tony Judt |
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e68f8e5
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And yet, for all its faults as a system of indirect government, the Union has certain interesting and original attributes. Decisions and laws may be passed at a trans-governmental level, but they are implemented by and through national authorities. Everything has to be undertaken by agreement, since there are no instruments of coercion: no EU tax collectors, no EU policemen. The European Union thus represents an unusual compromise: internat..
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Tony Judt |
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0583ed4
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The imposition of a Russian rather than a German solution cut Europe's vulnerable eastern half away from the body of the continent. At the time this was not a matter of great concern to western Europeans themselves. With the exceptions of the Germans, the nation most directly affected by the division of Europe but also ill-placed to voice displeasure at it, western Europeans were largely indifferent to the disappearance of eastern Europe. I..
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european-history
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Tony Judt |
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23728b9
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As Boris Yeltsin was to acknowledge many years later, in a speech to the Hungarian Parliament on November 11th 1992, 'The tragedy of 1956 . . . will forever remain an indelible spot on the Soviet regime.' But that was nothing when compared with the cost the Soviets had imposed on their victims. Thirty-three years later, on June 16th 1989, in a Budapest celebrating its transition to freedom, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians took part in a..
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Tony Judt |
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5edd137
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triple evils of modernity: Nazism, Communism and 'Americanism'.
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Tony Judt |
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2e46636
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Romanians, however, paid a terrible price for Ceausescu's privileged status. In 1966, to increase the population--a traditional 'Romanianist' obsession--he prohibited abortion for women under forty with fewer than four children (in 1986 the age barrier was raised to forty-five). In 1984 the minimum marriage age for women was reduced to fifteen. Compulsory monthly medical examinations for all women of childbearing age were introduced to prev..
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Tony Judt |
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00bd60e
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What matters is not how affluent a country is but how unequal it is.
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Tony Judt |
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b80e3fb
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The legacy of unregulated wealth creation is bitter indeed.
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Tony Judt |
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f669132
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refugees from the East sought desperately to convince bemused French, American or British officials that they did not want to return 'home' and would rather stay in Germany--of all places. They were not always successful: between 1945 and 1947, 2,272,000 Soviet citizens were returned by the Western Allies.
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Tony Judt |
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02d710f
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Canadian Labor Department in 1948 rejected girls and women applying to emigrate to Canada for jobs in domestic service if there was any sign that they had education beyond secondary school.
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Tony Judt |
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e0801e3
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by 1945 few people believed any longer in the magic of the market. This was an intellectual revolution.
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Tony Judt |
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2a85aca
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A tak pokazde, kdyz nejaky trouba prohlasi, ze Saddam Husajn je druhy Hitler, musime se do sporu vlozit a tyhle zjednodusujici pitomosti zkomplikovat. Realite odpovidajici zmatek je mnohem lepsi nez elegantni nepravdy.
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Tony Judt |
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744d734
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For anyone born after 1945, the welfare state and its institutions were not a solution to earlier dilemmas: they were simply the normal conditions of life - and more than a little dull. The baby boomers, entering university in the mid-'60s, had only ever known a world of improving life chances, generous medical and educated services, optimistic prospects of upward social mobility and - perhaps above all - an indefinable but ubiquitous sense..
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Tony Judt |
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1c958a2
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Inequality, then, is not just unattractive in itself; it clearly corresponds to pathological social problems that we cannot hope to address unless we attend to their underlying cause. There is a reason why infant mortality, life expectancy, criminality, the prison population, mental illness, unemployment, obesity, malnutrition, teenage pregnancy, illegal drug use, economic insecurity, personal indebtedness and anxiety are so much more marke..
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Tony Judt |
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7ff76f4
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khungvikki@gmail.com Vikki's Reading List Vikki's Reading List Comments Share FileEditViewInsertFormatDataToolsAdd-onsHelpAccessibilityLast edit was 6 days ago 100% $%123 Arial 10 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. Cells Selfishness is uncomfortable even for the selfish...
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Tony Judt |
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70902ec
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Above all, the new Left-- and its overwhelmingly youthful constituency -- rejected the inherited collectivism of its predecessor. To an earlier generation of reformers from Washington to Stockholm, it had been self-evident that 'justice', 'equal opportunity' or 'economic security' were shared objectives that could only be attained by common action. A younger cohort saw things very differently. Social justice no longer preoccupied radicals...
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Tony Judt |