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55cdba2
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But at least their provision was universal, and for good and ill they were regarded as a public responsibility.
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Tony Judt |
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befb707
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Beneficiaries of the welfare states whose institutions they call into question, they are all Thatcher's children: politicians who have overseen a retreat from the ambitions of their predecessors.
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Tony Judt |
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55a1b77
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Margaret Thatcher, like George W. Bush and Tony Blair after her, never hesitated to augment the repressive and information-gathering arms of central government.
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Tony Judt |
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e5ead2b
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One striking consequence of the disintegration of the public sector has been an increased difficulty in comprehending what we have in common with others.
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Tony Judt |
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6c1c053
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even if the students of Berkeley, Berlin and Bangalore share a common set of interests, these do not translate into community. Space matters. And politics is a function of space--we
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Tony Judt |
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2261213
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The loss of social purpose articulated through public services actually increases the unrestrained powers of the over-mighty state.
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Tony Judt |
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3cee24e
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sense of shared citizenship. This sentiment was crucial to the formation of modern states and the peaceful societies they governed.
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Tony Judt |
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099bf2f
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Rigid dress codes can indeed enforce authority and suppress individuality--an army uniform is intended to do just that. But in their time, uniforms--whether worn by schoolchildren, mailmen, train conductors or street-crossing wardens--bespoke a certain egalitarianism. A child in regulation clothing is under no pressure to compete sartorially with his better-off contemporaries. A
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Tony Judt |
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9d4f46a
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In an age when young people are encouraged to maximize self-interest and self-advancement, the grounds for altruism or even good behavior become obscured. Short of reverting to religious authority--itself on occasion corrosive of secular institutions--what can furnish a younger generation with a sense of purpose beyond its own short-term advantage?
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Tony Judt |
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834362c
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There is a widespread sense that since 'they' will do what they want in any case--while feathering their own nests--why should 'we' waste time trying to influence the outcome of their actions.
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Tony Judt |
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f8671a7
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privatization reverses a centuries-long process whereby the state took on things that individuals could not or would not do.
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Tony Judt |
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58b2a79
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This cohort of politicians have in common the enthusiasm that they fail to inspire in the electors of their respective countries. They do not seem to believe very firmly in any coherent set of principles or policies;
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Tony Judt |
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a151f78
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They convey neither conviction nor authority.
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Tony Judt |
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d741d32
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Convinced that there is little they can do, they do little.
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Tony Judt |
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c302b4e
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we lose faith not just in parliamentarians and congressmen, but in Parliament and Congress themselves.
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Tony Judt |
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172152a
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In our political as in our economic lives, we have become consumers: choosing from a broad gamut of competing objectives, we find it hard to imagine ways or reasons to combine these into a coherent whole. We must do better than this.
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Tony Judt |
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e008a7d
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Moreover, a social service provided by a private company does not present itself as a collective good to which all citizens have a right.
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Tony Judt |
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efb8228
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The implicit consensus of the postwar decades was now broken, and a new, decidedly unnatural consensus was beginning to emerge around the primacy of private interest.
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Tony Judt |
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c925ee3
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Even in Sweden, where the Social Democrats' grip on office remained as firm as ever, the relentless uniformity of even the best housing projects, social services or public health policies began to grate on a younger generation. Had more people known about the eugenicist practices of some Scandinavian governments in the postwar years, encouraging and even enforcing selective sterilization for the greater benefit of all, the sense of oppressi..
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Tony Judt |
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c23020b
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they were increasingly perceived as restrictions upon the self-expression and freedom of the individual.
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Tony Judt |
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3d6eb01
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Men like Hayek or von Mises seemed doomed to professional and cultural marginality. Only when the welfare states whose failure they had so sedulously predicted began to run into difficulties did they once again find an audience for their views:
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Tony Judt |
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2d9acf1
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Margaret Thatcher's notorious bon mot: "there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and families"."
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Tony Judt |
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f3ada78
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Looking back, it is striking to note how many in western Europe and the United States expressed enthusiasm for Mao Tse-tung's dictatorially uniform 'cultural revolution' while defining cultural reform at home as the maximizing of private initiative and autonomy.
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Tony Judt |
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a5ecb6b
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Marxism was the rhetorical awning under which very different dissenting styles could be gathered together--not least because it offered an illusory continuity with an earlier radical generation. But under that awning, and served by that illusion, the Left fragmented and lost all sense of shared purpose.
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Tony Judt |
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d84c322
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restriction upon autonomy and initiative.
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Tony Judt |
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aaf812c
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However, for Keynes it had become self-evident that the best defense against political extremism and economic collapse was an increased role for the state, including but not confined to countercyclical economic intervention.
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Tony Judt |
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895a623
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If government is the problem and society does not exist, then the role of the state is reduced once again to that of facilitator.
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Tony Judt |
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162b177
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The narcissism of student movements, new Left ideologues and the popular culture of the '60s generation invited a conservative backlash.
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Tony Judt |
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b7a03c8
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By the late '60s, the culture gap separating young people from their parents was perhaps greater than at any point since the early 19th century.
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Tony Judt |
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5116f69
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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.
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Tony Judt |
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a6e9178
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here, it was not until the mid-1970s that a new generation of conservatives felt emboldened to challenge the 'statism' of their predecessors and offer radical prescriptions for dealing with what they described as the 'sclerosis' of over-ambitious governments and their deadening impact upon private initiative.
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Tony Judt |
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f3e7042
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What exactly is a 'gated community' and why does it matter?
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Tony Judt |
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d08db0d
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Shanghai--the term denotes people who have gathered together into affluent subdivisions of suburbs and cities and fondly suppose themselves functionally independent of the rest of society.
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Tony Judt |
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381df88
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But today, they are everywhere: a token of 'standing', a shameless acknowledgment of the desire to separate oneself from other members of society, and a formal recognition of the state's (or the city's) inability or unwillingness to impose its authority across a uniform public space.
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Tony Judt |
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bfa4f38
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where the 'Chicago boys' got their ideas, we shall find that the greatest influence was exercised by a handful of foreigners, all of them immigrants from central Europe: Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Popper, and Peter Drucker.
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Tony Judt |
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c28b15a
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All five were profoundly shaken by the interwar catastrophe that struck their native Austria.
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Tony Judt |
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d3c7b56
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Beginning with a handful of outstanding intellectual refugees from interwar Europe, we pass through two generations of academic economists intent on re-configuring their discipline ... and arrive at the banking, mortgage, private finance and hedge fund scandals of recent years.
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Tony Judt |
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4759247
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Whatever their other differences, French Gaullists, Christian Democrats and Socialists shared a common faith in the activist state, economic planning and large-scale public investment. Much the same was true of the consensus that dominated policy-making in Scandinavia, the Benelux countries, Austria and even ideologically-riven Italy.
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Tony Judt |
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8f348bd
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By the late 1960s, the idea that "nanny knows best" was already starting to produce a backlash."
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Tony Judt |
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92c917d
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The idea that those in authority know best--that they are engaged in social engineering on behalf of people who do not understand what is good for them--was not born in 1945, but it flourished in the decades that followed.
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Tony Judt |
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3186f4f
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The consequences are clear. There has been a collapse in intergenerational mobility:
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Tony Judt |
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ef3ffc9
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Thus the incidence of mental illness correlates closely to income in the US and the UK,
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Tony Judt |
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f2f310c
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between 1983 and 2001, mistrustfulness increased markedly in the US, the UK and Ireland--three
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Tony Judt |
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a2dd700
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two world wars had habituated almost everyone to the inevitability of government intervention in daily life.
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Tony Judt |