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Overview
A great thinker’s final testament: a characteristically wise and forthright collection of essays spanning a career of extraordinary intellectual engagement
Tony Judt’s first collection of essays, Reappraisals, was centered on twentieth-century Europe in history and memory. Some of Judt’s most prominent and indeed controversial essays felt outside of the scope of Reappraisals, most notably his writings on the state of Israel and its relationship to Palestine. There would be time, it was thought, to fit these essays into a larger frame. Sadly, this would not be the case, at least during the author’s own life.
Now, in When the Facts Change, Tony Judt’s widow and fellow historian, Jennifer Homans, has found the frame, gathering together important essays from the span of Judt’s career that chronicle both the evolution of his thought and the remarkable consistency of his passionate engagement and intellectual élan. Whether the subject is the scholarly poverty of the new social history, the willful blindness of French collective memory about what happened to the country’s Jews during World War II, or the moral challenge to Israel of the so-called Palestinian problem, the majesty of Tony Judt’s work lies in his combination of unsparing honesty, intellectual brilliance, and ethical clarity. When the Facts Change exemplifies the utility, indeed the necessity, of minding our history and not letting cheerful fictions suffice in its place. An emphatic demonstration of the power of a great historian to connect us more deeply to the world as it was, as it is, and as it should be, it is a fitting capstone to an extraordinary body of work.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781594206009 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 01/22/2015 |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.50(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Tony Judt was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, and l’École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and taught at Cambridge, Oxford, and Berkeley. He was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University and the director of the Remarque Institute, which he founded in 1995. Professor Judt was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The New York Times, and many other journals. Judt is the author of The Memory Chalet, Ill Fares the Land, Reappraisals, and Postwar, which was one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2005 and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He died in August 2010 at the age of sixty-two.
Read an Excerpt
The only way for me to write this introduction is to separate the man from the ideas. Otherwise, I get pulled back into the man, who I loved and was married to from 1993 until his death in 2010, rather than forward into the ideas. As you read these essays, I hope that you, too, will focus on the ideas, because they are good ideas, and they were written in good faith. “In good faith” may have been Tony’s favorite phrase and highest standard, and he held himself to it in everything he wrote. What he meant by it, I think, was writing that is free of calculation and maneuver, intellectual or otherwise. A clean, clear, honest account.
This is a book about our age. The arc is down: from the heights of hope and possibility, with the revolutions of 1989, into the confusion, devastation, and loss of 9/11, the Iraq war, the deepening crisis in the Middle East, and—as Tony saw it—the self-defeating decline of the American republic. As the facts changed and events unfolded, Tony found himself turned increasingly and unhappily against the current, fighting with all of his intellectual might to turn the ship of ideas, however slightly, in a different direction. The story ends abruptly, with his untimely death.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "When the Facts Change"
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Copyright © 2016 Tony Judt.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: In Good Faith 1
Part 1 1989: Our Age
Chapter I Downhill All the Way 13
Chapter II Europe: The Grand Illusion 30
Chapter III Crimes and Misdemeanors 47
Chapter IV Why the Cold War Worked 65
Chapter V Freedom and Freedonia 85
Part 2 Israel, the Holocaust, and the Jews
Chapter VI The Road to Nowhere 107
Chapter VII Israel: The Alternative 115
Chapter VIII A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy 124
Chapter IX The "Problem of Evil" in Postwar Europe 129
Chapter X Fictions on the Ground 142
Chapter XI Israel Must Unpick Its Ethnic Myth 147
Chapter XII Israel Without Clichés 151
Chapter XIII What Is to Be Done? 156
Part 3 9/11 and the New World Order
Chapter XIV On The Plague 171
Chapter XV Its Own Worst Enemy 183
Chapter XVI The Way We Live Now 202
Chapter XVII Anti-Americans Abroad 215
Chapter XVIII The New World Order 234
Chapter XIX Is the UN Doomed? 252
Chapter XX What Have We Learned, if Anything? 269
Part 4 The Way We Live Now
Chapter XXI The Glory of the Rails 285
Chapter XXII Bring Back the Rails! 294
Chapter XXIII The Wrecking Ball of Innovation 303
Chapter XXIV What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? 319
Chapter xxv Generations in the Balance 339
Part 5 In the Long Run We Are All Dead
Chapter XXVI Francois Furet (1927-1997) 347
Chapter XXVII Amos Elon (1926-2009) 355
Chapter XXVIII Leszek Kolakowski (1927-2009) 360
Chronological List of Tony Judt's Published Essays and Criticism 367
Index 375