What Book to Read?

Tony Judt was a well respected historian, best known for his work on post war Europe. This book appeared just before he died of motor neurone disease in August 2010. Unable to write – scarcely able to move – he dictated it. I mention this not just because he showed immense courage in dealing with these ‘unusual circumstances’, but because undertaking the task at all demonstrates how urgent he considered the call to action.

‘Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay’ is a quotation from Goldsmith’s poem The Deserted Village (1770). Judt thinks this sentiment is equally apt now. ‘Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today’, he says. ‘We cannot go on living like this.’

He argues that over the last 30 years, slavish devotion to free market ideology, and erosion of belief in State action for the common good, have resulted in the creation of private wealth for the few and public squalor for the rest of us. Marked inequalities in income and access to services have hastened the ills of high levels of unemployment, mental illness, crime and alienation. And yet adherence to the free market seems to be the only option open to us, despite its failure in the global financial crisis, when free market bankers and car executives rushed to seek assistance from the public purse.

This argument is not new; Judt’s contribution is to place free market thinking in its historical context, showing that all Western nations have considerable experience of eschewing the market and using the State to achieve public benefits, such as the New Deal and the Welfare State. He argues that this legacy can be used as a basis for deciding when and how the State can intervene in economic and social matters, as he clearly thinks it should, in pursuit of greater equality. He believes that State power will inevitably be used to deal with threats like climate change, with the danger that it will be in unequal and undemocratic ways if belief in the power of the State to act for the public benefit has not been restored.

He argues that the political Left has largely given up on the debate, showing how the consensus around the use of State power crumbled under assaults from both Left and Right. I found particularly interesting his discussion of how the individual rights agenda of the New Left in the 1960s, among other things, eroded the collectivism of the ‘old’ Left. ‘The personal is the political’ cuts both ways.

So what does he think we can do to revive the legitimacy of State action for collective ends? I kept hoping he’d come up with a formula that I could use but of course he doesn’t. Judt values idealism but is suspicious of ideologies: ‘the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences’. Instead he favours ‘incremental improvements’, even if they are, as is likely, on ‘unsatisfactory circumstances’. In other words, we have to figure it out for ourselves on a case by case basis. But he argues that the general principle of State action needs vocal advocates to challenge the seeming hegemony of free market ideology. He believes that things won’t change until the way people think and speak about them changes.

Judt acknowledges the depth of cynicism about politics, and the dangers for democracy of such cynicism. But I’m not entirely clear how he hopes this will change. Greater political engagement by young people and better political leadership are excellent goals, but seem far from achievement. Judt has done his bit though.

Ill Fares the Land is based on an essay Judt wrote for The New York Review of Books in 2009. You can read this short version of his argument here.

Given Judt’s (and my) unashamedly partisan social democratic bias, you might like to read another view. Here is one from the conservative historian, Noel Malcolm, though I think he must have been reading a different book.