UFPPC (www.ufppc.org) Digging Deeper CXXXIII: August 16, 2010, 7:00 p.m.

Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penguin Press, March 2010). [Thesis. Social democracy is the best the left can hope for from politics at the present juncture.] Title. Oliver Goldsmith, "The Deserted Village" (1770): Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,/Where wealth accumulates, and men decay. Acknowledgments. Assistants, friends, Robert Silver, family (xiii-xvi). Introduction: A Guide for the Perplexed. Our society is too materialistic (1-3). The young are at a loss for ideals; this book is "written for young people on both sides of the Atlantic" (4; 3-4). Social democrats are to be distinguised from liberals (4-6). The financial crisis has led to a partial awakening (7). "[T]he Left must find its voice" (8). Insecurity dominates are age (8-9). This book is an elaboration of a New York Review of Books essay published in December 2009 (9). Ch. 1: The Way We Live Now. It is easy to understand our affluence, but our "public squalor" is hard to grasp (11-12). We have jettisoned the commitment to reducing inequality, and social mobility is reduced (13-17). Inequality is linked to pathological social problems of health, crime, mental illness (18-21). Our sense of possibility and moral sentiments have been corrupted (21-24). Victorian Poor Laws are not so different from our own (24-29). American peculiarities (29-33). We suffer from "economism," but we are not the first (34-36). We need trust; markets cannot provide this (37-39). Ch. 2: The World We Have Lost. The development of post-World War II social democracy and the welfare state (41-54). It worked because the market was regulated (54-63). This regulation was grounded in trust and community (6371). Varieties of welfare state (71-80). Ch. 3: The Unbearable Lightness of Politics. Critiques of the welfare state that developed in the 1970s (81-84). The New Left of the 1960s was too individualistic (85-91). There were cleareyed intellectuals back then: Aron, Hook (91-94). The rise of the Right required an intellectual revolution, and von Hayek (The Road to Serfdom, 1944) provided it (94-106). It underlay the vogue of privatization (96-14). But the result was a loss of the state's moral character (114-19). With this comes the disconnection of the population from the state (119-35). Ch. 4: Goodbye to All That? The fall of Communism (137-38). With it "unraveled the whole skein of doctrines which had bound the Left together for over a century" (142). We are all still "democrats," but we have lost our sense of how to organize ourselves (143-51). What we should have learned from 1989 is "the sheer contingency of politics"; instead, twenty years have been wasted (151-53). Ch. 5: What Is to Be Done? We need real dissent, not merely NGOs (155-66). Institutional critiques are common, but we need to rethink our terms and our ability to quantify themand instead, genuine debate is suppressed (166-73). It is imperative to reopen the social question, examine the consequences of technological change (173-78). A new moral narrative that embraces collectivism is needed (178-87). Ch. 6: The Shape of Things to Come. Globalization is a delusion and a disappointment (189-97). "We need to learn to think the state again" (199,

emphasis in original; 198-206). The example of railroads (207-16). Social democracy is the best we can do at this time (217-25). Conclusion: What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? We should dump the word "socialism" and replace it with "social democracy"; socialism is too "polluted" by associations with dictatorships (227-37). About the Author. Tony Judt was born in London in 1948 and educated at King's College, Cambridge and thecole Normale Suprieure in Paris. He taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley, and NYU. He wrote or edited more than a dozen books, including Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. [Additional information. Tony Judt died on Aug. 6, 2010. Judt was Jewish; his intellectual trajectory moved from Marxist Zionism to suspicion of leftist ideology and identity politics, but he remained an anti-imperialist. His scholarly concentration was in French political history of the 20th century. Among the general public, he was as well-known for his criticism of Israel and later for his struggle with Lou Gherig's disease as for his scholarship. He was married three times, had two children, and was 62 when death overtook him.] [Critique. The many epigraphs from Keynes and Tocqueville suggest, correctly, that there is little new to be found in this disappointing book. Ill Fares the Land purports to be a sort of manifesto, but it fails to address many key features of our time: corporatocracy, neoconservativism, militarism, the War on Terror, ascendant fundamentalism, media concentration, the Information Revolution, the decline of American hegemony, the rise of Asia, nuclear proliferation, resource depletion, climate change, etc., etc. Instead of confronting and understanding these developments,

Judt thinks efforts of mind and will to embrace the gray ideal of social democracy can inspire us to do better. It is not a plausible thesis. The "we" of the text is that of an intellectual lite in decline; the "loss of nerve" and enervation it describes are due to the decline in its progressive faith, and there is nothing here to restore it. This is not an impressive performance. Its tired clichs are not likely to appeal to the "young people" it addresses. It owes its cachet not to its intrinsic merits but to the media's desire to make Judt into a celebrity intellectual invalid, a process in which he was a willing participant.] [Reviews. Reviewers of Ill Fares the Land were gentle, but largely dismissive: "A slim and penetrating work, a dying mans sense of a dying idea . . . sometimes reads like a graduation speech" (Dwight Garner, New York Times, Mar. 16, 2010). "Passionate . . . But there is something awkward about his blurring of distinctions . . . The historical perspective of this book is rather odd, too . . . Some of Judts comments seem to express political prejudice rather than historical judgment . . . It reads . . . like a work written to console and fortify those who lived through the last 30 years" (Noel Malcolm, Daily Telegraph, Mar. 28, 2010). "Judt's history writing is immortal. This book is not" (Denis MacShane, Independent, Apr. 9, 2010. A "jeremiad . . . Oddly, there is too little history. . . . The social and cultural analysis, too, is weak. . . . Judt offers no way forward" (David Herman, New Statesman, Apr. 5, 2010). "Not a particularly original argument . . . he is raising legitimate questions" (George Shadroui, Intellectual Conservative, Aug. 4, 2010).

"Turning back the clock . . . is not as easy as Judt suggests, and his social democratic vision includes a strong dose of wishful thinking . . . Perhaps the best way to think of

this book, then, is as the beginning of a conversation rather than the last word" (Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times [London], Mar. 28, 2010).]