Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century by Tony Judt
Heinemann, £20

Governing the Present by Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose
Polity, £16.99

IN 1996 Tony Blair – remember him? – assured us that “the search is on to reinvent community for a modern age, true to core values of fairness, co-operation and responsibilities”. These two books explore the nature of that community. Reappraisals undertakes carefully to examine the soil and roots from whence it sprang and Governing the Present analyses the ways in which citizens are shaped and conditioned to accommodate existence within certain socio-economic and political confines. Neither book offers much cheer although Tony Judt often caused me to cheer aloud and expect hope and uplift that was not, in the end, delivered. But there is much fruitful knockabout.

Reappraisals is a collection of articles by Judt, who is Professor of European Studies at New York University, which appeared in various eminent journals or newspapers between 1994 and 2006 and chart his thinking over a range of connected themes from French Marxism to current American foreign policy. The book benefits from the spirited, confident style expected from quality journalism but is consequently marred by a lack of over arching coherence. This is an exciting, frequently stimulating if occasionally irritating tour of our recent historical and political landscape.

Opening the pages, our tour guide explains his itinerary: “The years the locusts ate… of wasted opportunity and political incompetence on both sides of the Atlantic. With too much confidence and too little reflection we put the 20th century behind us and strode boldly into its successor swaddled in self-serving half-truths: the triumph of the West, the end of history, the unipolar American moment; the ineluctable march of globalization and the free market”. And with that, we’re off!

Judt invariably highlights the landmarks as we go but, at journey’s end, you feel where has this actually got us? Where do we go from here? The value of Reappraisals lies in the intellectual thoroughness brought to bear on some significant figures – Koestler (though Judt actually spends more time attacking his biographer, Cesarini, than evaluating Koestler); Camus; Althusser; Hobsbawm; John Paul II and Said – as well as wider issues such as the fall of France; Israel; and the fatal impotence of much modern leftism. He is especially illuminating on the path that led to the domination of present US policy by neo-con hawks. Reappraisals offers a positive intellectual workout which will do you good.

The authors of Governing the Present are social scientists at the London School of Economics and here synthesize their work over the years to present a convincing and disturbing account of the hegemonic power of the economy, government and public life in our modern world. Various theories of hegemony were widely in circulation during the 1960s and various names – Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault, Barthes and all that lot – were part of the intellectual furniture of all politically right-on people. Miller and Rose revamp the hegenomic framework of our world.

Their guiding argument is clear throughout, that in a globalized world, freedom is not a sham but part of our agonistic relation between liberty and government, “an intrinsic part of what we have come to know as freedom”.

The intensely academic style frequently makes Governing the Present far from an easy read and that will limit its readership. This is a shame, as these ideas should be in much wider circulation. I read this book just before I saw a BBC Money Programme about who is buying up Britain. It made horrifying sense, especially to fans of Liverpool football club.

The authors take us through much in modern experience such as “the school, the home, the workplace, the courtroom, the dole queue” and investigate the ways in which human experience is shaped, textured and conditioned by economic and political imperatives that are seldom apprehended. The authors conclude by hoping that some of the conceptual tools and “methodological approaches” could contribute to the analytic inventiveness necessary to address them. Would that this were so! This is a fine book, but it will, sadly, only preach to the converted. Money talks. But do we listen to what it’s saying?

Robert Giddings