Because he had a rare neurodegenerative illness, Tony Judt was losing control of his body while writing this memoir-cum-essay collection. He describes in harrowing detail how the disease, from which he died in August, rendered him helpless and dependent on constant care. To take refuge from the boredom and discomfort, he drew on the inspiration of mnemonic devices like those explored in the Renaissance essays of Frances Yates and in Jonathan Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci to develop stories, essays and “interwoven segments of my own past which I had never previously thought of as related”.
In many ways this book is an account of political maturation: his break from Marxism and his change from being a Zionist to a critic of Israel are well known. But he also discusses his disappointment with the legacy of the 1960s, his contempt for political correctness and the pervasiveness of identity, and his disdain for the state of education in Britain; particularly the school selection system from which he benefited. Judt is at his best when he discusses his regret that he and his fellows were out protesting in Paris in the ’60s rather than in Warsaw or Prague where his peers were rallying against the oppression of communism. These young Europeans “went on to undermine, discredit, and overthrow not just a couple of dilapidated communist regimes but the very idea of communism itself”.
Judt’s defence of the social democratic system, expounded at length in Ill Fares the Land, is as visible in his prose. Through various narratives, such as youthful railway trips, he celebrates the virtues of public investment like that seen in continental Europe while expressing his disenchantment with Britain and America’s weird obsession with privatisation and the free market. In his discussion of the work of Czeslaw Milosz, particularly The Captive Mind, he attacks Anglo-American neo-liberalism, describing the market as dogma, “the acme of unreason”. The victims, he argues, are the people of vulnerable developing countries who have had the “Washington consensus” forced on them and average Americans who have dutifully swallowed the pill yet will never see the benefit.
Released posthumously, and not initially intended for publication, this is an entrancing trip through love, sex, politics, family, history and identity. For all the things it serves as, most of all it is a reminder of how great a thinker we have lost.
