Tony Judt

The British-born, American historian of French culture, Tony Judt, died over the weekend. Right now, Judt is perhaps most famous for a series of essays he has written over the past year or so detailing his struggles with Lou Gehrig's disease. They are unflinching in their honesty about the condition. As difficult as they are to read, I can only imagine how hard they most have been to write. Just prior to this, Judt had attained some level of controversy over his articles on Israel and the Middle East. A former Zionist, he came to a strongly critical position of the Israeli state late in his life. This contributed to a cancellation of a scheduled 2006 speech at the Polish Embassy in New York, prompted by pressure from the Anti-Defamation League.

But in fact Judt's speciality was intellectual history, and this is how I first became aware of him, especially around the publication of Past Imperfect, which indicted a number of Marxist and Left-wing intellectuals in post-War France, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre, for their moral obtuseness. At the time, I was falling out of love a bit with Western left-wing thinking myself, so I rather enjoyed Judt's elegant polemics. Now I think that it could also be seen as a bit of piling on: hitting the Left when it was in disarray and demoralized following the collapse of Soviet Communism and the seeming triumphant rise of free-market capitalism as solution to the human condition. But Judt was, to his credit, never a neo-liberal. As far as I can tell he remained a social democrat throughout his life, and his political positions were always a bit unpredictable, which is about as safe a guarantee of an original and honest mind as I can imagine. To get some idea of what we have lost, read this, one of the last essays he wrote for NYRB.