It’s a pity that the comment thread below my blog about the late Tony Judt was taken over by readers less interested in assessing his work than in grinding their own axes about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As Nikil Saval points out in an excellent appreciation of Judt on the n+1 website, the historian and essayist “will be remembered by many as a bracing critic of Zionism” — principally on account of his conversion to the arguments in favour of a single, binational state in the Middle East (set out in this much-discussed piece in the New York Review of Books, from 2003).
Saval reminds us that there was much more to Judt than his views on the future of the state of Israel. His most interesting point, I think, concerns the relationship between Judt’s repudiation of (academic) Marxism and his enduring commitment to social-democratic politics. I ended my post about Judt with the observation that he understood that a “sober recognition of the limits of politics is not the same as a quietistic and defeated abandonment of them”. This fits, I think, with Saval’s conclusion:
To his eternal credit, Judt did not leap from a repudiation of Marxism to an embrace of markets. There have been few spokesmen for the welfare state — that most prosaic of institutions — as eloquent as Judt. [His book] Postwar itself can be seen as one long paean to the construction of welfare states across western Europe in the aftermath of World War II. European social democrats, Judt once wrote, occupy an essentially schizophrenic position: they constantly have to resist calls for freer markets while emphasising their support for regulated ones; at the same time, they have to reiterate a belief in democratic institutions, committed to reducing inequality, against the more radical claims for transformation embodied by the revolutionary Marxists. Their successes have been fragile, Judt showed, and they need expanding.
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