All Thinkers

Tony Judt

Tony Judt was a British-American historian. He was one of the most important historians of postwar Europe and a sharp public intellectual. His massive 2005 book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 is widely considered one of the great works of modern historical writing. He was born in 1948 in London. He died in 2010 in New York, aged 62, from complications of motor neurone disease. He came from a Jewish family with roots in Eastern Europe. His parents were secular socialists. He grew up in north London. He studied history at King's College Cambridge from 1966. He spent time in Israel as a young man, where he worked on a kibbutz and briefly served in the Israeli army during the 1967 Six-Day War. The experience shaped him deeply. He returned home increasingly critical of Israeli policies, while remaining deeply engaged with Jewish history and identity. He earned his PhD in 1972. He taught at Cambridge and Oxford, then moved to the United States in 1987. He became professor of European history at New York University, where he taught for the rest of his career. In 1995 he founded the Remarque Institute at NYU for the study of Europe. He wrote across many fields: French intellectual history, postwar European history, contemporary politics, and questions of social democracy and political memory. He was politically a social democrat. He criticised both the radical left and the contemporary right. Some of his views, especially his strong criticism of Israeli policies and his 2003 essay calling for a binational state in Israel-Palestine, made him controversial. In 2008 he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, also called ALS. The disease gradually paralysed him while leaving his mind intact. He continued writing through dictation. His final books, written as he was dying, are some of his most powerful. He died in 2010.

Origin
United Kingdom (later United States)
Lifespan
1948 - 2010
Era
Modern / 20th-21st Century
Subjects
History European History Social Democracy 20th Century 21st Century
Skills
Research Skills Critical Thinking Ethical Thinking Creative Expression Cultural Heritage And Identity
Why They Matter

Tony Judt matters for three reasons. First, his book Postwar (2005) is widely considered one of the greatest historical works of recent decades. It is around 900 pages. It covers Europe from 1945 to 2005. It treats East and West together as parts of one complicated continent rather than two separate stories. The book has been translated into many languages and is widely used as a textbook. It changed how postwar European history is taught. Many historians consider it the standard account.

Second, he was one of the great defenders of social democracy in his time. By the 1990s and 2000s, the centre-left politics that had built European welfare states was in retreat. Judt argued this retreat had been a mistake. The welfare states had achieved real human goods: education, healthcare, security, dignity for ordinary people. Abandoning them, he argued, had real costs. His 2010 book Ill Fares the Land made the case publicly for social democratic values at a moment when they were widely treated as outdated.

Third, his late writing on memory, history, and contemporary politics combined deep historical knowledge with sharp public engagement. His essays in the New York Review of Books were widely read. He took unpopular positions when he thought they were right. His criticism of Israeli policies caused him serious professional difficulties. His writing on his own dying disease was clear and unflinching. The combination of major scholarly work, public intellectual courage, and personal honesty made him a model of what a public historian could be. Younger historians who write for general audiences often cite him as an example.

Key Ideas
1
Postwar Europe as One Story
2
What Is Social Democracy?
3
Writing While Dying
Key Quotations
"Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today."
— Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (2010), opening sentence
This is the famous opening sentence of Judt's 2010 book Ill Fares the Land. He wrote it while dying. The sentence is direct and challenging. Many of us, he argues, sense something is wrong with contemporary society but have lost the language to describe it. Inequality has grown. Public services have weakened. Democratic engagement has declined. Trust in institutions has fallen. The sentence names the diffuse unease many people feel. It also signals what the book will do. Judt will try to articulate what is wrong, why we have come to accept it, and what we might do differently. The opening is striking because it skips polite preliminaries. The book begins with a verdict. The reader is invited either to accept the verdict and read on, or to disagree and put the book down. Most readers continue. The sentence captures something they recognise. For students, the line is a useful prompt. What in your own society feels profoundly wrong? Naming the wrong is the first step in thinking about it carefully. Judt was a master of this kind of careful naming.
"If we don't believe in the difference we can make, neither will anybody else."
— Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (2010)
Judt argues throughout Ill Fares the Land that the contemporary left has lost confidence in itself. The right speaks with confidence. The left often speaks with doubt and qualification. As a result, the left increasingly fails to win democratic support for its programmes. People follow leaders who seem to believe in what they are doing. The line above captures this insight. If you do not believe in the difference you can make, no one else will believe it either. The argument applies beyond politics. Teachers, parents, professionals in any field face the same dynamic. People follow conviction. They do not follow doubt. This does not mean false certainty is good. It means real conviction, when it is justified, has to be expressed clearly and confidently. Judt thought the social democratic tradition had real reasons for confidence. Its achievements over decades had been substantial. Forgetting these achievements led to defeat. For students, the line is useful for thinking about how to engage in causes you care about. Half-hearted advocacy convinces no one. Serious commitment, clearly expressed, has a chance of moving things.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Cultural Heritage and Identity When introducing students to recent European history
How to introduce
Tell students that Tony Judt's Postwar (2005) is widely considered the standard history of Europe since 1945. The book treats East and West as parts of one connected continent. Discuss with students what they know about postwar Europe. Most will know more about Western Europe (Britain, France, Germany) than Eastern Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania). Judt's book covers both, treating them as parts of one story. The approach has shaped how recent European history is taught. The book is long but readable. For students wanting to understand the world they live in, it remains one of the best places to start. Judt's writing makes complex history accessible without simplifying it.
Critical Thinking When teaching students about social democracy
How to introduce
Tell students about social democracy. The basic idea is that markets work for many things but not all things. Some goods (healthcare, education, basic security) should be provided to everyone, paid for by taxes, regardless of how much money people have. The European welfare states built after 1945 are mostly social democratic. Discuss with students what services they think should depend on income and what should not. Different countries answer differently. Different students will have different views. The discussion is useful for thinking about the basic question of what societies owe their members. Judt was one of the most thoughtful late defenders of social democracy. Whether or not students agree with him, knowing the position helps them think about the choices their own societies face.
Emotional Intelligence When teaching students about facing serious illness
How to introduce
Tell students about Judt's last years. He was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at 60. The disease gradually paralysed his body while leaving his mind intact. He kept writing through dictation. He produced some of his best work in his final years. Discuss with students what this kind of effort requires. Most people would have stopped working when faced with such an illness. Judt did the opposite. He worked harder. The example has helped many readers think about their own response to difficulty. The discussion can be done at age-appropriate levels. The basic point is that serious illness, while terrible, does not always end meaningful work. Judt is one of many examples of writers who continued through their dying. His honesty about both the limits and possibilities of his situation is what makes his example useful.
Further Reading

For a first introduction, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) is the major work and is widely available in paperback. Ill Fares the Land (2010) is shorter and more polemical, accessible to general readers. The Memory Chalet (2010) collects autobiographical essays. The Tanner Lecture 'What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy' (2009) is freely available online and gives a sense of his late political thinking.

Key Ideas
1
Why He Disliked the New Left
2
His Position on Israel
3
The Past We Have Forgotten
Key Quotations
"We have entered an age of insecurity, economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity."
— Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (2010)
Judt argued that the early 21st century had become an age of insecurity. Economic insecurity had grown as good jobs disappeared and inequality rose. Physical insecurity had grown as terrorism and environmental crisis became central public concerns. Political insecurity had grown as faith in democratic institutions declined. The combination produced a particular mood: anxious, defensive, prone to authoritarian solutions. Judt was writing in 2009-2010, soon after the financial crisis. The pattern he identified has only intensified since. The line is useful for thinking about why contemporary politics often feels different from 20th-century politics. The mid-20th-century welfare states were built partly to provide security. The retreat from them has produced more insecurity. Authoritarian politicians now exploit this insecurity. Judt traced the connections clearly. For intermediate students, the line is useful for diagnosis. Understanding what kind of moment we are living in is the first step to thinking about how to respond. Judt's framing of the contemporary moment as the age of insecurity has held up well in the years since he wrote.
"All collective action requires that people share something. Sociologists call this trust."
— Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (2010)
Judt thought trust was central to democratic and social life. Collective action depends on people being willing to cooperate, take risks together, and accept that others will do their part. This requires trust. The trust does not have to be perfect. It has to be enough that cooperation can happen. Modern Western societies, Judt argued, had been losing this trust. People trusted their neighbours less. They trusted institutions less. They trusted government less. The decline made collective action harder. Solving common problems became more difficult. The trust is not just a private matter. It is a public good that needs cultivation. Strong public institutions can build it. Inequality can erode it. Cynical politics can poison it. Judt thought rebuilding social trust was central to recovering the political traditions he valued. For intermediate students, the line is useful for thinking about what societies need to function well. Money matters. Laws matter. Trust also matters, in ways that are easy to ignore until it is gone. Judt insisted on this throughout his late writing.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Critical Thinking When teaching students about historical memory
How to introduce
Read with students Judt's argument that we have forgotten what was hard about earlier generations' lives. The welfare states of 20th-century Europe were not given. They were built by people who had lived through wars, depression, and authoritarianism. They had reasons to think markets alone could not be trusted. Judt argues we have forgotten this. We take welfare states for granted while voting for their dismantlement. We take democracy for granted while ignoring threats to it. Discuss with students whether this argument applies in their own countries. What achievements of earlier generations are being forgotten? What might be lost as a result? The discussion is useful for thinking about how historical memory shapes political action. Judt was clear that what we forget about the past affects what we are willing to do now.
Ethical Thinking When teaching students about taking unpopular positions
How to introduce
Tell students about Judt's 2003 essay calling for a binational state in Israel-Palestine. He had grown up in a Jewish family with Zionist sympathies. He had served briefly in the Israeli army in 1967. By 2003 he was deeply critical of Israeli policies. The essay caused major controversy. Some pro-Israel organisations campaigned against him. A planned lecture was cancelled under pressure. Judt continued writing his views. Discuss with students what taking such positions costs. Real public debate sometimes requires saying things that powerful institutions do not want said. The discussion can be done sensitively. The point is not to take sides on Israel-Palestine. It is to recognise that serious public engagement sometimes requires courage. Judt thought the issues mattered enough to bear the costs of his positions. Many serious public thinkers have made similar choices.
Further Reading

For deeper reading, Past Imperfect

French Intellectuals 1944-1956 (1992) is his early major work on French intellectual responses to communism.

Reappraisals

Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (2008) collects his essays. Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012, with Timothy Snyder) is the long conversation conducted as Judt was dying. Marxism and the French Left (1986) and A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe (1996) cover his earlier work.

Key Ideas
1
His Critique of Eastern European Communism
2
His Critique of Public Intellectual Life
3
Why His Reputation Continues to Grow
Key Quotations
"Privatisation, deregulation, the dismantling of public services. We were assured by free-market enthusiasts that this would create efficiency, innovation, and shared prosperity. None of this has happened."
— Paraphrased from Tony Judt's writings, c. 2008-2010
Judt was sharp about the failures of the free-market policies that had dominated Western economic policy from the 1980s. They had been promised to deliver efficiency, innovation, and prosperity for all. The actual results, by 2010, were different. Public services had degraded. Inequality had increased. Financial crises had become more frequent. Innovation had concentrated in fewer hands. The general standard of living for most people had not improved as promised. Judt argued the policies had failed even by their own claimed measures. The argument was politically charged. Free-market defenders pushed back hard. The defenders had institutional and political power. Judt's argument was made from outside dominant policy circles. In the years since 2010, the empirical evidence has continued to accumulate. Economists including Thomas Piketty have documented the inequality patterns Judt identified. Other historians and economists have made related arguments. For advanced students, Judt's case is one of the clearer statements of the empirical critique of free-market orthodoxy. The data have largely supported him.
"I cannot say that this disease has cured me of my prejudices. But it has taught me to confront the truth."
— Tony Judt, late essay on living with motor neurone disease
Judt wrote about his motor neurone disease with extraordinary honesty. He did not pretend to have been transformed by it. He admitted his old prejudices and attitudes had not been miraculously cured. What had changed was his ability to avoid the truth. Lying down at night, paralysed, unable even to scratch an itch, he could not distract himself from honest reflection. The disease had stripped away the small daily evasions that healthy people use to avoid hard truths. He could only think. The thinking, he found, was sometimes more useful than the avoidance had been. The line is brave and honest. Most writing about serious illness either pretends the illness has produced wisdom or denies the illness has changed anything. Judt does neither. He admits the limited wisdom while acknowledging some real change. For advanced students, the line is a useful model for honest writing about hard experience. Pretending to be transformed is dishonest. Pretending nothing has changed is also dishonest. The careful middle is harder. Judt managed it. His example has helped many readers think about their own difficult experiences.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Creative Expression When teaching students about clear writing for general audiences
How to introduce
Tell students that Judt was unusual among academic historians in writing for general readers. His prose is clear. His arguments are direct. He took strong positions and defended them with evidence. Discuss with students why most academic writing is harder to read than Judt's. Specialised language, careful hedging, footnotes, and assumptions about what readers already know all make academic prose difficult. Judt deliberately avoided much of this. He thought serious history mattered for the public, not just for specialists. Students writing for general audiences can learn from his approach. Strong arguments, clear sentences, vivid examples, and willingness to take positions all help. The skill is harder than it looks. Plain writing about complex subjects requires more thought, not less.
Critical Thinking When teaching students about how reputations develop over time
How to introduce
Discuss with advanced students how Judt's reputation has grown since his death in 2010. The political moments he warned about have largely arrived. His arguments about social democratic retreat, historical forgetting, and rising authoritarianism have looked more accurate over time, not less. Discuss with students how this works. Some thinkers are vindicated by events. Some are discredited. Some remain contested. Judt's case is one of relatively clear vindication of his major warnings. The case is a useful study in how patient honest work sometimes outlasts the noise of its own time. His careful arguments, dismissed by some when he made them, look more obviously correct now. The pattern is encouraging for serious work that does not get immediate recognition.
Common Misconceptions
Common misconception

Judt was anti-Israel.

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What to teach instead

He was critical of specific Israeli policies, especially the occupation of Palestinian territories. He was not opposed to Israel's existence. He was deeply engaged with Jewish history and Jewish identity throughout his life. He had worked on a kibbutz and served briefly in the Israeli army as a young man. His 2003 essay calling for a binational state was a specific policy position about how Israelis and Palestinians might live together, not a call to end Israel. He continued to identify as Jewish and to engage with Jewish intellectual traditions throughout his life. Treating his criticism of Israeli policies as opposition to Israel itself misrepresents his actual position. He was, like many Jewish intellectuals, a critic of his own community's institutional positions on important questions.

Common misconception

His historical work was just thinly disguised politics.

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What to teach instead

His historical work meets standard scholarly tests. His sources are documented. His arguments are supported by evidence. His claims have been engaged with by historians of various political views. Postwar in particular is widely used as a textbook by historians who do not share Judt's political positions. The work is genuinely scholarly. He had political views and did not hide them. The political views shaped which questions he asked. They did not determine the answers. His historical conclusions sometimes complicated his own political preferences. His sharp criticism of Eastern European communism is one example. Treating his historical work as just politics in disguise underestimates both its scholarly rigour and its complexity.

Common misconception

His defence of social democracy was nostalgic.

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What to teach instead

He was clear about social democracy's failures and limits. He acknowledged the welfare states had not solved every problem. He acknowledged the social democratic tradition had its own forms of complacency. His point was not that social democracy had been perfect. It was that it had achieved real things that had been forgotten and were being lost. Defending these achievements while honestly acknowledging their limits is different from nostalgia. Nostalgia would idealise the past. Judt did not. He recovered specific achievements that had been ignored or forgotten. The recovery work is harder than nostalgia. It requires holding both the genuine achievements and the genuine failures together. Critics who called him nostalgic often had not engaged with the careful detail of his actual arguments.

Common misconception

His writing on his illness was sentimental.

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What to teach instead

It was the opposite. Judt was unflinching about his motor neurone disease. He described the loss of physical abilities directly. He acknowledged he had not been transformed into a wiser person by illness. He admitted to his old prejudices and frustrations. He noted what the illness had taken from him while also working on what it had not. The Memory Chalet and other late writings are notable for their refusal to make illness into a redemptive narrative. Most writing about serious illness either pretends the illness has produced wisdom or denies that it has changed anything. Judt did neither. He kept writing carefully and honestly until very near the end. The writing is moving precisely because it is not sentimental. It is true.

Intellectual Connections
In Dialogue With
Eric Hobsbawm
Hobsbawm and Judt represent different traditions in 20th-century left historical writing. Hobsbawm was a lifelong Marxist and Communist Party member. Judt was a social democrat who was sharply critical of communism, especially in Eastern Europe. Both wrote major works of modern European history. Both engaged with Marxism as an analytical tradition. Their political positions differed. Their methodological strengths complement each other. Reading them together gives students a sense of the range within left-wing historical writing. They were not in agreement on much. They were both serious about their craft. The contrast is useful for thinking about how political commitments and scholarly work interact.
Complements
Hannah Arendt
Arendt, the German-Jewish political philosopher who fled Europe in the 1930s, was a major influence on Judt. Both were Jewish thinkers who engaged with the catastrophes of 20th-century Europe. Both wrote about totalitarianism, the relationship between politics and memory, and the responsibilities of intellectuals. Both took positions that made them controversial within their own communities, especially on Israel and Jewish identity. Reading them together gives students a sense of how a particular tradition of post-Holocaust Jewish intellectual life developed. Arendt set foundations. Judt extended them in his own way decades later.
In Dialogue With
Edward Said
Said and Judt were both major public intellectuals at New York universities (Said at Columbia, Judt at NYU) in the same period. Both wrote on Israel-Palestine. Both took positions that made them targets of organised criticism. Both engaged with the relationship between scholarship and public life. Their backgrounds differed (Said was Palestinian-American Christian, Judt was Jewish-British). Their conclusions about Israel-Palestine sometimes converged. Reading them together gives students a sense of how serious engagement with the same questions can come from very different starting points. Their disagreements were also real. Both insisted on the careful work of getting the history right.
Complements
Thomas Piketty
Piketty's work on inequality has confirmed empirically much of what Judt argued politically. Both have written about how the postwar settlement that produced relative economic equality in Western Europe broke down from the 1980s onwards. Piketty has provided the historical data. Judt provided the political analysis and the moral framing. Reading them together gives students a sense of how careful historical analysis and serious political engagement can support each other. Judt died before Piketty's major book appeared. He would have welcomed the empirical confirmation of arguments he had been making.
Complements
Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens and Judt were near contemporaries and major British public intellectuals based in the United States. Both were prolific essayists. Both took positions that cost them friendships. Both wrote with unusual clarity for general audiences. They differed in important ways. Hitchens supported the Iraq war; Judt opposed it. Hitchens became a strong critic of religion; Judt remained more measured on these questions. Both wrote movingly about their own dying. Reading them together gives students a sense of the range of public intellectual writing in their generation. Both were models of serious public engagement, even when they disagreed.
Complements
Howard Zinn
Zinn's A People's History of the United States represented a particular American left tradition. Judt represented a different left tradition, more European in its frame of reference, more focused on social democracy than on radical social movements. Reading them together gives students a sense of how left thought differs across traditions. Zinn's emphasis on resistance from below and Judt's emphasis on building democratic majorities for substantive reform are different but related approaches. Students working through different left traditions can think about which approaches fit different problems.
Further Reading

For research-level engagement, the Remarque Institute at NYU continues work in territory Judt helped establish. The journal Dissent and the New York Review of Books archives have many of his essays. Recent assessment of his work includes essays in journals including Foreign Affairs, the Times Literary Supplement, and Le Monde Diplomatique. The Jewish Quarterly and similar publications have engaged seriously with his Jewish thought. His correspondence with Timothy Snyder and others is being edited for eventual publication.