Orwell’s heir? Book review: Thinking the Twentieth Century
“The twentieth century,” Tony Judt asserts in this luminous book of conversations with the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, “is the century of the intellectuals.” What does it say about intellectuals, then, that the century in which they exercised so much influence on policymaking and public opinion was also the bloodiest in history? There are some sobering answers—few of them flattering—in Thinking the Twentieth Century. Published two years after Judt’s death from motor neurone disease, this book contains his final views on politics and economics and on a range of thinkers from Keynes to Eric Hobsbawm.
A relatively obscure British academic based in New York, Judt refashioned himself in the last decade of his life into a strikingly bold and prominent public intellectual. Published in 2005, his masterpiece Postwar, a panoramic account of Europe after the second world war, broadened his reputation as a scholar of French intellectual history. But Judt was to become even better known for his eloquent defence of the old values of good governance, social and economic justice, and his attacks on his peers—western liberal intellectuals—for having succumbed to the false consolations of dogma and the blandishments of power.
Judt valiantly tried to resurrect a faded ideal: of the unaffiliated intellectual who told the truth as he saw it, as opposed to those who appealed to the higher “truths” of nationalism, human rights, security interests, neo-imperialism, or some other abstraction. “The distinctive feature,” he argued in 2006, “of the liberal intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional interest but the sustained effort to transcend that interest.” In the end, Judt himself did not overcome the failings of post-war liberalism that he so brilliantly illuminated. But few of his contemporaries seem to have been as aware as Judt of the many traps—the seductions of higher status as well as of ideology—which the 20th century laid for intellectuals.
As Judt’s book relates, the raucously polemical century began with the obviously malign thinkers on the right such as the antisemitic newspaper editor Edouard Drumant and the fascist Robert Brasillach. These were followed by the idealistic thinkers on the left whose endeavour to make a better world for all of humanity ended in, as Albert Camus wrote, “slave camps under the flag of freedom,” and “massacres justified by philanthropy.”
After two world wars and the Holocaust came an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity in the west—the perfect interlude, you might think, for intellectuals to uphold their oft-asserted ideals of reason and justice. But the cold war seems to have enhanced the capacity of writers, academics, politicians and journalists for terrible ideological choices. Stalinism and the gulag did not lack for apologists in the west. Nor did the unconscionable nuclear build-up at home, and the destructive proxy wars abroad for the sake of the “free world.”..
In a prodigiously successful postwar America, the old notion of the freelance intellectual, who questioned all verities, including his own, was threatened with irrelevance. In his influential book The End of Ideology (1960), the American sociologist Daniel Bell proposed that the overwhelming superiority of the American model of industrial capitalism and democracy over communism had rendered intellectual debate moot. According to Bell, there was a “rough consensus among intellectuals on political issues: the acceptance of a Welfare State; the desirability of decentralized power; a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism.” Furthermore, Bell added, America’s “affluent” society could find a place, even “prestige” for even its most bitter former critics.
Indeed, no one moved faster to realise this possibility, and whisper advice to power, than the ex-Marxist radicals of Bell’s own generation: Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Norman Podhoretz. They were the first neoconservatives and precursors to today’s Washington-based intellectuals who derive their salaries from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and the Weekly Standard and affirm their allegiance in turn to the right wing of the Republican party.
Towards the end of his life, Judt, born in 1948, became queasily aware that many liberals of his own generation—a “pretty crappy” one in his unforgiving assessment—had also followed the neocon trajectory, retreating, as he put it, “from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security.” ..
