Judt called attention to America's and Europe's worship of efficiency, wealth, free markets, and privatization. We live, he said, in a world shaped by a generation of Austrian thinkers—the business theorist Peter Drucker, the economists Friedrich A. von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Joseph Schumpeter, and the philosopher Karl Popper—who witnessed liberalism's collapse in the face of fascism and concluded that the best way to defend liberalism was to keep government out of economic life. "If the state was held at a safe distance," Judt said, "then extremists of right and left alike would be kept at bay." Public responsibilities have been drastically shifted to the private sector. Americans and, to a lesser extent, Europeans have forgotten how to think politically and morally about economic choices, Judt warned, his fragile, British-accented voice growing louder. To abandon the gains made by social democrats—the New Deal, the Great Society, the European welfare state—"is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come."(italics added)
Even as the results of deliberately following the lead of some of the men mentioned by Judt (and other, lesser, lights, such as Milton Friedman) lay around us - the physical, political, and socio-economic ruins of western society demolished in a perverse insistence that public good can only come from the accumulated "wisdom" of private vice - we should heed the emphasis on legacy to which Judt refers.
There is irony in this. Judt's masterwork - at least from his own perspective - is a 900 page recounting of modern European history entitled Postwar: A History Of Europe Since 1945. In his own words, Europe has become the exemplar of many social and civic virtues "by forgetting its past. 'The first postwar Europe was built upon deliberate mis-memory—upon forgetting as a way of life.'" The irony here is that Judt sees our own social and political predicament as resulting from forgetfulness. Yet, it is a kind of manipulative forgetfulness, as he points out.
"Communism was a very defective answer to some very good questions. In throwing out the bad answer, we have forgotten the good questions. I want to put the good questions back on the table."
We need to be attentive to those questions as we stand and stare at the social wreckage around us. Our best friend, at the moment, is a much longer memory. I do hope that Judt, despite his desperate physical condition, continues to serve as a mnemonic for us.
