Tony Judt

From one of our greatest historians and public intellectuals, reflections on a twentieth century that is turning into ancient history, when it's not being displaced by myth or forgotten entirely, with unprecedented speed and at great cost The accelerating changes of the past generation have been accompanied by a comparably accelerated amnesia. The twentieth century has become "history" at an unprecedented rate. The world of 2007 is so utterly unlike that of even 1987, much less any earlier time, that we have lost touch with our immediate past even before we have begun to make sense of it. In less than a generation, the headlong advance of globalization, with the geographical shifts of emphasis and influence it brings in its wake, has altered the structures of thought that had been essentially unchanged since the European industrial revolution. Quite literally, we don't know where we came from. The results have proved calamitous thus far, with the prospect of far worse. We have lost touch with a century of social thought and socially motivated social activism. We no longer know how to discuss such concepts and have forgotten the role once played by intellectuals in debating, transmitting, and defending the ideas that shaped their time. In Reappraisals, Tony Judt resurrects the key aspects of the world we have lost in order to remind us how important they still are to us now and to our hopes for the future. Reappraisals draws provocative connections between a dazzling range of subjects, from the history of the neglect and recovery of the Holocaust and the challenge of "evil" in the understanding of the European past to the rise and fall of the "state" in public affairs and the displacement of history by "heritage. " With his trademark acuity and Zlan, Tony Judt takes us beyond what we think we know to show us how we came to know it and reveals how many aspects of our history have been sacrificed in the triumph of mythmaking over understanding, collective identity over truth, and denial over memory. His book is a road map back to the historical sense we so vitally need.

The first truly European history of contemporary Europe, from Lisbon to Leningrad, based on research in six languages, covering 34 countries across 60 years, using a great deal of material from newly available sources. The book integrates international relations, domestic politics, ideas, social change, economic development, and culture--high and low--into a single grand narrative. Every country has its chance to play the lead, and although the big themes are handled--including the cold war, the love/hate relationship with America, cultural and economic malaise and rebirth, and the myth and reality of unification--none of them is allowed to overshadow the rich pageant that is the whole.--From publisher description.

Leon Blum, Albert Camus, and Raymond Aron might seem an unlikely combination. Blum was a fin-de-siecle aesthete who became the spiritual and political leader of the French non-Communist Left in the first half of this century. Camus, best known to millions of readers worldwide for his novels The Stranger and The Plague, was a wartime Resistance figure who played a prominent part in post-1945 intellectual life in France before dying tragically young in a car crash in 1960. Aron, a contemporary of Jean-Paul Sartre in the brilliant intellectual generation of interwar France, was a political theorist, journalist, and critic of Communism who made a major contribution to the recent revival of liberal thought in contemporary France. In The Burden of Responsibility Tony Judt offers a distinctive and original reinterpretation of the writings and public role of these three men, arguing that they have much in common. Despite the great differences in their backgrounds, their interests, and their views, all three were men of integrity who took seriously their responsibility as public intellectuals.

In this timely new book, a distinguished intellectual historian offers us cogent and persuasive responses to these urgent topical questions: What are the prospects for the European Union? If they are not wholly rosy, why is that? Which nations should "belong" to Europe and when? And, in any event, how much does it matter whether a united Europe does or does not come about, on whatever terms? Tony Judt - European by extraction, British by nationality, American by residence - is especially well qualified to examine these thorny issues. At once skeptical of large claims yet enthusiastically "European," he argues that there are reasonable, realistic, and practical modes by which we can deal with the political, cultural, and economic factors involved. We need not return to the Europe of the past, but we also need not settle for a super-national, quasi-sovereign European Union that obliterates national differences.

xiv, 370 pages : 24 cm

Thinking the Twentieth Century maps the issues and concerns of a turbulent age onto a life of intellectual conflict and engagement. Tony Judt presents the triumphs and the failures of prominent intellectuals, adeptly explaining both their ideas and the risks of their political commitments.--[book jacket]

"'The Memory Chalet' is a memoir unlike any you have ever read before. Each essay charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt's prodigious mind. His youthful love of a particular London bus route evolves into a reflection on public civility and interwar urban planning. Memories of the 1968 student riots of Paris meander through the divergent sex politics of Europe, before concluding that his generation 'was a revolutionary generation, but missed the revolution.' A series of road trips across America lead not just to an appreciation of American history, but to an eventual acquisition of citizenship. Foods and trains and long-lost smells all compete for Judt's attention; but for us, he has forged his reflections into an elegant arc of analysis. All as simply and beautifully arranged as a Swiss chalet-a reassuring refuge deep in the mountains of memory."--Dust jacket flap.

Débat classique que celui des relations entre langue et politique. A une époque où l'anglais est en passe de devenir la langue véhiculaire des pays de l'Union, sans qu'il ait jamais eu de politique linguistique européenne clairement formulée, il est important de s'interroger sur la signification de langue dominante.

"In this collection of original essays Denis Lacorne and Tony Judt have brought together ten experts from North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Israel to address the legal, communal, historical and political dimensions of this "language question" in modern and modernizing societies. Ranging from the conflict between French and Occitan in the construction of modern France to the future of language use on the Internet, Language, Nation, and State contributes to some of the most contentious debates of our time: What are the sources of ethnic conflict? Is multiculturalism a solution to the problems of linguistic minorities? Are there any models of successful multilingual and stable societies? The authors have no single answer to propose to these questions but no one with an interest in them - which is to say no one actively concerned with the dilemmas of our contemporary world - can ignore the issues raised in this book."--BOOK JACKET.