Tony Judt, the British writer, historian and professor who was recently described as having the “liveliest mind in New York” and a public intellectual known for his sharply polemical essays on American foreign policy, the state of Israel and the future of Europe, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 62.
In 2008 he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, a wasting malady that gradually, often rapidly, destroys the use of all muscles. In a matter of months the disease left him paralyzed and unable to breathe without mechanical assistance. Judt, who had considered himself a “very healthy, very fit, very independent, travelling, sports-playing guy”, found his body ravaged and considered euthanasia. “In effect,†Mr. Judt wrote in an essay published in The New York Review of Books, “A.L.S. constitutes progressive imprisonment without parole. There I lie, trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts”. Words, for Judt, were a way of making sense of his life and a weapon in his battle against his illness. “Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.” Judt chronicled his illness in unsparing detail in public lectures and essays – giving an extraordinary account that won him almost as much respect as his voluminous historical and political work. Rather then resign himself to slow extinction in a prison cell, Judt began, as a mental exercise, to recall all his life, beginning in childhood, and turned this into a series of beautiful short “windows of memory” which were published in the New York Review. Some dealt with Cambridge, Paris and Switzerland, while those on his childhood were almost intolerably poignant to anyone of his generation: rationing, London fogs, trolleybuses, the local Sainsbury’s which still had sawdust on its floor and “assistants in starched blue-and-white aprons”, not to mention the way that “girls in those days came buttressed in an impenetrable Maginot Line of hooks, belts, girdles, nylons, roll-ons, suspenders, slips and petticoats”.
His finest work was thought to be “Postwar,†a monumental history of post World War II Europe and an enormous critical success.”Postwar” was described by Yale historian Timothy Snyder as “the best book on its subject that will ever be written by anyone”. Judt wrote essays on politics and current affairs in journals like The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books. In 2003 he published in the New York Review the single most controversial of all these essays, “Israel: The Alternative”, which opens with “The Middle East peace process is finished”.  In “Bush’s Useful Idiots” he took apart the soi-disant liberals who had supported Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy. He derided those members of the liberal intelligentsia who had supported the Iraq war but changed their minds after incompetent execution led to disaster. “Like Stalin’s western admirers who, in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, resented the Soviet dictator not so much for his crimes as for discrediting their Marxism,” the liberal hawks were now “irritated with Bush for giving ‘preventive war’ a bad name”.
But history is what remained uppermost in his mind, his view of history remained unvarnished. His latest book, “Ill Fares the Land,†is a passionate call for a re-engagment in politics, turning his attention to a problem he regarded as acute: the loss of faith in social democracy, and the power of the state to do good, that had brought prosperity to so many European countries after World War II. “History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another,” he once declared. “It can also show you that there’s been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it”.
“The historian’s task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly,†he told Historically Speaking. “A well-organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves.â€
“The meaning of our life … is only incorporated in the way other people feel about us. Once I die, my life will acquire meaning in the way they see whatever it is I did, for them, for the world, the people I’ve known.
I really liked this piece he wrote for the New York Review of Books:Â The Meritocrats
