Reappraisals Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

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 lan, 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.

"Exhilarating . . . brave and forthright."

-The New York Times Book Review

"Perhaps the greatest single collection of thinking on the political, diplomatic, social, and cultural history of the past century."

-Forbes

"By turns fascinating [and] edifying . . . Judt is one of our foremost historians of Europe, an elegant writer and subtle thinker."

-Los Angeles Times

"The head of the Remarque Institute at New York University, Judt has moonlighted as a prolific and provocative essayist. Now a new collection of essays...confirms Judt as one of the most versatile public intellectuals working in the English language today. In twenty-four pieces, he covers an astonishingly broad range of twentieth-century life — from Whittaker Chambers to the state of the railways in Europe — almost always writing with authority, anchored in a depth and breadth of reading that few could match." Jonathan Freedland, The New York Review of Books (read the entire )

From one of the greatest historians and public intellectuals come these reflections on a 20th century that is turning into ancient history with unprecedented speed, and at great cost to understanding and truth.

Tony Judt is one of today's leading historians and thinkers. Winner of the Hannah Arendt Prize in 2007, his previous book, Postwar, was hailed as "monumental . . . a tour de force"by Foreign Affairs, among other leading publications. In Reappraisals, he persuasively argues that we have entered an "age of forgetting." Drawing provocative connections between a dazzling range of subjects, from Jewish intellectuals and the challenge of evil in the recent European past to the interpretation of the Cold War to the displacement of history by heritage, Judt takes us beyond what we think we know of the past to explain how we came to know it, and shows how much of our history has been sacrificed in the triumph of myth-making over understanding and denial over memory.

 

We have entered an age of forgetting. Our world, we insist, is unprecedented, wholly new. The past has nothing to teach us. Drawing provocative connections between a dazzling range of subjects, from Jewish intellectuals and the challenge of evil in the recent European past to the interpretation of the Cold War and the displacement of history by heritage, the late historian Tony Judt takes us beyond what we think we know of the past to explain how we came to know it, showing how much of our history has been sacrificed in the triumph of myth-making over understanding and denial over memory. Reappraisals offers a much-needed road map back to the historical sense we urgently need. 

Tony Judt was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University, as well as the founder and director of the Remarque Institute, dedicated to creating an ongoing conversation between Europe and the United States. He was educated at Kings College, Cambridge, and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and also taught at Cambridge, Oxford, and Berkeley. Professor Judt was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The New York Times, and many journals across Europe and the United States. He is the author or editor of fifteen books, including Thinking the Twentieth Century, The Memory Chalet, Ill Fares the Land, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, and Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, which was one of The New York Times Book Reviews Ten Best Books of 2005, the winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He died in August 2010 at the age of sixty-two.

Reappraisals Acknowledgments

Introduction: The World We Have Lost

Part One: The Heart of Darkness

Chapter I: Arthur Koestler, the Exemplary Intellectual

Chapter II: The Elementary Truths of Primo Levi

Chapter III: The Jewish Europe of Manes Sperber

Chapter IV: Hannah Arendt and Evil

Part Two: The Politics of Intellectual Engagement

Chapter V: Albert Camus: "The best man in France"

Chapter VI: Elucubrations: The "Marxism" of Louis Althusser

Chapter VII: Eric Hobsbawm and the Romance of Communism

Chapter VIII: Goodbye to All That? Leszek Kotakowski and the Marxist Legacy

Chapter IX: A "Pope of Ideas"? John Paul II and the Modern World

Chapter X: Edward Said: The Rootless Cosmopolitan

Part Three: Lost in Transition: Places and Memories

Chapter XI: The Catastrophe: The Fall of France, 1940

Chapter XII: A la recherche du temps perdu: France and Its Pasts

Chapter XIII: The Gnome in the Garden: Tony Blair and Britain's "Heritage"

Chapter XIV: The Stateless State: Why Belgium Matters

Chapter XV: Romania between History and Europe

Chapter XVI: Dark Victory: Israel's Six-Day War

Chapter XVII: The Country That Wouldn't Grow Up

Part Four: The American (Half-) Century

Chapter XVIII: An American Tragedy? The Case of Whittaker Chambers

Chapter XIX: The Crisis: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Cuba

Chapter XX: The Illusionist: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy

Chapter XXI: Whose Story Is It? The Cold War in Retrospect

Chapter XXII: The Silence of the Lambs: On the Strange Death of Liberal America

Chapter XXIII: The Good Society: Europe vs. America

Envoi: The Social Question Redivivus

Publication Credits

Index