Without going back as far as Herodotus (who gave us the word “history” from the Greek for “enquiry”), and leaving aside Caesar and Churchill, who first made history and then wrote it, or Gibbon and Macaulay, who both sat as members of Parliament, the “engaged historian” belongs to a long and often honorable tradition. It was on display 20 years ago when The New York Times carried a full-page advertisement rebuking President Reagan, “A Reaffirmation of Principle,” signed by 63 public intellectuals (for want of a less irritating name) who included such eminent historians as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Fritz Stern.
That ad is mentioned by Tony Judt in “Reappraisals,” his exhilarating new collection of essays, by way of another rebuke, this time to liberals who “acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy,” but then he is himself one of the latest adornments of that engaged tradition. A Londoner by origin and a New Yorker by adoption, Judt was educated at Cambridge, and is now a professor at New York University and director of its Remarque Institute. N.Y.U. is no ivory tower, as it turns out: in a memorable article not included here, he described looking downtown from his office window on 9/11, to see the 21st century begin. His original scholarly subject was modern France, which led Judt from studies of the French left to the excellent recent “Postwar,” a panoramic history of Europe since 1945, by way of his acidulated “Past Imperfect” on the Parisian intelligentsia in the postwar decade and, perhaps my favorite among his books, “The Burden of Responsibility,” essays on Léon Blum, Albert Camus and Raymond Aron. Like those heroes, Judt has increasingly spread his wings as a commentator on contemporary politics.
In “Reappraisals,” he looks back at the tragedy of Europe in the 20th century — although one should really say the four decades from the outbreak of World War I until the death of Stalin — and in particular at the Jewish tragedy. Judt writes informatively about Manès Sperber, tenderly about Primo Levi, enthusiastically about Hannah Arendt: an enthusiasm I wish I could share. Even apart from the fact that her supposed magnum opus, “The Origins of Totalitarianism” is, as Judt admits, “not a perfect book,” nor “particularly original,” that gifted writer had something missing. Arendt is clever and she is formidable, but her heart’s in the wrong place. Another survivor from the wreckage of Jewish Europe was Arthur Koestler, whom Judt defends from his detractors and who leads Judt on to the riveting question of Communism and its foes. He is generous toward Eric Hobsbawm, a fine historian to be sure, but someone whose own engagement has been not so much perverse as grotesque. In reply to Hobsbawm’s sneering words that “there are certain clubs,” meaning ex-Communists, “of which I would not wish to be a member,” Judt points out that it is precisely the members of those clubs — Jorge Semprún and Margarete Buber-Neumann as well as Silone, Camus, Sperber and Koestler — who have written some of the best accounts of their age. Although Judt rightly says that Hobsbawm is an excellent writer, he curiously adds that so are E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Christopher Hill, “his erstwhile companions in the British Communist Historians’ Group.” But Thompson, at any rate at his worst, was not only patronizing and insular but bombastic and garrulous, while Williams was a dreadful writer. The judgment is the odder coming from Judt, who writes admirably himself. In one judicious examination of this subject, Judt observes that European progressives have been better than their American counterparts at allowing “that there might really have existed a secret Communist underground” — and a real mortal, moral conflict, one could add. The Communist-turned-anti-Communist Ignazio Silone once told Palmiro Togliatti, the Italian Communist leader, that “the last battle” of the 20th century would be waged between the two camps they personified, and there is a great book to be written on this subject one day. If Judt doesn’t write it, one of the rest of us will have to. While gazing about contemporary Europe, Judt encounters a very striking recent phenomenon, a confection of nostalgia, commemoration, invented tradition, “heritage industry” and la mode rétro. He praises the marvelous seven volumes of “Les Lieux de Mémoire,” a collaborative work on national memory edited by the historian Pierre Nora, while perceptively seeing that this absorption with the “world we have lost” is a reaction to the breathtaking changes that have overtaken France since 1945, not to mention the fact that there is nothing very glorious or confident about French history since 1918, despite de Gaulle’s heroic efforts to prove otherwise. Then after crossing the Channel to the country where he grew up, Judt finds England awash with whimsical “heritage” — as opposed to things that actually work — epitomized by former mining villages Disneyfied into theme parks. Sharp-eyed as he is, political prejudice colors his account here. There is a long riff on the decayed state of British railways (à qui le dîtes-vous; tell me about it: some of us have to use them regularly), compared with French railways, so good that riding them is a pleasure in itself. But then Judt and I don’t pay French taxes, and he might have addressed the plausible argument that, at least in the British context, state subsidy of public transport — as of higher education and the arts — represents a net transfer of wealth from poor to rich. He displays an understandable contempt for Tony Blair (à qui le dîtes-vous again: some of us had to live under his government), although from the perspective of an impenitent social democrat. While Judt says that “Communism defiled and despoiled the radical heritage,” he could have added that the cause of even moderate British socialism was completely discredited by the failures of Labor governments in the 1960s and ’70s. And while Judt has few good words for Margaret Thatcher, he might try to see that she compares favorably with her epigone Blair at every point, not least in her far less servile attitude toward Washington. An essay on the “strange death of liberal America” wonders, perhaps with some exaggeration, why the liberal intelligentsia has had so little to say “about Iraq, about Lebanon or about recent reports of a planned attack on Iran.” He has in mind particularly the dread “liberal hawks,” whom he has also attacked on the New York Times Op-Ed page for the rhetorical cover they gave the Bush administration and its court (“In today’s America neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig leaf”). And yet Judt, while an opponent of the Iraq war, was himself an interventionist hawk over Kosovo. Although he tries to distinguish between them, he must have an inkling of the difficulty this poses for those like him. No very casuistical argument was needed to link the two, and it was neither surprising nor necessarily illogical that a bomber flight path was lighted up from Belgrade to Baghdad. Once the principle is accepted that we can attack other countries that have nasty governments but offer us no threat, where do you stop? “You don’t have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps,” Judt writes, and while it has certainly helped him as a historian, he has also made a very striking personal pilgrimage. In the 1960s he was an ardent young socialist-Zionist, spending time on a kibbutz and flying to Israel in her hour of need when the 1967 war began. He is now a caustic opponent of Israeli policy, and of American policy toward Israel also, even offering sympathetic words about the widely anathematized “Israel Lobby,” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Not only does Judt lament that the United States has suffered a catastrophic loss of international influence in recent years, thanks to “self-defeating and even irrational” conduct, in the Middle East above all; he says that the reflexive charge of anti-Semitism against critics of Israel, and of the American alliance with Israel, must ultimately be “bad for Jews — since it means that genuine anti-Semitism may also in time cease to be taken seriously, thanks to the Israel lobby’s abuse of the term.” Anyone who writes on this subject is asking for trouble (à qui ...), and Judt’s notably brave and forthright essays have brought him much obloquy. Yet whatever else may be said, he is unarguably right about one thing. The “historian of Opinion,” in Keynes’s phrase, cannot fail to see a huge “change of mood that proved lasting and with the consequences of which we are living still.” At the time of the 1967 war, it was possible for Israelis to bask in glory, and to cheer when Abba Eban said that “never before has Israel stood more honored and revered by the nations of the world.” Those words would be impossible to utter today, even if, as Judt observes, many Americans don’t seem to have caught up with the great shift of sentiment throughout the rest of the world. Looking back from our latest fin de siècle, the theme that stands out in Judt’s account is lost time, not in the Proustian sense but in Goethe’s: the moment that, once lost, Eternity will never give back. That is true of the West since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of Soviet Russia, years of “wasted opportunity and political incompetence on both sides of the Atlantic,” but true first of all of Israel, which after 1967 threw away a priceless chance for peace and for her own ultimate security. In one of his endnotes, Judt says that his essay on the 1967 war was his last appearance in The New Republic, from which he has since been excommunicated. Just a few months earlier, he had appeared in the same magazine with a ferocious assault on “Koba the Dread,” by Martin Amis (unofficially known in literary London as “Stalinbad” — the book in which Amis “says that Stalin was a bad man”). That evisceration was unkind, but not unfair. And it served as a reminder that, especially by comparison with the literary gentlemen and ladies — all the novelists, poets and playwrights with their preening political fatuities — historians have had a good record in this field. Few are better than Tony Judt, not only a historian of the first rank but (in a word we need an equivalent for) a politicologue who gives engagement a good name. Uno de los ensayos de Judt en Reappraisals es un estupendo retrato de Leszek Kolakowski. Ahí menciona el intercambio epistolar entre Edward Thompson y el filósofo polaco. Judt califica la respuesta de Kolakowski a la invectiva del marxista inglés como una demolición intelectual perfecta: la más fina en la historia del argumento político. Los archivos del Socialist Register nos permiten asomarnos a las dos cartas. De Thompson a Kolakowski; de Kolakowski a Thompson. La respuesta de Kolakowski también puede leerse en un libro reciente que lleva precisamente el título de la carta: Por qué tengo razón en todo. Lo publica en España la editorial Melusina. Tony Judt recoge en Reappraisals que tras la guerra fría llegó un optimismo iluso que proclamaba novedades en abundancia. Si la historia había llegado a su fin parecían innecesarios los recuerdos. Olvidamos por proyecto, no por amnesia. El historiador se pregunta si hemos aprendido algo. Concluye que, en lugar de huir del siglo XX, habría que regresar a él para aprender de nuevo lo elemental. Por ejemplo, que la guerra degrada a los ganadores tanto como a los perdedores. El libro de Judt ha recibido mucha atención crítica. John Gray celebra al historiador heterodoxo: "un pensador liberal dedicado de desmitificar las ilusiones liberales." El Economist es menos entusiasta: sus punzadas son certeras pero el paisaje que pinta del siglo es nebuloso. Tim Rutten en el Los Angeles Times apunta que el libro es como su autor: "fascinante, edificante y frustrante."
That ad is mentioned by Tony Judt in “Reappraisals,” his exhilarating new collection of essays, by way of another rebuke, this time to liberals who “acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy,” but then he is himself one of the latest adornments of that engaged tradition. A Londoner by origin and a New Yorker by adoption, Judt was educated at Cambridge, and is now a professor at New York University and director of its Remarque Institute. N.Y.U. is no ivory tower, as it turns out: in a memorable article not included here, he described looking downtown from his office window on 9/11, to see the 21st century begin. His original scholarly subject was modern France, which led Judt from studies of the French left to the excellent recent “Postwar,” a panoramic history of Europe since 1945, by way of his acidulated “Past Imperfect” on the Parisian intelligentsia in the postwar decade and, perhaps my favorite among his books, “The Burden of Responsibility,” essays on Léon Blum, Albert Camus and Raymond Aron. Like those heroes, Judt has increasingly spread his wings as a commentator on contemporary politics.
In “Reappraisals,” he looks back at the tragedy of Europe in the 20th century — although one should really say the four decades from the outbreak of World War I until the death of Stalin — and in particular at the Jewish tragedy. Judt writes informatively about Manès Sperber, tenderly about Primo Levi, enthusiastically about Hannah Arendt: an enthusiasm I wish I could share. Even apart from the fact that her supposed magnum opus, “The Origins of Totalitarianism” is, as Judt admits, “not a perfect book,” nor “particularly original,” that gifted writer had something missing. Arendt is clever and she is formidable, but her heart’s in the wrong place. Another survivor from the wreckage of Jewish Europe was Arthur Koestler, whom Judt defends from his detractors and who leads Judt on to the riveting question of Communism and its foes. He is generous toward Eric Hobsbawm, a fine historian to be sure, but someone whose own engagement has been not so much perverse as grotesque. In reply to Hobsbawm’s sneering words that “there are certain clubs,” meaning ex-Communists, “of which I would not wish to be a member,” Judt points out that it is precisely the members of those clubs — Jorge Semprún and Margarete Buber-Neumann as well as Silone, Camus, Sperber and Koestler — who have written some of the best accounts of their age. Although Judt rightly says that Hobsbawm is an excellent writer, he curiously adds that so are E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Christopher Hill, “his erstwhile companions in the British Communist Historians’ Group.” But Thompson, at any rate at his worst, was not only patronizing and insular but bombastic and garrulous, while Williams was a dreadful writer. The judgment is the odder coming from Judt, who writes admirably himself. In one judicious examination of this subject, Judt observes that European progressives have been better than their American counterparts at allowing “that there might really have existed a secret Communist underground” — and a real mortal, moral conflict, one could add. The Communist-turned-anti-Communist Ignazio Silone once told Palmiro Togliatti, the Italian Communist leader, that “the last battle” of the 20th century would be waged between the two camps they personified, and there is a great book to be written on this subject one day. If Judt doesn’t write it, one of the rest of us will have to. While gazing about contemporary Europe, Judt encounters a very striking recent phenomenon, a confection of nostalgia, commemoration, invented tradition, “heritage industry” and la mode rétro. He praises the marvelous seven volumes of “Les Lieux de Mémoire,” a collaborative work on national memory edited by the historian Pierre Nora, while perceptively seeing that this absorption with the “world we have lost” is a reaction to the breathtaking changes that have overtaken France since 1945, not to mention the fact that there is nothing very glorious or confident about French history since 1918, despite de Gaulle’s heroic efforts to prove otherwise. Then after crossing the Channel to the country where he grew up, Judt finds England awash with whimsical “heritage” — as opposed to things that actually work — epitomized by former mining villages Disneyfied into theme parks. Sharp-eyed as he is, political prejudice colors his account here. There is a long riff on the decayed state of British railways (à qui le dîtes-vous; tell me about it: some of us have to use them regularly), compared with French railways, so good that riding them is a pleasure in itself. But then Judt and I don’t pay French taxes, and he might have addressed the plausible argument that, at least in the British context, state subsidy of public transport — as of higher education and the arts — represents a net transfer of wealth from poor to rich. He displays an understandable contempt for Tony Blair (à qui le dîtes-vous again: some of us had to live under his government), although from the perspective of an impenitent social democrat. While Judt says that “Communism defiled and despoiled the radical heritage,” he could have added that the cause of even moderate British socialism was completely discredited by the failures of Labor governments in the 1960s and ’70s. And while Judt has few good words for Margaret Thatcher, he might try to see that she compares favorably with her epigone Blair at every point, not least in her far less servile attitude toward Washington. An essay on the “strange death of liberal America” wonders, perhaps with some exaggeration, why the liberal intelligentsia has had so little to say “about Iraq, about Lebanon or about recent reports of a planned attack on Iran.” He has in mind particularly the dread “liberal hawks,” whom he has also attacked on the New York Times Op-Ed page for the rhetorical cover they gave the Bush administration and its court (“In today’s America neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig leaf”). And yet Judt, while an opponent of the Iraq war, was himself an interventionist hawk over Kosovo. Although he tries to distinguish between them, he must have an inkling of the difficulty this poses for those like him. No very casuistical argument was needed to link the two, and it was neither surprising nor necessarily illogical that a bomber flight path was lighted up from Belgrade to Baghdad. Once the principle is accepted that we can attack other countries that have nasty governments but offer us no threat, where do you stop? “You don’t have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps,” Judt writes, and while it has certainly helped him as a historian, he has also made a very striking personal pilgrimage. In the 1960s he was an ardent young socialist-Zionist, spending time on a kibbutz and flying to Israel in her hour of need when the 1967 war began. He is now a caustic opponent of Israeli policy, and of American policy toward Israel also, even offering sympathetic words about the widely anathematized “Israel Lobby,” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Not only does Judt lament that the United States has suffered a catastrophic loss of international influence in recent years, thanks to “self-defeating and even irrational” conduct, in the Middle East above all; he says that the reflexive charge of anti-Semitism against critics of Israel, and of the American alliance with Israel, must ultimately be “bad for Jews — since it means that genuine anti-Semitism may also in time cease to be taken seriously, thanks to the Israel lobby’s abuse of the term.” Anyone who writes on this subject is asking for trouble (à qui ...), and Judt’s notably brave and forthright essays have brought him much obloquy. Yet whatever else may be said, he is unarguably right about one thing. The “historian of Opinion,” in Keynes’s phrase, cannot fail to see a huge “change of mood that proved lasting and with the consequences of which we are living still.” At the time of the 1967 war, it was possible for Israelis to bask in glory, and to cheer when Abba Eban said that “never before has Israel stood more honored and revered by the nations of the world.” Those words would be impossible to utter today, even if, as Judt observes, many Americans don’t seem to have caught up with the great shift of sentiment throughout the rest of the world. Looking back from our latest fin de siècle, the theme that stands out in Judt’s account is lost time, not in the Proustian sense but in Goethe’s: the moment that, once lost, Eternity will never give back. That is true of the West since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of Soviet Russia, years of “wasted opportunity and political incompetence on both sides of the Atlantic,” but true first of all of Israel, which after 1967 threw away a priceless chance for peace and for her own ultimate security. In one of his endnotes, Judt says that his essay on the 1967 war was his last appearance in The New Republic, from which he has since been excommunicated. Just a few months earlier, he had appeared in the same magazine with a ferocious assault on “Koba the Dread,” by Martin Amis (unofficially known in literary London as “Stalinbad” — the book in which Amis “says that Stalin was a bad man”). That evisceration was unkind, but not unfair. And it served as a reminder that, especially by comparison with the literary gentlemen and ladies — all the novelists, poets and playwrights with their preening political fatuities — historians have had a good record in this field. Few are better than Tony Judt, not only a historian of the first rank but (in a word we need an equivalent for) a politicologue who gives engagement a good name. Uno de los ensayos de Judt en Reappraisals es un estupendo retrato de Leszek Kolakowski. Ahí menciona el intercambio epistolar entre Edward Thompson y el filósofo polaco. Judt califica la respuesta de Kolakowski a la invectiva del marxista inglés como una demolición intelectual perfecta: la más fina en la historia del argumento político. Los archivos del Socialist Register nos permiten asomarnos a las dos cartas. De Thompson a Kolakowski; de Kolakowski a Thompson. La respuesta de Kolakowski también puede leerse en un libro reciente que lleva precisamente el título de la carta: Por qué tengo razón en todo. Lo publica en España la editorial Melusina. Tony Judt recoge en Reappraisals que tras la guerra fría llegó un optimismo iluso que proclamaba novedades en abundancia. Si la historia había llegado a su fin parecían innecesarios los recuerdos. Olvidamos por proyecto, no por amnesia. El historiador se pregunta si hemos aprendido algo. Concluye que, en lugar de huir del siglo XX, habría que regresar a él para aprender de nuevo lo elemental. Por ejemplo, que la guerra degrada a los ganadores tanto como a los perdedores. El libro de Judt ha recibido mucha atención crítica. John Gray celebra al historiador heterodoxo: "un pensador liberal dedicado de desmitificar las ilusiones liberales." El Economist es menos entusiasta: sus punzadas son certeras pero el paisaje que pinta del siglo es nebuloso. Tim Rutten en el Los Angeles Times apunta que el libro es como su autor: "fascinante, edificante y frustrante."
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