Tony Judt
Tony Judt
Tony Robert Judt, FBA was a British historian, essayist, and university professor who specialized in European history. Judt moved to New York and served as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University, and Director of NYU's Erich Maria Remarque Institute. He was a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. In 1996 Judt was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 a corresponding Fellow of the...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth2 January 1948
I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all.
I started work on my first French history book in 1969; on 'Socialism in Provence' in 1974; and on the essays in Marxism and the French Left in 1978. Conversely, my first non-academic publication, a review in the 'TLS', did not come until the late 1980s, and it was not until 1993 that I published my first piece in the 'New York Review.'
Reality is a powerful solvent.
American social arrangements, economic arrangements, the degree of inequality in American life, the relatively small role played by the government in American public life and so forth, compares to exactly the opposite conditions in most of the European societies.
The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them.
Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.
My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
At a certain point, to remain slightly tangential to wherever I was became a way of 'being Tony': by not being anything that everyone else was.
We need to learn... how war brutalises and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonise our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance.
Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
Love, it seems to me, is the condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.
After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck. To fall prey to a motor neuron disease is surely to have offended the Gods at some point, and there is nothing more to be said. But if you must suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked head...
Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.