Tony Judt, Ave Atque Vale

I note with sorrow the passing of historian Tony Judt at the far too early age of 62.  He was a tremendous writer and historian, shrewd and penetrating.  I did not share his social democratic politics, and less still his disdain for American conservatism, or his views on American foreign policy or Israel, sure, but I like to think we shared the broadest liberal view.

Of his many writings, the one that impacted me most was his magisterial history, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin 2005).  I keep it in a shelf near my desk, and dip into it occasionally as an aside; I first read it while in Western Europe for a few months, and it helped more than just about anything else for making sense of the contemporary Western European sensibility.  Part of the book’s shrewdness is Judt’s ability to combine a historian’s keen synthetic abilities with a personal, and yet never self-indulgent, judgment borne of the experience of being part of the demographic he describes.  His personal experience in that book served as a valued, gently skeptical interpretive check on the larger data with which he worked as historian.   I have never forgotten a remark made entirely in passing about the Western European baby boom of the 1950s – something like, the birth rate owed as much to a combination of a sense of optimism about the future and free milk as to anything else.

Actually, it it hard to say whether that work impacted me as much as his two earlier studies of French intellectuals, particularly The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (U Chicago 1998); call it a toss-up.  This is because I have regarded myself as something like an amalgam disciple of Camus and Aron – never Sartre – ever since I read The Rebel just out of high school; this is the sense I mean of a “liberal” in the broadest meaning.  Camus offers not so much a political doctrine, or a coherent philosophy, as a sensibility – the sensibility of moderation, a certain idea of political humility, but at the same time always asserting the core content of liberalism as being right and worth defending against its many enemies.  As for Aron, well, the essential value of defending that liberal core is not up for grabs with him; what matters is the practical realism of how to do it.  He offers a form of humanist political realism that American realists would do well to re-examine.

(I never met Tony Judt, but I once had a fascinating conversation that touched on him.  One of my French intellectual friends once remarked that no one was more deeply American in outlook than I – exceptionalism and all – but rarely had he met anyone who got there by such … French, but weirdly French, paths.  I responded that Tony Judt, though not American and certainly not a conservative, seemed somewhat the same, and I had drunk from the well of Judt’s writing on French intellectuals in getting where I had got.  To which the reply – this from a leading editor in Paris not long after 9/11:  “Ah, Judt!  He is serious and his books are followed.  But Camus and Aron long overtake Sartre in France; only among passe chic radical American academics is it even close.  Tell me, who are your French writerly heroes?”

Me:  Camus, Aron, Stendhal, Rene Char, and, guilty pleasures, Blaise Cendrars.  Him (Gallic shrug from self-described radical leftwing-Gaullist):  “There you have it – excepting Aron, and despite Camus’ growing appeal, this is about as unrepresentative a list of French writers as anyone could come up with.  Including your beloved Stendhal – Flaubert, yes, Stendhal not really, not truly, and didn’t you write something scandalously flattering about Dominique Aury when she died?  [Ans: yes.]  Please leave pop theorizing to Bernard-Henri Levy.”)

That conversation went on for a long time.  I was struck by the fact that Judt was closely read on these subjects in Paris, by academics and intellectuals.  They did not think him merely a non-French-intellectual carrying the word abroad; they thought of his writings as part of, and important intervention in, the conversation within France that was carrying the weight of intellectual moralism about politics toward Camus and Aron.  That is a high intellectual honor.  Tony Judt had something important to say about French intellectuals and the 20th century, not just to people like me, but also in conversation with today’s intellectuals in France.  Likewise something important to say about how the Western Europe of today came about following 1945.  Across all of it, something about humanism and the good liberal society.  Ave atque vale.

(I’m closing this to comments; look, I do not agree with or, in a stronger sense, approve of the late Tony Judt’s views on Israel or the Jews, but I do not think what was filtering in here to be necessary or acceptable in expression.)

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