Thinking the Twentieth Century: Intellectuals and Politics in the Twentieth Century

by Tony Judt

Wisdom seems to come from being both an insider and an outsider, from passing through the inside with eyes and ears wide open and returning to the outside to think and to write.

The intellectuals who contributed to the east European revolutions of 1989, people such as Adam Michnik and Václav Havel, were concerned with living in truth. What does this mean? Much of this book, as a history of intellectuals and politics, is concerned with the difference between the big truths, the beliefs about great causes and final ends which seem to require mendacity and sacrifice from time to time, and the small truths, the facts as they can be discovered.

The truth of authenticity is different from the truth of honesty.

To be authentic is to live as one wishes others to live; to be honest is to admit that this is impossible.

Arendt goes on to claim that another characteristic of modern society is the paradox of distributed responsibility: bureaucracy dilutes and obscures individual moral responsibility, rendering it invisible and thus producing Eichmann and, with Eichmann, Auschwitz.

not only are we uncomfortable with notions of collective responsibility or guilt, but we require some evidence of intention and action in order to arrange to our satisfaction issues of guilt and innocence. But legal and even ethical criteria do not exhaust the terms available to us for historical explanation. And they certainly provide insufficient purchase for an account of how and why otherwise nondescript persons, undertaking decidedly nondescript actions (like the management of train schedules) with untroubled consciences, can yet produce very great evil.

is one thing to say that I am willing to suffer now for an unknowable but possibly better future. It is quite another to authorize the suffering of others in the name of that same unverifiable hypothesis. This, in my view, is the intellectual sin of the century: passing judgment on the fate of others in the name of their future as you see it, a future in which you may have no investment, but concerning which you claim exclusive and perfect information.

By analogy with a medieval or early modern Christian religious view of the world, what really matters is your salvation. If I am a believer I should care more about your mortal soul than I should care about your preferences, I should try to save you. Even if that means torturing you, even if that means, in the end, killing you; if I could save your soul, I would have done not only the right thing but also that which it is self-evident that I should do. That’s a style of reasoning from which liberalism really does separate itself. That is, it takes people’s purposes as emerging from them individually and as being empirically discernable to others and binding upon them. It was Hegelianism that introduced into Marx’s thought the discernability of the deeper purpose and meaning of things, and thence into the Leninist understanding (such as it was) of the Marxist heritage.

In this way, the ultimate purposes of history—attained and understood in the light of the Revolution—became homologous with the immortal soul: to be saved at any price. This, then, was about more than just faith or belief in a trivial sense. For decades, it ascribed to “revolution” a mystery and meaning that could and did justify all sacrifices—especially those of others and the bloodier the better.

In any event, the kind of truth that a believer was seeking was not testable by reference to contemporary evidence but only to future outcomes. It was always about believing in a future omelet that would justify an infinite number of broken eggs in the present. If you ceased to believe, then you were not simply abandoning a piece of social data which you had apparently misread hitherto; you were abandoning a story that could alone justify any data one wished so long as the future payoff was guaranteed.

this incorporation of Jews into the meaning of European history was only possible precisely because they were gone. On the scale of what once was, there really are not many Jews in Europe, and very few who would contest their role in Europe’s new mnemonic ethics. Nor, come to that, are there many Jews left to make a significant contribution to European intellectual or cultural life, at least not in the way they used to before 1938. In fact, such Jews as there are in Europe today constitute a contradiction: if the message that the Jewish people have left behind required their destruction and expulsion, their presence only tends to confuse matters. This leads to a positive—but only conditionally positive—European attitude towards Israel. The meaning of the State of Israel for Europeans is bound up with the Holocaust: it points to a lost messiah from whose legacy we have at least been able to draw a new, secular morality. But the actually existing Jews in Israel disrupt this narrative. They cause trouble. It would be better—so goes this thinking—if they did not cause so much trouble and allow us Europeans to interpret them in peace—hence the focus upon Israel’s misdemeanors among European commentators. Here, as you may see, I am defending Israel.

in your Christian version of Jewish history, Jews—Christ-like—can only truly win when (or rather, after) they lose. If they appear to be victorious, to be gaining their ends (at someone else’s expense) there is a problem. But this otherwise elegant European appropriation of someone else’s story for quite other purposes raises complications. The first of these, as you rightly note, is that Israel is there. This is rather as though—allow me to offend you—Jesus Christ had been reincarnated as a rather venal but otherwise talented version of his former self: installed in a Jerusalem café, saying much the same things as he always used to and making his erstwhile persecutors feel guilty for crucifying him—even as they resent him deeply for reminding them of it. But think what that would mean. It would suggest that within short order—a mere generation or two—the uncomfortable recollection of Jesus’ suffering would be altogether effaced by the irritation aroused by his endless invocation of it.