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

by Tony Judt

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.