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

by Tony Judt

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.

This emerges very clearly when one reads survivor testimonies from, e.g., Ukraine or Belarus: when Jews recall what it was that gave them away as Jews—beyond incontrovertible physical markers such as circumcision—they typically list the things that they (we) could simply not do, because they lived in a hermetically separated social space. Jews did not know the Lord’s Prayer; it was a rare Jew in this part of the world who could saddle a horse or plough a field. Jews who did survive were characteristically from that minority within the community who for some chance reason knew about such things.

Odd as it may sound today, democracy was a catastrophe for Jews, who thrived in liberal autocracies:

Arendt is writing in terms that reflect a Weberian grasp of the modern world: a universe of states governed by administrative bureaucracies themselves subdivided into very small units where decisions and choices are exercised by, so to speak, individual non-initiative. Inaction, in such an institutional environment, becomes action; the absence of active choice substitutes for choice itself, and so forth.

Since this shift in perspective occurred in exactly the decade when “victimhood” was taking center stage in historical and political debates across the West, we should not be surprised that questions of comparative suffering, apology and commemoration—familiar from American identity politics to the South African truth commissions—have their place in German conversations as well.

It 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.

The notion that everything is or else it isn’t—that everything is either one thing or another but cannot be both at the same time, that if something (e.g., torture) is bad then it cannot be dialectically rendered good by virtue of its results: this is and always was an un-Marxist thought and was duly castigated, as you know, as “Revisionism.”

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.

The Berlinian lesson most pertinent to daily political analysis and debate is the reminder that all political choices entail real and unavoidable costs.

Any decision—including any right decision—entails forgoing certain options: depriving yourself of the power to do certain things, some of which might well have been worth doing. In short, there are choices which we are right to make but which implicitly involve rejecting other choices whose virtues it would be a mistake to deny.

Marx’s point in The Eighteenth Brumaire: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”

What made the West a better place, in short, were its forms of government, law, deliberation, regulation and education. Taken together, over time, these formed an implicit pact between society and the state. The former would concede to the state a certain level of intervention, constrained by law and habit; the state, in turn, would allow society a large measure of autonomy bounded by respect for the institutions of the state.

This point of view captures and illustrates an illusion that was once widespread in the West as well: the purest form, the morally purest form of capitalism is basically artisanal production., i.e., that the important quality of a brewer is that he makes good beer. Whereas of course in capitalism, the important quality of a brewer is that he sells lots of bottles of beer.

To put it no finer, the state recycles the profits of capitalism in its less appealing forms to sustain the more aesthetically appealing marginal entrepreneurs.

It was a common feature of the closed societies of the twentieth century, whether of Left or Right, that they manipulated history. Rigging the past is the oldest form of knowledge control: if you have power over the interpretation of what went before (or can simply lie about it), the present and the future are at your disposal. So it is simple democratic prudence to ensure that the citizenry are historically informed.

American public policy on crucial areas of national interest is hostage to a single, isolated instance of human history—often of marginal relevance, always selectively invoked. You asked me what was the downside of this emphasis on the Holocaust? That is the downside.

Let’s begin with the Dreyfus Affair, with the entrance of the intellectual into modern politics, on a question of what you call smaller truth: whether or not a man betrayed his country. A French army officer of Jewish origins was falsely accused of treason, and defended by a coalition of French intellectuals. This moment, January 1898 in Paris when the novelist Émile Zola published his famous letter “J’accuse,” is seen as the beginning of the history of the political intellectual.

The Dreyfusards were trying to tell the truth, which is truthfulness, rather than acknowledging higher truths, as their opponents wanted them to. By “higher truths,” they meant that France comes first, or that the army must not be insulted, or that the collective purpose trumps individual interests. This distinction is what lies behind Zola’s letter: the point is simply to tell it as it is, rather than to find out what the higher truth is and then adhere to it.

The idea of preemptive war fails the first Kantian test, which is to act as though what you were doing creates a rule.

If you look at the history of nations that maximized the virtues that we associate with democracy, you notice that what came first was constitutionality, rule of law and the separation of powers. Democracy almost always came last.

Democracy is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a good, open society. I don’t want to come across as excessively skeptical about democracy: as someone having a preference for the aristocratic, liberal societies of the nineteenth century. But I do want to make an (Isaiah) Berlinian point. We simply have to acknowledge that some earlier non-democratic societies were in certain respects better than later democracies.

This is one of the unfortunate prices we pay for the 1960s: the loss of faith in truth as a sufficient counter to lies. It’s not enough to say: she’s not telling the truth; you have to say: she’s lying because she is connected to an arms manufacturing firm. Or she’s lying because her politics are tied to the Zionist lobby, or she’s lying because she has a larger plan that she doesn’t wish to reveal. What’s wrong with her, in short, is not that she lies: everyone lies. Her problem is that she’s badly motivated.

The prudential consideration is that of saving capitalism from itself, or from the enemies that it generates. How do you stop capitalism from creating an angry, impoverished, resentful lower class that becomes a source of division or decline? The moral consideration concerned what was once called the condition of the working class. How could workers and their families be helped to live decently without damaging the industry that gave them their means of subsistence?

Over time he came to the position that the default condition of a capitalist economy could not be understood in the absence of instability and the inevitably accompanying inefficiencies. The classical economic assumption, that equilibrium and rational outcomes were the norm, instability and unpredictability the exception, were now reversed. Moreover, in Keynes’s emerging theory, whatever it was that caused instability could not be addressed from within a theory which was unable to take that instability into account. The basic innovation here is comparable to the Gödelian paradox: as we might put it today, you cannot expect systems to resolve themselves without intervention. Thus, not only do markets not self-regulate according to a hypothetically invisible hand, they actually accumulate self-destructive distortions over time.

Smith argued that capitalism does not in itself generate the values that make its success possible; it inherits them from the pre-capitalist or non-capitalist world, or else borrows them (so to speak) from the language of religion or ethics. Values such as trust, faith, belief in the reliability of contracts, assumptions that the future will keep faith with past commitments and so on have nothing to do with the logic of markets per se, but they are necessary for their functioning. To this Keynes added the argument that capitalism does not generate the social conditions necessary for its own sustenance.

The city is the place where it’s logistically easiest for the state to distribute resources. And the further away from the city you go, the more difficult and expensive it becomes for the state to act, which means that the people who think that they get the least are in fact getting the most. The places, geographically, where people are most disinclined to pay taxes are the ones that are on the dole from the federal government.

But I do think that it is a particular byproduct of our contemporary cult of privatization: the sense that what is private, what is paid for, is somehow better for just that reason. This is an inversion of a common assumption in the first two thirds of the century, certainly the middle fifty years from the 1930s to the 1980s: that certain goods could only be properly provided on a collective or public basis and were all the better for it.

Now the notion of taxing all to benefit some—or indeed some to benefit all—is absent from the core calculations of American social policy makers. The consequences are clear in the confused reasoning of even the best-intentioned reformers. Take, for example, the feminist line on child care and other facilities from which women might benefit. Rather than suppose that the wider point of the exercise is to revise taxation and social services in such a way as to benefit all, the mainstream feminist position is to seek legislation designed exclusively to advantage women.

And then there’s also the kind of nationalism which says: I pay very few taxes although I’m very rich, and you pay taxes although you’re working class, and I am driven to work and you take the bus, and we have very little to talk about—and in any case we never meet. But when something very bad happens, I’m going to find a good patriotic argument why you need to protect my interests and why your children, although not mine, need to kill and die.

The Chinese government today is removing itself from economic life except at strategic levels, on the grounds that maximum economic activity of a certain kind is clearly beneficial in the short run to China and that regulating it other than for the purposes of keeping out competition would not be in anyone’s interests. At the same time it is an authoritarian state: censorious and repressive. It is an unfree capitalist society. The United States is not an unfree capitalist society, but the ways in which Americans conceive of the things they would allow and the things they would not allow point in a rather similar direction.

In today’s increasingly open world, in which neither governments nor individuals can guarantee themselves against competition or threat, security is fast becoming a social good in its own right.

My own sense is that for much of the century we were engaged in implicit or explicit debates over the rise of the state. What sort of state did free people want? What were they willing to pay for it and what purposes did they wish it to serve?

In this perspective, the great victors of the twentieth century were the nineteenth-century liberals whose successors created the welfare state in all its protean forms. They achieved something which, as late as the 1930s, seemed almost inconceivable: they forged strong, high-taxing and actively interventionist democratic and constitutional states which could encompass complex mass societies without resorting to violence or repression.

If we look at the history of the past two decades we see something quite different: a story of American sociological and economic stagnation camouflaged by extraordinary opportunities for a tiny minority, and which therefore average out as an appearance of continuing growth.