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

by Tony Judt

The harsh reality is that Jews, Jewish suffering and Jewish extermination were not matters of overwhelming concern to most Europeans (Jews and Nazis aside) of that time. The centrality that we now assign to the Holocaust, both as Jews and as humanitarians, is something that only emerged decades later.

sometimes the point really is not so much to change the world as to understand it.

it had always been the analytical Karl Marx, the political commentator rather than the revolutionary prognosticator, who had most appealed to me. If you asked me which one essay by Marx I would recommend to a student, both in order to appreciate Marx’s talents and grasp the central message, I think it would be The Eighteenth Brumaire, followed closely perhaps by The Class Struggles and The Civil War in France. Marx was a polemical commentator of genius, whatever the shortcomings of his broader theoretical speculations.

There’s a lovely essay by Koestler in The Trail of the Dinosaur called, “The Little Flirts of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.”

The fascists don’t really have concepts. They have attitudes.

It was also in those years that I read the best critique of Marxism ever published. At the time of the publication of Main Currents of Marxism, in 1979, I still knew little of Polish political or intellectual history, though I had heard of Leszek Kołakowski

Kołakowski’s perspective—that Marxism, especially in its heyday, merited intellectual attention but was bereft of political prospects or moral value—was

intensely disliked Atlanta: a gray zone of humidity, boredom, suburbia and isolation. Emory itself, perceived by its faculty as an oasis of culture and sophistication in the southern desert, seemed to me a sad and mediocre place: a view that I have not had occasion to revise, however unjust it may appear. A high point of my stay there was the visit of Eric Hobsbawm, who was attending a conference in Atlanta. We were probably both happy enough to enjoy one another’s company for a few hours in the alienating surroundings of Atlanta’s featureless downtown business district.

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.

The Poor Law of 1834 mandated work. To get relief, you had to go to the local workhouse, and work for a wage lower than that available on the open job market. The intention was to discourage people from taking advantage of poverty relief, and also to make very clear that there was something unworthy about being reduced to this condition. The Poor Law thus distinguished between the so-called deserving and undeserving poor, thereby creating moral categories that did not correspond to economic reality. And indeed it forced people into poverty, since they first had to exhaust their own resources before becoming eligible for public or local assistance. It thus exacerbated the very problem that it was ostensibly intended to treat. From very early on the new Poor Law was regarded as a blot on the face of English society. It stigmatized those whom capitalism had temporarily put out of commission through no fault of their own.

What binds Beveridge and Attlee together and links them eventually to reformers from very different backgrounds was an obsession with reforming the Poor Law.

The First World War greatly increased government expenditure, and also the model of government control of the economy, the government direction of labor, the government direction of raw materials, control of incoming and outgoing goods and so on. Moreover, the French tried to stabilize their rapidly tumbling currency and reduce public expenditure; the British went back on the gold standard in the mid-twenties and tried to deflate to overcome the postwar economic crisis. Elsewhere, even those countries which had moved quite far along in a direction of a social welfare state were constrained to keep benefits and payments under strict control. The levels attained shortly after the armistice were not to be exceeded, with only a few local exceptions, for two decades.

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.

To this Keynes added the argument that capitalism does not generate the social conditions necessary for its own sustenance.

Beveridge began from society rather than from the economy: there are certain social goods that only the state can provide and enforce—by legislation, regulation and enforced coordination. Keynes starts from very different concerns, but their approaches dovetail: whereas Beveridge devoted his career to alleviating the social consequences of economic distortion, Keynes spent much of his adult life theorizing the necessary economic circumstances in which Beveridge’s policies could be applied to optimal effect.

Keynes was a devastating critic of the gold standard long before countries began coming off it at the Ottawa conference. He saw that attaching themselves to a gold standard deprived states of the ability to devalue currencies as needed.

The neoclassical consensus was for government passivity in the wake of economic problems.

Friedrich Hayek was already at work on the case that he would most fully articulate in his 1945 book, The Road to Serfdom. In it, he argues that any attempts to intervene in the natural process of the market risk, and indeed, in one version of his account, are guaranteed to produce authoritarian political outcomes.

But when you set Hayek’s writing against Karl Popper’s work of the same period, a pattern begins to emerge. What you see is a conflation of two animosities: dislike for the overconfident social democratic urban planning of early 1920s Vienna, and distaste for the Christian Social corporatist models that replaced them on the national level following the reactionary coup of 1934.

Hayek is quite explicit on this count: if you begin with welfare policies of any sort—directing individuals, taxing for social ends, engineering the outcomes of market relationships—you will end up with Hitler. Not merely with social democratic housing projects or right-wing subsidies for “honest” winegrowers, but Hitler. Thus, rather than run such a risk, democracies should avoid all forms of intervention which distort the properly apolitical mechanisms of a market economy.

we should recall that Keynes’s General Theory was a theory of “employment, interest and money.” Unemployment was the preoccupation of the British and the Americans, and in continental Europe of the Belgians. But employment wasn’t actually the theoretical starting point for French or German writing—which was much more concerned with inflation. The way in which Keynes matters to European policy makers was less about employment per se than about theorizing the role of government in stabilizing economies by counter-cyclical measures, such as deficit spending during recession. This meant not only measures to keep people in jobs, but measures to keep currency stable, and to ensure that interest rates didn’t fluctuate wildly and destroy savings. So employment, which is central to English and American thought, is not a universal obsession on the continent. Stability is.

Employment thus returns to social policy as the measure of full participation in public affairs: if you don’t have a job, you aren’t quite a whole citizen.

And this was something that three generations of social and economic reformers from the 1910s to the 1960s strove mightily to get away from. Clinton reintroduced exactly that.