tony judt_ the last interview

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Judt: the last interview Prospect Magazine

/www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/07/tony-judt-interview/[2011-05-01 8:05:14]

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W eb exclu s iveTony Judt: the lastinterviewPETER JUKES 21st July 2010 Issue 173

Exc lus ive t o Prospect on l ine , the fu l l

ransc r i p t o f Pe te r Jukes 's i nte rv iew w i th

h is to r ian and au thor Tony J udt

Peter J ukes ( r igh t ) w i th J udt

(middle), 2007

Tony Judt d ied, surrounded by h is fam i ly ,

on the t he evening o f August 6 th , 2010. The

New York T imes obi tua ry can be read here .

Th is i s the fu l l t ranscr ip t o f Peter J ukes s

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BY PETER JUKES

Peter Jukes writes

for print, stage,

television, radio, and

now online

Tony Judt: a man of

his word

Peter Jukes

discusses history,

life and justice with

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n te rv iew w i th Tony J udtconduc t ed

ear lie r th is year v ia emai l , due t o t he

progress o f J ud t s mot or neurone d isease.

The fu ll tex t o f Juk es s por t ra i t o f Tony

Judt i s fea tured in the August i ssue of

Prospect, and c an be read onl ine here .Peter J ukes : Ill start with a confession. Before we

irst met 12 years ago at the Remarque Forum [a

conference Judt sponsored as professor of history at

New York University] a joint friend of ours sent me an

example of your worka chapter I think from your

1979 book Socialism in Provence 1871-1914. I must

admit my heart sank. Im sure it was compelling and

well documented, but it gave no indication of theiveliness and relevance of the discussion at that

Forum, nor of the range of your writing. I think you

must have been half way through your compendious

history of the whole of post-war Europe at the time.

So my question is: how did you move from the micro-

analysis of the French left between two wars to the

often global historical issues you address today?

Tony J ud t : Remember it was a long process. I

started work on my first French history book in 1969;

on Socialism in Provence in 1974; and on the essays

n Marxism and the French Left in 1978. Conversely,

my first non-academic publication, a review in the TLS,

did not come until the late 1980s, and it was not until

1993 that I published my first piece in the New York

Review. So thats a 25 year learning curve. Moreover,here was a transitional book: Past Imperfect. This was

real intellectual history, but it was also a political

ntervention and its often unclear even to me which

way I was leaning in any given chapter.

dont think that English historians of my generation or

he immediately preceding one were incapable of the

the late Tony Judt

a master of morally

charged rhetoric

Why Britain can't do

The Wire

The critically

acclaimed US

television drama

could not be made

here. We have

writing talent in

abundance, but its

output is controlled

by a stifling

monopolythe BBC.

Plus, an interview

with The Wire's

creator David Simon

Flaming for Obama

This year's

Democratic

primaries weren't just

fought on the

hustings and in the

television studios.

Some of the fiercest

battles took place in

the blogosphere

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bigger picture, whether in form or content. But there

was (no longer is) a deep prejudice against

popularization. Some people did it wellHobsbawm

or Trevelyanand many people did it badly; but there

was no academic reward for it. Recall that AJP Taylor,

a truly first-rate historian, diminished his reputation by

spending too much time on radio and TV shows, not tomention reviews in the Beaverbrook Press.

Popularizingmuch less venturing beyond ones

secure turfwas frowned upon for many years. I think

probably internalized the prohibition, even though I

wasand knew I wasamong the best speakers and

writers of my age cohort. I dont mean I was the best

historian, a quite different measure.

PJ : Was the training you had part of the problem here,

given that you took your degree and then your

doctorate in Cambridge, and then wrote from a

university position in France? Youve often regretted

he lack of public intellectuals in modern lifeis this

because of issues with modern academic systems?

TJ : The problem of dformation professionnelleis real

but mostly American. It would be suicide in the

American academy to show too early an interest

beyond your doctoral specialization: charges of

everything from charlatanry to ambition would be

evied and tenure denied. Ive seen this first-hand. This

s because the American graduate school universe

was created by Germans (refugees) and echoes many

of the worst as well as the best features of its model:

deep academic research, carefully limited range of

materials, engagement in internally-referential debates

and utter unconcern for the market. These are not all

bad qualitieswithout them we would not have had

some of the worlds greatest historical monographs.

But they inhibit people for decades from putting their

nose above a parapet. I have always loved sticking my

a month in Tripoli

made me think again

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history?

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decades kowtowing

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nose about a parapet, so long as I had a decent

weapon to hand. Thats partly an English trait, partly

an Oxbridge trait and probably mostly a recessive Judt

rait. John Dunn, my favorite Kings supervisor, once

described me as the silver-tongued orator: a barbed

compliment, since it suggested that I spoke before I

hought and seduced rather than convinced, but I like itall the same.

The shortage of public intellectuals (in the English-

speaking world) goes back to the decline of the written

media: the first TV intellectual was Foucault, who was

at home in both media, but his successors and

mitators know only the camera. This forces sound

bites upon even the most complex material: see

Schama, Ferguson e tutti quanti. Also, and

paradoxically: public intellectuals are best when they

are grounded in a particular language, culture, debate.

Thus Camus was French, Habermas is German, Sen

s Bengali, Orwell was deep English. This made their

cross-frontier ventures plausible, in the same way that

Havel or Michnik today have street cred because they

started out as courageous dissidents in a very

particular time and place. The opposite is the

ridiculous Slavoj Zizek: a global public intellectual

who is therefore of no particular interest in any one

place or on any one subject. If he is the future of public

ntellectuals, then they have no future.

PJ : This love for sticking your nose above the parapet:

s that what drew you to Israel in 1967, or Paris in

1968? Youve written you knew you wanted to be ahistorian from an early age: so what made you march

owards the sound of (water) cannons: the desire to be

an observer or a participant?

TJ : I am not sure I know the answer. I never thought

of Paris in 1968 as nose above the parapetif

anything, it was a rather conventional thing to do!

srael in 1967 was a bit different, but in that case I was

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Prize. Read his

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central Asian nation

of Karakalpakstan

here
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5/18



ollowing my ideological nose where it led, rather than

poking it up for the sake of it. Im not sure that I am

nearly as controversial or awkward as my reputation

suggests: I didnt even drop out of high school until I

had a place at Kings College, Cambridge.

That said, its true that periodically from the early1970s through the present I have published something

hat put the institutional or professional noses out of

oint. I think this comes from a mischievous disposition

already in evidence at primary school where I was in

constant trouble: a distaste for humbug, rules and

undeserving authority. It may also be a result of never

having been part of a school of historians but always

being something of a lone wolf. And, lastly, it wasclearly facilitated by early adoption into the Oxbridge

elite, which bought me status and security from which

o be a difficult boy.

PJ : Your work abjures the messianism of both the

right and the left. And your latest book, Ill Fares the

Land, emphasises this, explaining how the collapse of

Communism in 1989 and the Reagan/Thatcher

paradigm undermined all these narratives of a future

when history would end. In a way, its a classic tragic

vision. But somehow how, you rescue some kind

optimism out of thisespecially in regard to a revival

of social democracy. How do you square that?

TJ : I see what you mean about the tragic vision. But

you cant have a tragic vision in politicsnot if you

wish to intervene and convince (with the exception ofgrand turning points, from which one should not

generalize). What I am against is false optimism: the

notion either that things have to go well, or else that

hey tend to, or else that the default condition of

historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in

he long-run. I think that in order to sustain such irenic

visions one has to have been born at very particular

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exactly, does this

word mean?
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historical moments and in fortunate places. Just now I

hink we have very good grounds for pessimism. And

as you noted, Ive tried to write an intervention that

urns pessimism into a political program rather than adespairing sceptical dismissal of all possible

programs.

One of the very few things that I know I believe

strongly is that we must learn how to make a better

world out of usable pasts rather than dreaming of

nfinite futures. Its a very late-Enlightenment view that

says that the only way to make a better future is to

believe that the future will be better. Smarter people

han me used to believe very differently and I think it is

ime to listen to them once again.

PJ : Before we discuss Ill Fares the Landin more

detail, it seems to me that your decision to move to the

US in 1987 was a vital transition or self translation. Not

only did New York welcome intelligent pontification,

but it gave you the distance and perspectivenot tomention time and resourcesto complete your vast

book, Postwar, on modern European history.

TJ : All true: but we must not mix up causes and

consequences. My motives for leaving Oxford in 1987

were interwoven with personal stuff (girlfriend in

Stanford) and English politics: the horrible Thatcher

years and the beginnings of financial and bureaucratic

strangulation of higher education in the UKthe

catastrophic long-term consequences of which are

now becoming clear.

came to New York with no particular plans to stay

ong term. I was attracted by the French Institute at

NYU, but by the early 1990s I was already moving

away from French material. Moreover, I did not do any

Private view

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public intellectual stuff for at least five years: my first

New York Times piece was in 1990 I believe and my

irst NYRB essay in 1993. I nearly left the US on

various occasionsoffers from Oxford in 1993,

Chicago in 1994, Oxford again in 1999 and more

recently Princeton and EUI. But each time something

about the city and the wonderful flexibility of NYU keptme back.

agree on the resources: both academic and financial,

which made Postwarpossible. But above all it was the

Universitys willingness to let me travel and live abroad

or long periods which made the book feasible. I could

never have done that from Oxford. And yet, curiously,

NYC felt closer to Europe than Oxford itself: more

urban, more cosmopolitan, more international.

PJ : Yet for all that, it wasnt long before the moeurs of

US academia grated on you. Im thinking particularly of

your dislike of cultural studies and your rubbing up

against the political correctness of identity politics.

TJ : I always hated that crap: I left Berkeley for Oxford

n 1980 in part because of it. And things were worse a

decade later. But the great thing about my

ndependent status at NYUand above all the

ndependent status I insisted upon for my Institute and

ts activitieswas that even while the pollution was

rising all around us, we were free to do whatever we

wanted and ignore it. I could protect students and

colleagues from it, offer jobs to people who could

otherwise never find them because of it, and say

hings that no one else dared say. For a brief while, as

Humanities Dean here at NYU in the early 1990s, I

was even able to push money in unconventional

directions: medieval studies, minority language

earning (minority here meaning Slovenian, not

Cherokee), and above all build the countrys number

one philosophy department, a counter-cultural

achievement of which Im proud.


8/18



All that said, had it not been for the Remarque Institute

would certainly have gone back to Europe. But being

allowed to do everything I wanted and invite anyone I

wanted to say anything they wanted, I experienced

more freedom here as an academic than would have

been possible in any other country or perhaps even

university in the world. When I explained back in 2000

at a lunch in St Johns College Cambridge how

Remarque worked, how much cash we had and how

ree I was to spend it as I chose, you could see them

gagging

And then of course there was the NYRB.

PJ : And yet, for all your dislike of the personal being

political, it seems to me that this strong strand of

English moralism requires a notion of the personal

voice. Certainly, when it came to your controversial

writings for the NYRB from 2003 on the Israeli

Palestinian conflict, you partly stood up because you

knew it would be harder to impugn you on personal

grounds, given your background working as translator

or the Israeli Defence Force during the Six Day War in

1967.

TJ : But this is not about the personal being political.

This is invoking the personal to create space in which

o be political. But you are right that this is not

something that came easy to me. I used to avoid the

irst person and personal memoirs like the plague. But

t became clear that if I wanted to say unpopular things

n large public places, I needed street cred. BeingJewish is not enough. Being an ex-Zionist is not

enough. But being an ex-Zionist who wore the Israeli

army uniform (and has a pic of himself complete with

cutie and sub-machine gun): that helped. And in this

case the end justified the means. No one can shut me

up on this subject, so they are forced to resort to

clichs about self-hating Jews and the like: evidence


9/18



of failure.

All the same, it does irritate me when I am described

as a controversialist and commentator on Israel. I see

myself as first and above all a teacher of history; next

a writer of European history; next a commentator on

European affairs; next a public intellectual voice within

he American Left; and only then an occasional,

opportunistic participant in the pained American

discussion of the Jewish matter

PJ : I dont want to go about this at length, because it

does seem unfair that youre identified with this one

ssue. However, the controversy surrounding the one

state solution piece took a while to die down. Your op-

eds seemed to disappear from The New York Times,and you no longer wrote for The New Republic. This

was soon followed by the cancellation of a talk at the

Polish Consulate in 2006. I recall there were Rabbis

hreatening to picket your lectures with holocaust

survivors.

TJ : Again, all true. The rabbis of Riverdale

(approximately the Golders Green of New York) got

me banned from one talk and picketed another at a

ocal high school, with picket-liners dressed as

concentration camp inmates.

This ought to hurt a lot: some of my family

disappeared into the camps and a large part of my

childhood was side-shadowed by this memory. But all

can do is find it stupid. The influence of extremist

Rabbis and the Anti-Defamation League worries memuch more as a broader cultural phenomenon of (self-

censorship. As I have pointed out ad nauseam, I

dont lack platforms for my opinions so the problem is

not the silencing of Judt. It is the closing of the

Jewish mind here in America.

PJ : Around the same time, you also broke with

prevailing US opinion on the issue of Iraq, taking both


10/18



he Neocons to task, as well as their Liberal

apologists. Like Obama, you seemed to recognise it

was a dumb war of choice early on. However, if I recall

rightly, you wereunlike much of the US or European

Leftnot opposed to liberal interventions in Bosnia

and Kosovo.

TJ : In the 1990s, I was fully in favour of what is rather

azily called liberal interventionism. I prefer to think of

t as taking seriously the UN Charter mandating

protection of minorities extending into repressive

states rather than stopping at their borders. But I

recognize and always recognized the limitations.

Politics, especially international politics, is about what

s possible. You can intervene in Rwanda or Bosnia,

you cant in Chechnya (you in this case being the

benevolent West). The reasons are obvious. But the

charge of hypocrisywhy intervene only where you

can and not where you should?seems to me less

weighty than the charge of opportunism: using the

excuse that you cant do everything in order to do

nothing.

But just because I know that we could have intervenedeffectively and quickly in the Balkans or the Great

Lakes, it doesnt mean that I think there arent

problems. However, I see a huge difference between

sending in a couple of battalions of paratroops to

smash Serbian irregulars on the hills outside Sarajevo,

and inventing grounds for a pre-emptive war on an

Arab statewhose murderous chieftain was until very

recently our best friend in the region.

My objection to all my liberal friends who ran with the

raq hawks is that they were not making the case for

iberal interventionism but for exemplary war. On

Afghanistan, I took the view in 2001 that a rapid

response directed at a police-style operation to

capture Osama was both politically prudent and legally


11/18



ustifiable. The longer it went onthe more it became

a war and less a police operationthe less justifiable it

was. And, of course, extending it into Iraq discredited

he whole exercise.

On the general question: I dont believe that one

should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for

nternational political action. Thats what misled Adam

Michnik and Michael Ignatieff and others into saying

hat because they believed in truth and beauty and

rights for Poles and Czechs, they had to believe in

hem for Iraqis as well and therefore could not oppose

plans to liberate the latter. That isnt how the world

works. George Bushs motives were not those of his

ntellectual apologists, with the result that the latter

ose their autonomous ethical credibility and pollute

heir own pure purposes. Back in 1988, I wrote an

essay about The Dilemmas of Dissidence in which I

said that Havel and his friends were perfectly adapted

o moral opposition under conditions of political

mpotence (late Communism); but that in later years,

hey would need to understand the very different terms

n which political calculations get made in messy liberal

worlds. They failed to do this, and their embarrassing

subservience to Dick Cheney was the result.

Where does that leave me? Trying, as usual, to square

general truths with particular circumstances. Thats the

difference between pure ethics and political theory; but

t isnt resolved by simply abandoning the tension and

sliding to one end of the pole.

PJ : Isnt there a danger here that the contemporary

historian gets pulled into cursory judgments and

cloudy polemics. For example, while your diagnosis of

he ideological dangers of Clintons triangulation or

Blairs New Labour have been vindicated over the

years, you seem to already despair of the Obama

administration in Ill Fares the Land. Isnt itmuch like

he French Revolution according to Mao/Ho Chi Minh


12/18



a bit early to tell?

TJ : Excuse me, but it was Zhou Enlai who said that!

Okay: anyone who opens his mouth in the present

ense risks being proven wrong in retrospect. And of

course I am free to be right or wrong about Obama

depending upon how many years in the future you pick

or your point of reference.

But: it was a distinctive quality of the Obama campaign

hat it offered not just particular legislation or

programs, but a radical recasting of the mood of

politics in a democracy dangerously detached from its

own founding virtues. His complete failure to vindicate

hat promiseindeed, his abandoning of nearly all the

erms of innovative political approach that got himelectedis far more serious and devastating than his

particular failure to follow through on health policy, the

Middle East, etc. He has raised and dashed hopes in a

way that no one has done here for two generations.

That seems to me grounds for despair. What would

you have me say? That he may yet do better? That he

nherited a tough situation? That all politics is the art of

compromise? All true. And all secondary to the scaleof lost hopes.

PJ : The scale of lost hopes could be an apt

description of Ill Fares the Land, which must be your

most political book to date: an impassioned attempt to

revive the exhausted language of social democracy

made all the more urgent, it seems to me, by two

extraordinary circumstances. The most obvious is the

credit crunch of 2008. But the second extraordinary

hing is the personal circumstance under which you

made this intervention. Because of the sudden onset

and fast advance of Lou Gehrigs disease, it must

have taken an enormous act of will to imagine,

mentally compose and then dictate this book.

TJ : I suppose so, though in retrospect things always


13/18



seem tidier. Actually, what happened was that I was

planning a sort of valedictory seminar talk at my own

nstitute last autumn, precisely on the lines of what

became the lecture/book. The Dean of NYU talked me

nto doing it as a public lecture, which I undertook as a

sort of personal and intellectual challenge: something

between an effort of will and a determination to provehat what I had been saying about this diseasethat it

doesnt affect your mindwas externally verifiable.

The next stage came when the New York Review

offered to publish a polished version of the recorded

ecture and various people, beginning with my agent,

urged me to think of it as a book. Initially I declined,

put off by the prospect of the work. Then I began to

see a shapeand, of course, another challenge. The

atter proved both huge and quite manageable: the bit

hat I thought would be harddictating a whole book

rom coldbecame surprisingly familiar thanks to a

antastic assistant; the organization took shape thanks

o nocturnal mental exercises as I have described. I

suppose the book would have been a little tighter and

maybe more methodologically consequential if I had

done it the old way. But it would surely have lacked the

energy and anger.

PJ : The other thing I notice about Ill Fares the Landis

a sense of a generational handing over. The book

often feels like a primer for thoselike your sonsin

heir teens, who have little idea of the Keynesian post-

war consensus (i.e. the state saves capitalism) that

obtained both in Western Europe and the US in thehirty years after World War II. You then follow the

neo-liberal dismantlement of those ideas of

ntervention, basically from the late 1970s onwards,

and the social, political and even historical costs of

his, especially in the former communist countries of

Eastern and Central Europe.

TJ : Yes. I was conscious of this: having had to back-


14/18



and-fill for my sons Daniel and Nicholas when

explaining aspects of my lecture after the fact. And it

really is the case that for the last decade on and off I

have been talking these things through with students

or whom all of that is, if not completely news, then

certainly ancient history. And I do think that one of the

original aspects of the book is my insistence on theback to the future aspect: that sometimes the best

uture entails recovering good pasts.

PJ : But theres one question I have about this

generational handing over. It was your generation, the

baby boomers, the children of the 1960s, who felt the

real benefit of social democratic security who also

oversaw its dismantling. One could say the last thirty

years have been accompanied by the grating sound of

a whole generation pulling up the ladder behind them.

feel the anger, range of reference and intelligence in

your response to this. But Im not sure I detect an

acknowledgement of any complicity.

TJ : Okay, okay. But I do say, again and again, that we

1960s people threw it away. Yes, the sound of a whole

generation pulling up the ladder is not inaudible to meeither, but I dont feel complicit. I dont recall ever

being swept into the vortex of the me generation, nor

did I ever believe that the personal is political, much

ess that we can afford to throw away the security

blankets of the postwar years and just indulge.

God knows I can think of enough things that I did

wrong both personally and as part of my cohort. But I

never abandoned what I thought of as the benefits of

he postwar consensus in favour of sectional

advantage. Actually, I was always a bit awkward in this

as other respects. As you know, I was against root-

and-branch school comprehensivization on the

grounds that the postwar arrangements combining

meritocracy with opportunity, while imperfect and


15/18



ogically indefensible, were better than the radical

schemes on offer which have trashed much of the

pedagogical gains of the early postwar decades.

n the same way, I never liked New Labour

something about the smug enthusiasm for success

and wealth and public celebrity grated on my austerity-

raised postwar personality. I recall a dinner party back

n 1998 I believe, full of New Labourites and the more

socially fashionable liberals. I hated it and felt old and

Michael Footish. At the same time, the Labour party of

Tony Benn always seemed provincial and deluded to

me, for the obvious reasons. So Im just an awkward

customer, I guess.

PJ : You said earlier that you tended to avoid the firstperson in your writing. But in the last few months that

nhibition has gone and youve published some very

personal pieces in the NYRB, about Revolution, Girls,

Cars, Trains, even Putney. These arent memoirs in

he traditional sense of preserving individual identity for

uture record. Indeed, they feel more like something

else: where in the awful nocturnal immobility of the

night you use your memory to make new connections,connections so dense, rich, often comic, sometimes

ragic, that they go beyond narrative to something

almost poetic.

TJ : Thanks! It really doesnt always feel like that, but

ooking back I see a few good phrases

PJ : I know you dont write these in the traditional way,

but compose them in your head using the classic arsmemoriain the long empty hours of the night, and then

dictate them in the morning. My sense is that these are

not elegiacsetting yourself down for posterityor

angry ravings against the dying of the light, but a

matter of more urgent personal survival: making sense

of things, now, for you,

TJ : Yes. Certainly not Dylan Thomas. More a sense


16/18



hat I see better now than I could have done before the

shape of all the little wholes of my life, even though I

am seeing them now from the perspective of one very

arge incomplete. I dont think I enjoyed living as much

as I should have donetoo busy thinking about it all

he time. So now I am enjoying thinking about it (which

s a different sort of thinking) and getting as close toenjoying it in the moment as retrieved memory will

permit.

do, though, note an occasional temptation to slip into

analytical moralizing via past memoryanother

dformation professionnelle. I dont altogether resist it,

ust try to keep it under control. Its also, of course, my

way of making sense of things. Not the only possible

wayperhaps not even the only way that I might once

have gone (in school I was better at literature than

history and was urged by various interested parties to

go in that direction, but something pulled me back).

PJ : Now that youve finished the book, will the disease

allow you to compose more?

TJ : In one sense, yes. Its getting a little harder to

dictate, but only because of the irritating secondary

symptoms: phlegm mostly. But if I wanted to write

something, I certainly could. What will be an issue will

be energy and concentration versus alternative claims

upon them (e.g. boys); and also perhaps the difficulty

of writing non-urgent texts, where huge bursts of

mental energy are less forthcoming and sustained

concentration is the problem. I truly dont yet know the

answer.

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Constance Ellis says:FEBRUARY 10, 2011 AT 11:36 PM

am a late reader of this superb interview. Peter, what

a sensitive and

preceptive job! You got Tony at his best in the face of

dire circumstances.

Your description of his memoire pieces in NYRB is

spot on. I am grateful that Tony had the benefit of your

admiration and your friendship.

Vive le Forum!

Connie Ellis
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