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Something is profoundly wrong with the way we think about how we should live today.
In Ill Fares The Land, Tony Judt, one of our leading historians and thinkers, reveals how we have arrived at our present dangerously confused moment. Judt masterfully crystallizes what we've all been feeling into a way to think our way into, and thus out of, our great collective dis-ease about the current state of things.
As the economic collapse of 2008 made clear, the social contract that defined postwar life in Europe and America - the guarantee of a basal level of security, stability and fairness -- is no longer guaranteed; in fact, it's no longer part of the common discourse. Judt offers the language we need to address our common needs, rejecting the nihilistic individualism of the far right and the debunked socialism of the past. To find a way forward, we must look to our not so distant past and to social democracy in action: to re-enshrining fairness over mere efficiency.
Distinctly absent from our national dialogue, social democrats believe that the state can play an enhanced role in our lives without threatening our liberties. Instead of placing blind faith in the market-as we have to our detriment for the past thirty years-social democrats entrust their fellow citizens and the state itself.
Ill Fares the Land challenges us to confront our societal ills and to shoulder responsibility for the world we live in. For hope remains. In reintroducing alternatives to the status quo, Judt reinvigorates our political conversation, providing the tools necessary to imagine a new form of governance, a new way of life.
Until a year ago, Tony Judt was a prolific historian of twentieth-century Europe and a frequent critic of American foreign policy. Then he was stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or "Lou Gehrig's disease"). As his mobility has dwindled, his thoughts have turned from scholarship and polemic to memoir and prophecy. A series of exquisite autobiographical essays have appeared in the New York Review of Books, revisiting his boyhood and adolescence in post-World War II England. Ill Fares the Land is a political valediction, a distillation of his career-long engagement with the vicissitudes of twentieth-century history and ideology.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
E.h. Koch
reviewed Ill Fares the Land on December 21, 2014
Ill Fares the Land
Yawn yawn. The world is a miserable mess, billionaires are greedy, politicians do nothing because the dogma of free markets and small government is running the show, pretending private sector booms aren't just cashing out years (decades) of careful public sector investment and development. Nod nod nod. I can't figure out why Judt thinks he's so original here. he must be hanging out with the wrong crowd.
He certainly isn't hanging out with the crowd I read anyway. Didn't Naomi Klein write a much less cringey (but still cringey) critique of 'identity politics' in No Logo? Seriously Tony, if you're going to complain about 'political correctness' 'relativism' 'excessive influence of special interests' 'narcissism' etc don't count on my vote. No matter how 'moral' the frustrated young folk you are addressing are in their approach to politics, they will have to do better than this. When you compare gated communities to African American Studies courses you are talking ahistorical assimilationist caca.
Early on, talking about the benefits of social democracy (for which he thanks Keynes, extensively), Judt states that people trust each other more in ethnically homogenous countries (the data he uses comes, I think, from Wilkinson and Pickett's book The Spirit Level) and those with 'little anxiety about immigration' I was a little concerned that he left that hanging, but I waited patiently for him to return to this point in his 'What is to be Done?' chapters. I waited and waited! And he didn't come back to it, so we have to conclude that diversity is the problem, and it's immigration that destroys trust. Careless. Or he really means that.
Oh the politicians of today. Pygmies! Not like Churchill!
I wish I was irresponsibly satirizing, but I'm not, just condensing what he actually said.
It gets my goat that I agree with him about many things. Yes, mixed economies work quite well. Yes, welfare is a good thing and governments need to stop stripping it away. Yes, the NHS is totally awesome. Yes it would be horrible if supermarkets were run by the state. Yes, Margaret Thatcher screwed us all. Too bloody right we need more economic equality.
This makes me think that I might be voting for one of those white guys who comment on blog posts and articles saying 'forget about race, it's all about class' or 'it's sad that you feel this way. We're all just human' *shudder*
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