Quotes from Tony Judt

Solidarity was financed largely from the US and it was the US that gave the most insistent official encouragement to protesters in Berlin and elsewhere—once it was clear that they would probably win.

Not for the first time in international disputes over Germany, France was its own worst enemy.

The reason Vichy was acceptable to most French people after the defeat of 1940, for example, was not that it pleased them to live under a regime that persecuted Jews, but because Pétainist rule allowed the French to continue leading their lives in an illusion of security and normality and with minimum disruption. How the regime treated Jews was a matter of indifference: the Jews just hadn't mattered that much. And much the same was true in most other occupied lands.

by 1945 few people believed any longer in the magic of the market. This was an intellectual revolution.

tax farming is absurdly inefficient. In the first place, it discredits the state, represented in the popular mind by a grasping private profiteer. Secondly, it generates considerably less revenue than a well-administered system of government collection, if only because of the profit margin accruing to the private collector. And thirdly, you get disgruntled taxpayers.

More than anything else, the welfare states of the mid-20th century established the profound indecency of defining civic status as a function of economic good fortune.

Blair's new-look politics would not long survive the disastrous decision to embroil his country and his reputation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq—a move which merely reminded foreign observers that New Labour's Third Way was inseparably intertwined with the UK's reluctance to choose between Europe and the United States.

two world wars had habituated almost everyone to the inevitability of government intervention in daily life.

Poles died in World War II; proportionately lower than the death rate in parts of Ukraine or among Jews, but a terrible figure notwithstanding. Yet there was a difference. For Poles, it was difficult to survive under German occupation, but in principle you could. For Jews it was possible to survive under German occupation—but in principle you could not.

Contrary to a widespread assumption that has crept back into Anglo-American political jargon, few derive pleasure from handouts:

if politi-cians—however well-intentioned—were barred from planning, manipulating, or directing the affairs of their fellow citizens, then extremists of Right and Left alike would be kept at bay.

Socialism for social democrats, especially in Scandinavia, was a distributive concept. It was about making sure that wealth and assets were not disproportionately gathered into the hands of a privileged few. And this, as we have seen, was in essence a moral matter:

It is, quite simply, humiliating.

We are all the beneficiaries of those who went before us, as well as those who will care for us in old age or ill health.

the country's inter-war anti-Semitism). But if east Europeans paid less attention in retrospect to the plight of the Jews, it was not just because they were indifferent at the time or preoccupied with their own survival. It is because the Communists imposed enough suffering and injustice of their own to forge a whole new layer of resentments and memories.

The most obvious symptom of the change came in the form of 'planning'.

An older generation of free market economists used to point out that what is wrong with socialist planning is that it requires the sort of perfect knowledge (of present and future alike) that is never vouchsafed to ordinary mortals. They were right. But it transpires that the same is true for market theorists:

The Labour Party was unable to impose industrial order because its paymasters in the industrial unions preferred nineteenth-century style confrontations on the shop floor—which they stood a good chance of winning—to negotiated contracts signed in Downing Street that would bind their hands for years ahead.

Unsurprisingly, planning was most admired and advocated at the political extremes.

we have smuggled in a misleadingly 'ethical' vocabulary to bolster our economic arguments

These days, we take pride in being tough enough to inflict pain on others.

The intellectual case for planning was never very strong. Keynes, as we have seen, regarded economic planning much as he did pure market theory: in order to succeed, both required impossibly perfect data.

The late Ralf Dahrendorf, an Anglo-German political scientist well placed to appreciate the scale of the changes he had seen in his lifetime, wrote of those optimistic years that "[i]n many respects the social democratic consensus signifies the greatest progress which history has seen so far. Never before have so many people had so many life chances."12

Seen from the satellite countries, the Soviet version of recent history was palpably false; but for many Russians themselves it contained more than a grain of truth.