Quotes from Tony Judt

No basta, a fin de cuentas, con «matar al padre»: también es preciso comprenderlo. De lo contrario, en el peor de los casos, uno se arriesga a repetir sus mismos errores. Salvo

This cohort of politicians have in common the enthusiasm that they fail to inspire in the electors of their respective countries. They do not seem to believe very firmly in any coherent set of principles or policies;

Beginning with a handful of outstanding intellectual refugees from interwar Europe, we pass through two generations of academic economists intent on re-configuring their discipline … and arrive at the banking, mortgage, private finance and hedge fund scandals of recent years.

They convey neither conviction nor authority.

The Soviet Party-State acquired a new foundation myth: the Great Patriotic War.

Convinced that there is little they can do, they do little.

re-surfaced.

we lose faith not just in parliamentarians and congressmen, but in Parliament and Congress themselves.

Eugenics—the 'science' of racial improvement—was more than an Edwardian-era fad, like vegetarianism or rambling (though it often appealed to the same constituencies).

In our political as in our economic lives, we have become consumers: choosing from a broad gamut of competing objectives, we find it hard to imagine ways or reasons to combine these into a coherent whole. We must do better than this.

had brought Stalin credibility and influence, in the counsels of governments and on the streets.

Silence over Europe's recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future. Today - in the wake of painful public debates in almost every other European country - it seems somehow fitting (and in any case unavoidable) that Germans, too, should at last feel able openly to question the canons of well intentioned official memory.

After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite [to that of WWI], boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.

one were seeking a symbolic moment when this transformation was accomplished, a hinge on which post-war Europe's self-understanding turned, it came in Paris on December 28th 1973 with the first Western publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. Reviewing the English translation in the Guardian, W. L. Webb wrote 'To live now and not to know this work is to be a kind of historical fool, missing a crucial part of the consciousness of the age.

The older generation of politicians was deaf to their appeals: to many on the conservative Right and Center state intervention in the economy was still abhorrent, while on the socialist Left it was generally believed that only a post-revolutionary society could plan its economic affairs rationally.

La Primera Guerra Mundial destruyó la vieja Europa; la Segunda Guerra Mundial generó las condiciones para una nueva.

Few—very few—graduates before the mid-'70s sought out a 'business' education;

Moreover, a social service provided by a private company does not present itself as a collective good to which all citizens have a right.

Capitalism, as it had emerged in the Atlantic world and Western Europe over the course of four centuries, was accompanied by laws, institutions, regulations and practices upon which it was critically dependent for its operation and its legitimacy. In many post-Communist countries such laws and institutions were quite unknown—and dangerously underestimated by neophyte free-marketers there.

This leveling process, whereby the native population of central and Eastern Europe took the place of the banished minorities, was Hitler's most enduring contribution to European social history.

The more equal a society, the greater the trust. And it is not just a question of income: where people have similar lives and similar prospects, it is likely that what we might call their 'moral outlook' is also shared.

And few can deny that welfarism, taken to extremes, carries a whiff of do as you're told!: there were moments in postwar Scandinavia when the enthusiasm for eugenics and social efficiency suggested not just a certain insensitivity to recent history but also to the natural human desire for autonomy and independence.

What we have been watching is the steady shift of public responsibility onto the private sector to no discernible collective advantage.

By the early '70s it would have appeared unthinkable to contemplate unraveling the social services, welfare provisions, state-funded cultural and educational resources and much else that people had come to take for granted.