Quotes from Tony Judt

Since anti-Communists ran the gamut from Trotskyists to neo-Fascists, critics of the USSR frequently found themselves sharing a platform or a petition with someone whose politics in other respects they abhorred. Such unholy alliances were a prime target for Soviet polemic and it was sometimes difficult to persuade liberal critics of Communism to voice their opinions in public for fear of being tarred with the brush of reaction.

Keynes's warning on this matter: "[i]t is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the transition.

A social democracy of fear is something to fight for. To abandon the labors of a century is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come. It would be pleasing—but misleading—to report that social democracy, or something like it, represents the future that we would paint for ourselves in an ideal world. It does not even represent the ideal past. But among the options available to us in the present, it is better than anything else to hand.

Take humiliation: what if we treated it as an economic cost, a charge to society? What if we decided to 'quantify' the harm done when people are shamed by their fellow citizens as a condition of receiving the mere necessities of life?

Let a hard and just sentence be given and carried out, as the honour of the nation demands and its greatest traitor deserves'. Resolution of Czechoslovak resistance organizations, demanding severe punishment for Father Józef Tiso, November 1946

Anti-capitalism—recast somewhat implausibly as anti-globalization, as though strictly domestic capitalism were somehow a different and less offensive breed—was attractive to nativist reactionaries and internationalist radicals alike.

The uncharming qualities of capitalism are its middle ground.

Canadian Labor Department in 1948 rejected girls and women applying to emigrate to Canada for jobs in domestic service if there was any sign that they had education beyond secondary school.

Considering that the GDR—to adapt Mirabeau's description of Hohenzollern Prussia—was little more than a security service with a state, it demonstrated in the glow of retrospect a remarkable capacity to evoke affection and even longing.

is never a struggle between good and evil, but between the preferable and the detestable.

True, many radicals of the '60s were quite enthusiastic supporters of imposed choices, but only when these affected distant peoples of whom they knew little.

But for enlightened Austrians, 'Asia' nevertheless began at the Landstrasse, the high road leading east out of Vienna. When Mozart headed west from Vienna en route for Prague in 1787, he described himself as crossing an oriental border. East and West, Asia and Europe, were always walls in the mind at least as much as lines on the earth.

It is tempting to conform: community life is a lot easier where everyone appears to agree with everyone else, and where dissent is blunted by the conventions of compromise.

This sort of faith was widespread in Kohout's generation. As Milosz would observe, Communism operated on the principle that writers need not think, they need only understand. And even understanding required little more than commitment, which was precisely what young intellectuals in the region were looking for.

they were increasingly perceived as restrictions upon the self-expression and freedom of the individual.

enthusiasm for Communism in theory was characteristically present in inverse proportion to direct experience of it in practice.

We face today two practical dilemmas. The first can be succinctly described as the return of the 'social question'.

Men like Hayek or von Mises seemed doomed to professional and cultural marginality. Only when the welfare states whose failure they had so sedulously predicted began to run into difficulties did they once again find an audience for their views:

The welfare states of continental Europe—what the French call the Etat providence, or providential state—followed yet a third model. Here, the emphasis was primarily on protecting the employed citizen against the ravages of the market economy. It should be noted that 'employed' here is no casual adjective. In France, Italy and West Germany it was the maintenance of jobs and incomes in the face of economic misfortune that preoccupied the welfare state.

The history of the 20th century West is in large measure the history of efforts to answer these questions. The responses proved spectacularly successful:

The past was neither as good nor as bad as we suppose: it was just different. If we tell ourselves nostalgic stories, we shall never engage the problems that face us in the present - and the same is true if we fondly suppose that our own world is better in every way. The past really is another country: we cannot go back. However, there is something worse that idealising the past - or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it.

Whatever their other differences, French Gaullists, Christian Democrats and Socialists shared a common faith in the activist state, economic planning and large-scale public investment. Much the same was true of the consensus that dominated policy-making in Scandinavia, the Benelux countries, Austria and even ideologically-riven Italy.

Among the speakers at the graveside was Viktor Orbán, the young leader of the Young Democrats, who could not help noting that some of the Communists present at Nagy's reburial were the same who, just a few years before, had so strenuously falsified the very revolution whose praises they were now singing.

Nothing in its life so became the Soviet Union as the leaving of it