Quotes from Tony Judt

The European dilemma is

In the years following 1945 it seemed to most intelligent observers as though the Austrians had made a simple category error. Like so many of their fellow refugees, they had assumed that the conditions which brought about the collapse of liberal capitalism in interwar Europe were permanent and infinitely reproducible.

The solipsistic conceit of the age—that the young would change the world by 'doing their own thing', 'letting it all hang out' and 'making love, not war'—was always an illusion, and it has not worn well. But it was not the only illusion of the time, and by no means the most foolish.

If we compare the gap separating rich and poor, whether measured by overall assets or annual income, we find that in every continental European country as well as in Great Britain and the US, the gap shrank dramatically in the generation following 1945.

In an age of vastly expanded universities, with periodicals, journals and lecturers urgently seeking 'copy', there emerged a market for 'theories' of every kind—fuelled not by improved intellectual supply but rather by insatiable consumer demand.

The disappearance of so many regimes so closely bound to a revolutionary narrative marked the death knell of a 200-year promise of radical progress.

British-made domestic goods, vehicles, tools or weapons had for long been highly prized on foreign markets. But in the course of the 1930s and 1940s British producers had so successfully undermined their own standing in almost every commodity save men's clothing that the only niche left to Britain's retail merchants by the 1960s was high profile, low quality 'trendy' fads

We have entered an age of insecurity—economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity.

Looking back, it is striking to note how many in western Europe and the United States expressed enthusiasm for Mao Tse-tung's dictatorially uniform 'cultural revolution' while defining cultural reform at home as the maximizing of private initiative and autonomy.

Insecurity breeds fear. And fear—fear of change, fear of

Racism had no place in the Marxist lexicon; dead Jews were posthumously assimilated into the same local communities that had so disliked them when they were alive. But

The idea that those in authority know best—that they are engaged in social engineering on behalf of people who do not understand what is good for them—was not born in 1945, but it flourished in the decades that followed.

decline, fear of strangers and an unfamiliar world—is corroding the trust and interdependence on which civil societies rest.

the center of gravity of political argument in the years after 1945 lay not between left and right but rather within the left: between communists and their sympathizers and the mainstream liberal-social-democratic consensus.

All around us we see a level of individual wealth unequaled since the early years of the 20th century.

Marxism was the rhetorical awning under which very different dissenting styles could be gathered together—not least because it offered an illusory continuity with an earlier radical generation. But under that awning, and served by that illusion, the Left fragmented and lost all sense of shared purpose.

The United Nations showed little initial concern—its inadequate and unconcerned Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, described Bosnia as 'a rich man's war'—

financial transactions have displaced the production of goods or services as the source of private fortunes, distorting the value we place upon different kinds of economic activity.

It says something about the mood of the time that a New Labour government with an overwhelming parliamentary majority and nearly 11 million voters at the 2001 elections should nonetheless have been moved to respond in this way to the propaganda of a neo-Fascist clique which attracted the support of just 48,000 electors in the country at large: one-fifth of 1 percent of the vote and only 40,000 more votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party. France

From the late 19th century until the 1970s, the advanced societies of the West were all becoming less unequal. Thanks to progressive taxation, government subsidies for the poor, the provision of social services and guarantees against acute misfortune, modern democracies were shedding extremes of wealth and poverty.

But each in its own way was affected by the growing intolerance of immoderate inequality, initiating public provision to compensate for private inadequacy.

Over the past thirty years we have thrown all this away.

Margaret Thatcher may have destroyed the Conservative Party but she must be credited with the salvation and re-birth of Labour. In the short-run, of course, she crushed her Labour opponents—indeed, she could not have wrought the changes she did but for their stunning incompetence. While some Labour Party leaders in 1979 understood the problems they faced, they could carry neither conviction nor their supporters.

The consequences are clear. There has been a collapse in intergenerational mobility: