Quotes from Tony Judt

Governments, in short, now increasingly farm out their responsibilities to private firms

By the end of the 1970s, a clear majority of the employed population of Britain, Germany, France, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia and the Alpine countries worked in the service sector—communications, transport, banking, public administration and the like. Italy, Spain and Ireland were very close behind.

Moreover, it was social democracy and the welfare state that bound the professional and commercial middle classes to liberal institutions in the wake of World War II.

between 1983 and 2001, mistrustfulness increased markedly in the US, the UK and Ireland—three

life closely track your income: residents of wealthy districts can expect to live longer and better.

The wider the spread between the wealthy few and the impoverished many, the worse the social problems: a statement which appears to be true for rich and poor countries alike.

At the conclusion of the First World War it was borders that were invented and adjusted, while people were on the whole left in place.6 After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.

What matters is not how affluent a country is but how unequal it is.

Whether capitalist economies thrive best under conditions of freedom is perhaps more of an open question than we like to think.

This familiarity of revolutionary violence in the French imaginaire, together with sepia-tinted memories of the old Franco-Russian alliance, pre-disposed intellectuals in France to greet Communist apologetics for Soviet brutality with a distinctly sympathetic ear.

As a consequence, the thick mesh of social interactions and public goods has been reduced to a minimum, with nothing except authority and obedience binding the citizen to the state.

The legacy of unregulated wealth creation is bitter indeed.

The chief shortcoming of the old public services was the restrictive regulations and facilities—one-size-fits-all—with

restriction upon autonomy and initiative.

In a popular Soviet-era joke, a listener calls up 'Armenian Radio' with a question: 'Is it possible', he asks, 'to foretell the future?' Answer: 'Yes, no problem. We know exactly what the future will be. Our problem is with the past: that keeps changing'. So

Like Germany, Russia and Turkey had once played an imperial role in European affairs. And many Russians and Turks had shared the uncomfortable fate of Europe's ethnic German communities: displaced heirs of an autocratic power now reduced to resented and vulnerable minorities in someone else's nation state, the tidal refuse of imperial retreat.

Like large-scale state projects elsewhere, the Cassa was inefficient, and more than a little corrupt. Most of its benefits went to the favored coastal regions; much of the new industry that it brought in was capital-intensive and thus created few jobs.

However, for Keynes it had become self-evident that the best defense against political extremism and economic collapse was an increased role for the state, including but not confined to countercyclical economic intervention.

Silvio Berlusconi, who entered politics not so much to further the national house-cleaning as to ensure that his own business dealings remained safely unaffected.

Post-Soviet Russia was a Eurasian empire rather than a European state. Preoccupied with violent rebellions in the Caucasus, it was maintained at a distance from the rest of Europe by the new buffer states of Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova as well as by its own increasingly illiberal domestic politics.

But as one Hungarian who had worked for some years in California explained to an interviewer: 'America is the place to come when you are young and single. But if it is time to grow up, you should return to Europe'.

If government is the problem and society does not exist, then the role of the state is reduced once again to that of facilitator.

At the core of anti-Fascist rhetoric as deployed by the official Left was a simple binary view of political allegiance: we are what they are not. They (the Fascists, Nazis, Franco-ists, Nationalists) are Right, we are Left. They are reactionary, we are Progressive. They stand for War, we stand for Peace. They are the forces of Evil, we are on the side of Good. In the words of Klaus Mann, in Paris in 1935: whatever Fascism is, we are not and we are against

In the conventional wisdom of the 1940s, the political polarizations of the last inter-war decade were born directly of economic depression and its social cost. Both Fascism and Communism thrived on social despair, on the huge gulf separating rich and poor.