Three years after publishing his masterpiece, Judt was diagnosed with a degenerative neural disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which rapidly deprives its sufferers of all physical capacities, but leaves the mind unimpaired. In Judt the diagnosis produced a last creative flood: Ill Fares the Land (2010), an impassioned lament for the passing of social democracy, which I give to left-wing friends as a reminder of the Labor party pre-Hawke and Keating; The Memory Chalet (2010), in which the rooms in a Swiss chalet, where he once, as a child, spent a skiing holiday, serve as a device for constructing the fragments of a memoir; and now Thinking the Twentieth Century, a profoundmeditation – at once biography, history, and ethical treatise – on the fraught twentieth century.

It is written in collaboration with a younger historian, Timothy Snyder, author of the much acclaimed Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010). Snyder would come every Thursday, record a two-hour conversation with Judt without breaks, save it to a digital file, and have the file transcribed; then Snyder would edit the transcript into a text according to an agreed chapter outline and send the result to Judt for comment and revision.  Judt signed off on the final text on 5 July 2010; a month later he was dead. In a moving article in the New York Review of Books (22 March 2012), Judt’s widow, Jennifer Homans, tells of the heroic struggle to complete this last book, increasingly ‘interrupted by respiratory crises and shots of morphine’. Despite the laborious nature of the process, the conversations are fresh and spontaneous; even the inevitable repetitions are welcome, as they add new riffs to the dominant themes.

The template for the conversations is established in the opening chapter. First, we have an autobiographical monologue from Judt, mainly intellectual but not neglecting other aspects of his life, including numerous romantic attachments and three marriages. In this chapter the focus is his Jewish family background; he was the descendant of Eastern European Jews who fled pogroms early in the twentieth century. Although brought up in a ‘self-consciously un-Jewish […] household […] [t]he world of my youth was […] the world that was bequeathed us by Hitler’ so ‘the Holocaust penetrated everything – like a fog, ubiquitous but inchoate’. At this point Snyder interrupts the biography and opens the conversation, in this case with the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig’s nostalgic evocation of a Vienna, ‘for one brief early twentieth century moment the intellectual and cultural cradle of modernity’. This leads to a discussion of the place of the Jews in early twentieth-century Europe, with nuanced contrasts between the cultivated, assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie of the great cosmopolitan centres of the Habsburg empire and the alienated parvenu Ostjuden in the provincial ghettos of the empire. Both were to share the same fate in Hitler’s Europe, tragically ensuring that ‘another narrative […] insistently intervenes and intrudes upon any account of twentieth-century thought and thinkers: the catastrophe of the European Jews’.

Judt’s upbringing in a Marxist but anti-Stalinist household (his thirteenth-birthday present was Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, since ‘it was time for me to learn to distinguish the good guys from the bad’) introduces a conversation on the clash between communism and fascism that dominated the period between the wars. An adolescent and romantic involvement with Zionism and the kibbutz ends with his experiences of Jewish chauvinism when serving as an auxiliary during the Six Day War, thus opening a discussion of his disillusion with the statecraft of modern Israel – ‘unhealthily dependent upon the Holocaust – its moral crutch and weapon of choice with which to fend off all criticism’. Again ‘ignorant of the history of Europe’s other half’, Judt encounters Eastern European intellectuals in the 1980s, an aspect of his biography which leads to ‘a new subject and a new Europe’, thereby challenging the Anglo-Saxon framing of modern European history. After a peripatetic academic life in Cambridge, Oxford, Paris, California, Atlanta, and Vienna, he finally settles in New York, becoming ‘thanks to September 11, 2001 […] increasingly and polemically engaged in American public affairs’. We now have a critique of the second Iraq War and its impact on democracy (‘corrosive’ is his verdict), and musings on the puzzling ‘collective cognitive dissonance’ of the American people opposed to an increased role of government in their lives, yet cheering on the biggest conceivable governmental intervention in citizens’ lives, fighting a war, and a pre-emptive one at that.

In a short review it is difficult to convey the richness and intellectual excitement of these conversations. Why in the 1930s, outside Britain and Scandinavia, did the totalitarianisms of the right and the left crowd out, politically and intellectually, the liberal centre across much of continental Europe? Was it because communism and fascism seemed to have answers to the Great Depression, while the liberal centre did not? Intellectuals were mesmerised by the apparent success of Soviet planning in a rapidly industrialising country. Nazi Germany was an old industrialised economy, and therefore a different case. For Nazis the state was free to do what it wanted. Massive over-expenditure in the present would be paid for by plundering the Jews and by the conquests in East Europe in the future. Similarities with Keynesian thinking are superficial.  Keynes was accepting short-term deficits while pursuing a longer-term equilibrium in order, as Judt notes, to ‘save liberal England from the consequences of its own economic ideology […] Hitler is not in the business of saving liberal Germany from anything’.

Judt notes that we have a tendency to forgive the pro-communist peccadilloes of intellectuals in the 1930s but are unforgiving towards the pro-fascists, odd given that ‘through the 1930s, what was happening in the Soviet Union in terms of scale and repressiveness was incomparably worse than anything being done in Nazi Germany’.

The answer seems for Judt to lie in the progressive, millenarian, and universal appeal of communism in contrast to the narrow nationalism of fascism, at least in its Nazi variant. ‘I simply cannot think,’ he writes, ‘of a single Nazi intellectual whose reasoning holds up as an interesting account of twentieth century thought […] parasitic [as it is] upon a set of claims about what it was that made Germans unique.’ There follows a nuanced discussion of other fascisms – Italian, Romanian, French, Spanish – in which, however distasteful the substance, the proponents do proffer a broader account of modernity and its discontents.

But once the evidence is in on the Soviet Union, communist fellow travellers get short shrift from Judt. His heroes are the bell-ringers, Koestler and Orwell, along with French writers such as Camus and Aron, who did not succumb to the romantic mystique enveloping many French intellectuals that the Russian revolution was somehow the contemporary incarnation of their own glorious republican revolution. Commitment by these intellectuals to the ultimate success of the Soviet experiment was often couched in macho realistic terms, ‘breaking eggs for a future omelette’, an approach simply blind to the mounting evidence of an infinity of broken eggs and an ever-receding future omelette. For Judt this is ‘the intellectual sin of the century: passing judgement on the fate of others in the name of their future as you see it, a future […] concerning which you claim exclusive and perfect information’.

This historical judgement flows over into his own writing of history. Monopolistic historical narratives are out; old-fashioned Whiggish narratives of history as progress do not work. On the evidence of the twentieth century, it is hard to claim that ‘progress is the default condition of the human story’. Modern versions of this grand progressive narrative are equally suspect: progress blocked by mature capitalism until unblocked by socialism; modernisation theory bringing progress from primitive society to its end point, ‘advanced industrial society and its political doppelgänger – democracy’, or its latest version, Fukuyama-Hegelianism and the end of history, hilariously mocked by Snyder as ‘goodbye to all that and so much the better now that we are all bourgeois liberals playing free-market croquet together’. For Judt, the historian’s task is ‘to tell it as it is’, to defend the little truths against the claims of grand narratives and the demands of the national story.

More controversially, he tends to see the contemporary narrative that ‘economic growth and free markets [are] not merely the necessary condition for human improvement but the best account of it’ as another of those dangerously grandiose versions of history. He deplores the dominance of economic language – efficiency, productivity, global competitiveness – in political argument as ‘a brake upon a more morally informed social debate’; is antipathetic to the neo-Orwellian chant – private ‘good’, public ‘bad’; finds Hayekian assertions – that all governmental welfare will end in Hitler – ahistorical; and challenges the Reagan–Thatcher view that there is a seamless continuum between ‘the right to make any amount of money unhindered by the state’ and the right to free speech. He searches for an alternative to neo-liberalism in what he suggests is the banality of social democracy with its small truths and its unpretentious claims.

Perhaps we can complain that the book is Eurocentric – China is mentioned, but chiefly as another example of a Leninist revolution in a developing country, thereby contradicting Marxian analysis, and with a Cultural Revolution which was ‘a sort of vicious replica of aspects of Stalinism’. Australia’s single mention comes in a paragraph on the mediocrity of politicians in today’s free societies. For Judt, Europe is the fulcrum of the century. The two great hot wars of the century originated in Europe, the pivot of the Cold War was Europe, the cataclysmic impact of the Great Depression was most obvious in Europe, and the thinkers who interpreted the calamities of the century were nearly all European. In this sense, the history of the twentieth century cannot escape Europe.

Judt told his wife when Thinking the Twentieth Century was finished that it ‘wasn’t exactly right […] but it was good enough’. Make up your own minds. For my mind, ‘good enough’ is far too modest for this exceptional book, even if none of us can ever hope to get it ‘exactly right’.

CONTENTS: JUNE 2012