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384 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
I was moving towards the idea that all three men were genuinely independent thinkers in a time and a place where being independent placed you in real danger, as well as consigning you to the margins of your community and to the disdain of your fellow intellectuals.The discussions of Judt's Jewish heritage and early-forged (and rapidly-soured) enthusiasms for Zionism and Israel are set against the legacy of the Holocaust and his later role as a lauded and decried critic of Israel, particularly in its relationship with the Palestinians. This Jewish background鈥攖o his own familial and the twentieth century's story鈥攅ntwines around extended discoursing upon the Fascism and Communism that stood as the most formidable enemies of liberal democracy of the past century. Of interest was Judt's dismissal, against the probing by Snyder, of the worth of Fascist intellectuals to the discussion, deeming their separation from universality in the pursuit of top-level truths aimed at national and ethnic particularism fell outside the historical narrative and, hence, had little to teach us鈥攁n opinion that reverses itself when it comes to the communists and anarchists. He also ranges over his early academic investiture in the French Left and French Socialism, as well as the Eastern Europe that enthralled him to the degree that he learned the Czech language and immersed himself in the works and history of that fractious and troubled area so badly misused by the Red and Nazi armies that vied bloodily for and across their boundless expanse. With Judt's extensive understanding of this area, so potently applied within , complemented by Snyder's own appreciable academic and personal knowledge of the same, this lesser-known half of the European continent receives a degree of attention from the pair that sheds new light and shores up prior awareness.
Maybe I thought this story worth telling because there is a subterranean twentieth-century tale to be told of intellectuals who were forced by circumstances to stand outside and even against their natural community of origin.
The unpleasant truth is normally, in most places, that you're being lied to.Which is followed-up by an examination of how this culture of lies has become the norm in our political culture, and that serves as the focal point about which Judt makes his case for the perduring relevance and significance of the public intellectual as a purveyor of truth, no matter how uncomfortable the perch may prove to self or audience.
As the great reformers of the nineteenth century well knew, the Social Question, if left unaddressed, does not just go away. It goes instead in search of more radical answers.Read this book, goddammit!