Mark LeVine: Tony Judt: An Intellectual Hero
[Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).]
New York University (NYU) professor and internationally renowned historian Tony Judt died last week of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known in the US as Lou Gehrig's disease after the famous baseball player whose death from the disease first brought it to public consciousness in 1941.
It is hard to fathom the scope of the loss, not just of the man, but of the type of scholarship, of the way Professor Judt taught those willing to learn about how to approach and utilise history.
I only knew Judt in passing as a graduate student at NYU but his reputation was already secure then, as a leading historian of France and the European Left. What was as striking as his superior intellect was his equally clear intellectual courage. He was clearly an intellectual of both the 1960s and of the Left (a much maligned combination in Newt Gingrich's America). But unlike so many of his peers he grasped the inherent contradictions of both while they were happening.
And so Judt became an astute and critical observer of why the era and its politics not only failed to bring about revolutionary change in Europe and the US, but produced a conservative backlash that is largely responsible for the slow destruction of the welfare states that had enabled unprecedented prosperity in the West in the decades after the second world war.
Israel shaping politics
What is most interesting in this regard is that among the most important experiences that shaped Judt's critical stance towards the Left was the years he spent as a devoted left-wing Zionist, including many summers spent working on Israeli kibbutzim and even volunteering as an auxiliary in the Golan Heights in the wake of the 1967 war.
As he explained in an article earlier this year, despite their progressive ideology (or better, the mythology surrounding them), the kibbutzim were "provincial and rather conservative communities, their ideological rigidity camouflaging the limited horizon of many of their members .... The mere fact of collective self-government, or egalitarian distribution of consumer durables, does not make you either more sophisticated or more tolerant of others .... Even now I can recall my surprise at how little my fellow kibbutzniks knew or cared about the wider world-except insofar as it directly affected them or their country".
Judt's realisation is not surprising. The mundane realities of daily life inevitably batter down ideological commitments and utopian visions. More broadly, the paradoxes and ethical contradictions of the "New Left" of the 1960s, during which he came of age, led many acolytes of the movement to lurch rightwards in disgust. In so doing, it planted many of the seeds out of which the neoconservative movement grew in the ensuing two decades.
Unlike his more politically jaundiced contemporaries, Judt retained his core commitment to justice and intellectual honesty even as he grew disenchanted with the politics of his era....
Read entire article at Mark LeVine for Al Jazeera
New York University (NYU) professor and internationally renowned historian Tony Judt died last week of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known in the US as Lou Gehrig's disease after the famous baseball player whose death from the disease first brought it to public consciousness in 1941.
It is hard to fathom the scope of the loss, not just of the man, but of the type of scholarship, of the way Professor Judt taught those willing to learn about how to approach and utilise history.
I only knew Judt in passing as a graduate student at NYU but his reputation was already secure then, as a leading historian of France and the European Left. What was as striking as his superior intellect was his equally clear intellectual courage. He was clearly an intellectual of both the 1960s and of the Left (a much maligned combination in Newt Gingrich's America). But unlike so many of his peers he grasped the inherent contradictions of both while they were happening.
And so Judt became an astute and critical observer of why the era and its politics not only failed to bring about revolutionary change in Europe and the US, but produced a conservative backlash that is largely responsible for the slow destruction of the welfare states that had enabled unprecedented prosperity in the West in the decades after the second world war.
Israel shaping politics
What is most interesting in this regard is that among the most important experiences that shaped Judt's critical stance towards the Left was the years he spent as a devoted left-wing Zionist, including many summers spent working on Israeli kibbutzim and even volunteering as an auxiliary in the Golan Heights in the wake of the 1967 war.
As he explained in an article earlier this year, despite their progressive ideology (or better, the mythology surrounding them), the kibbutzim were "provincial and rather conservative communities, their ideological rigidity camouflaging the limited horizon of many of their members .... The mere fact of collective self-government, or egalitarian distribution of consumer durables, does not make you either more sophisticated or more tolerant of others .... Even now I can recall my surprise at how little my fellow kibbutzniks knew or cared about the wider world-except insofar as it directly affected them or their country".
Judt's realisation is not surprising. The mundane realities of daily life inevitably batter down ideological commitments and utopian visions. More broadly, the paradoxes and ethical contradictions of the "New Left" of the 1960s, during which he came of age, led many acolytes of the movement to lurch rightwards in disgust. In so doing, it planted many of the seeds out of which the neoconservative movement grew in the ensuing two decades.
Unlike his more politically jaundiced contemporaries, Judt retained his core commitment to justice and intellectual honesty even as he grew disenchanted with the politics of his era....