Reappraisals by Tony Judt

The subtitle to this book is 'reflections on the forgotten 20th Century', which at first glance seems like a rather odd proposition. What is there about the century of mass genocide, totalitarianism of the left and right, space flight, total war and the globalisation of commerce and culture, that could be forgotten? Plenty, it would appear, a BBC documentary some years ago held an exit poll outside a New York movie theatre, quizzing people about the historical war epic they had just watched. An astonishing number seemed to be labouring under a range of misaprehensions, sure that the war happened in the 60s, that it was fought against the Russians, That Kennedy was America's wartime president etc. A few years ago whilst lecturing at UWIC I discovered students who had no idea what Auschwitz was, or who Himmler, Goebbels or Goering were. History students, to boot.

How is it that the common intellectual currency of previous generations is now rarer than faberge eggs to the post cold war, internet savvy era? Tony Judt suggests in the preface to the book, which is essentially his collected essays written over the last two decades, that the triumph of western liberal capitalism over Soviet communism has led to the closing of the western mind. Two decades of triumphalism that are now drawing to a close wih our current crises has created a situation where people are more likely to forget history, or if they are to be aware of it at all, to understand it as a series of History Channel naratives or Hollywood blockbusters. the real depth of understanding required to understand its lessons. The first part of the book is dedicated to waht Judt calls the now extinct 'Republic Of Letters, that made up so much of the intellectual life of the 20th Century, his praises Camus and Hobsbawm, pours scorn on Althusser and seems quite wearily dismissive of Hannah Arendt, his old friend Edward Said is recognised in this sections as being perhaps the last of the constituents of the republic. The rest of the book features more conventional essays ranging from the Fall of France, the delusions of Blair's Britain and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a discussion of Israel, how it won so many wars but failed in peace so consistently.

This is a book for lovers of modern history who aren't content with cosmetic and commercialised takes of an era that we are still struggling to undersand, or as Judt puts it, forgetting as fast as we can