Reappraisals

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“Exhilarating . . . brave and forthright.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Perhaps the greatest single collection of thinking on the political, diplomatic, social, and cultural history of the past century.” —Forbes

We have entered an age of forgetting. Our world, we insist, is unprecedented, wholly new. The past has nothing to teach us. Drawing provocative connections between a dazzling range of subjects, from Jewish intellectuals and the challenge of evil in the recent European past to the interpretation of the Cold War and the displacement of history by heritage, the late historian Tony Judt takes us beyond what we think we know of the past to explain how we came to know it, showing how much of our history has been sacrificed in the triumph of myth—making over understanding and denial over memory. Reappraisals offers a much-needed road map back to the historical sense we urgently need.

Judt’s book, Ill Fares the Land, republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates.ReappraisalsAcknowledgments

Introduction: The World We Have Lost

Part One: The Heart of Darkness

Chapter I: Arthur Koestler, the Exemplary Intellectual
Chapter II: The Elementary Truths of Primo Levi
Chapter III: The Jewish Europe of Manes Sperber
Chapter IV: Hannah Arendt and Evil

Part Two: The Politics of Intellectual Engagement

Chapter V: Albert Camus: “The best man in France”
Chapter VI: Elucubrations: The “Marxism” of Louis Althusser
Chapter VII: Eric Hobsbawm and the Romance of Communism
Chapter VIII: Goodbye to All That? Leszek Kotakowski and the Marxist Legacy
Chapter IX: A “Pope of Ideas”? John Paul II and the Modern World
Chapter X: Edward Said: The Rootless Cosmopolitan

Part Three: Lost in Transition: Places and Memories

Chapter XI: The Catastrophe: The Fall of France, 1940
Chapter XII: A la recherche du temps perdu: France and Its Pasts
Chapter XIII: The Gnome in the Garden: Tony Blair and Britain’s “Heritage”
Chapter XIV: The Stateless State: Why Belgium Matters
Chapter XV: Romania between History and Europe
Chapter XVI: Dark Victory: Israel’s Six-Day War
Chapter XVII: The Country That Wouldn’t Grow Up

Part Four: The American (Half-) Century

Chapter XVIII: An American Tragedy? The Case of Whittaker Chambers
Chapter XIX: The Crisis: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Cuba
Chapter XX: The Illusionist: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy
Chapter XXI: Whose Story Is It? The Cold War in Retrospect
Chapter XXII: The Silence of the Lambs: On the Strange Death of Liberal America
Chapter XXIII: The Good Society: Europe vs. America

Envoi: The Social Question Redivivus

Publication Credits
Index

“Exhilarating . . . brave and forthright.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Perhaps the greatest single collection of thinking on the political, diplomatic, social, and cultural history of the past century.” —Forbes

“By turns fascinating [and] edifying . . . Judt is one of our foremost historians of Europe, an elegant writer and subtle thinker.” —Los Angeles TimesTony Judt was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University, as well as the founder and director of the Remarque Institute, dedicated to creating an ongoing conversation between Europe and the United States. He was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and also taught at Cambridge, Oxford, and Berkeley. Professor Judt was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The New York Times, and many journals across Europe and the United States. He is the author or editor of fifteen books, including Thinking the Twentieth Century, The Memory Chalet, Ill Fares the Land, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, and Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, which was one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2005, the winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He died in August 2010 at the age of sixty-two.US

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