"The past has nothing of interest to teach us." That, fears Tony Judt, is the presiding assumption of the early twenty-first century. The speed of social and economic change, the exhaustion of the twentieth century's dominant ideologies and a desire to put the horrors of that century's carnage behind us all conspire, he believes, to encourage a culture of forgetting. And this belief frames and justifies his sense of his own role; he appoints himself the Reminder-General in contemporary society (or at least in the United States), a particular version of the historian as public intellectual."
And:
"In his introduction, Judt claims that two main themes run through the book: first, "the role of ideas and the responsibility of intellectuals"; and second, "the place of recent history in an age of forgetting." I'm not sure that these are, in practice, the salient themes, but the announcement does fairly represent the insistent, exigent tone of what is to follow--"the role," "the responsibility," "the place." It might be more accurate to say that the dominant concerns of the volume are, first, the primacy of the political when evaluating ideas; second, the defining significance of attitudes toward the Holocaust and communism; third, the value of transatlantic comparisons and contrasts when thinking about the state; and fourth, the distinctive contribution of Jews to understanding modern history."
Read a piece in The Nation by Stefan Collini reviewing and analysing Tony Judt's book Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century.
And:
"In his introduction, Judt claims that two main themes run through the book: first, "the role of ideas and the responsibility of intellectuals"; and second, "the place of recent history in an age of forgetting." I'm not sure that these are, in practice, the salient themes, but the announcement does fairly represent the insistent, exigent tone of what is to follow--"the role," "the responsibility," "the place." It might be more accurate to say that the dominant concerns of the volume are, first, the primacy of the political when evaluating ideas; second, the defining significance of attitudes toward the Holocaust and communism; third, the value of transatlantic comparisons and contrasts when thinking about the state; and fourth, the distinctive contribution of Jews to understanding modern history."
Read a piece in The Nation by Stefan Collini reviewing and analysing Tony Judt's book Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century.
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