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Ill Fares the Land

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I want to thank Judt for defending with such clarity, eloquence, and passion the concept of social democracy-- the modern welfare state and its set of associated freedoms. He identifies the failures of the new Left that have allowed the ideologies of the Right (wealth accumulation and privatization) to come to so dominate the political conversation that the tremendous gains of the early 20th century--the New Deal, the Great Society etc. are being systematically destroyed. He shows how the rise in inequality between the rich and everyone else is leading to a sick, uneducated, often imprisoned underclass. He then argues that the values of the pre-1960's Left-- equality, trust in government and between citizens, a belief that the public sphere was an important and effective way to solve problems-- are cut out of the public debate. To begin to move away from this sad state of affairs we need to regain the ability to speak in moral terms and develop a coherent narrative of the Left.

A deeply moving work that is fundamentally optimistic and practical. Should be read by every citizen.

Living in a city like Milwaukee, where our county executive has spent the last five years going out of his way to cut as many jobs in our county park system as possible, I found myself drawn to Judt's intelligent analysis of how the case against government had undermined things we hold dear. But it was his writing that really set his book apart. It's not just the argument between privatization and government that's killing the U.S., it's the wealth disparity that breeds government intrusion through security (wiretapping, CCTV in Britain) in order to pacify the growing anger among a democracy's citizens.

Because ultimately, we love our parks. We love having access to affordable, clean drinking water. And transit. And streets and streetlights. And schools. Is that "socialism," or do we simply use that label in order to avoid engaging in real discourse? We've withdrawn, given up, accepted the idea that our elected leaders are "all the same" and as a result, we've lost something. Read the book to find out what that "something" is and how you can take it back.

Best political book I've ever read.

"Ill Fares the Land" should become one of the most important publications of the next decade.

In straight forward, clear writing, Judt outlines the growing inequities between the rich and the poor in the United States and the failure of the ecomomic philosophy of the past 30 years. During this time the United States has become the most income stratified of the major industrial societies with the highest crime rates and the highest percentage of incarceration.

With devastating analysis Judt documents this growing inequality: The CEO of Walmart earns 900 times the wages of the average employee. The wealth of the Wal-Mart founders' family - $90 billion is equivalent to the combined bottom 40% of the US population: 120 million people.

"Ill Fares..." should be required reading for everyone.

Hugh McIsaac, Santa Cruz

Inequality of incomes --- the widening gap between the very rich and the middle --- is bringing both the United States and the United Kingdom into grave danger, Tony Judt forcefully argues in his latest book. He produces graph after graph to show that inequality correlates with a range of social evils from crime to ill health. The remedy, he believes, is a turn from reckless market capitalism to rational social democracy.
Judt, a fine historian and professor at NYU, is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. This short book, "Ill Fares the Land," can be read as his last will and testament, the single most important message that he wants to leave with those two countries, the one in which he was born and the other in which he has come to live.
The weakness of the book is that he does not address the great questions why the United Kingdom turned away from social democracy a generation ago, and why --- as the dramatic struggle over health care reform recently demonstrated --- a great many Americans have never accepted the idea.
And yet, for any reader who thinks about the future of the two countries and suspects that growing inequality is corroding our values, this book will be a valuable contribution to the debate. Incidentally, Judt summarized the book's main argument in an article he published in the April 29 issue of the New York Review of Books.

Tony Judt describes himself as a social democrat. What that means is that he believes that the state should have progressive taxes and to use revenue to create social goods such as health services, education and transport to benefit the community generally. He also believes in the responsibility of the state to manage demand and to lessen unemployment caused by economic cycles.

In Europe following the second world war most people were social democrats. The old nationalist right had been discredited by the failures of fascism. The communists system under Stalin was not successful at the ballot box and it only spread aided by the barrel of a gun.

In the 1980's the old Social Democrat consensus began to collapse with the success of Regan in America and Thatcher in England. Both Regan and Thatcher believed in unequal societies in which the market was the determinant of social activity. The old sectors of the public service were privatized, taxes made more regressive and the government retreated from the economy.

The aim of this book is to explain the virtues of social democracy to the young and to develop a way of selling it. Judt argues that unequal societies are sicker than more equal societies. Crime, illness and division increase. Trust breaks down and you have the rise of gated communities in which the rich exclude the threatening poor. The level of dialogue becomes shriller and the narrow focus on money makes for empty society.

The neo-liberal ideology has dominated political thought for 20 or so years but is now under threat as pure capitalism has shown its inherent weaknesses. The 2008 crash revealed that the system is potentially unstable and also that the creation of wealth can be based on speculation rather than on actual production. Judt sees the crash as a time to look at the Regan and Thatcher era and to see that the old social democratic model is superior.

my political views are generally conservative and have free market libertarian roots. anyone with an open mind needs to read other points of view (or why value freedom?). tony judt's elegant exposition of the keyensian intevention in 20th century history is a must read for any intellectual "tea party sympathizer" who wonders if the only alternative is "socialism".

I am sending this book to my mid-twenties daughter. She already has an excellent attitude and outlook toward others which makes me proud. This book will provide background knowledge and support for her positions. While the 60's and 70's begat much of the me generation that followed from the 80's until now, it also stimulated many to believe and work toward social democracy. Unfortunately, the word 'social' has been preempted to nether meanings, but man is ultimately a social animal. This author does an excellent job reminding us of the good past and political progress of the last century that has become somewhat unraveled. Read it. You'll be somewhat saddened, but perhaps reenergized to speak up for social justice and change.

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
Oliver Goldsmith. The Deserted Village, 1770

Review by Alan Wheatley

Title: Ill Fares The Land
Author: Tony Judt
Publisher: The Penguin Press, New York
ISBN: 978-1-59420-276-6

Price: Varies in its current manifestation as a hard-back, but it has also emerged as an e-book and early next year will be available as a paperback. Check out online stores and local bookshops. Prices are around US$12.00, AU$30.00, GB£12.00.

I can't remember a work about politics/economics that has had such an effect on me as Ill Fares The Land. Not that I make a habit of actually reading such books, but in my 80 years on this planet I have experienced the application of both in three countries: in Britain, the country of my birth and for the first 40 odd years of my life, Canada (or more specifically Montreal) a brief sojourn in the 1950s, and now Australia, here since late 1974. But of course I have taken a lively interest in current affairs/news as reported in the media in those countries.

Tony's book is memorable for a number of reasons. He is British by birth, educated at King's College, Cambridge and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris and has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley and New York University, where he is currently University Professor and Director of the Remarque Institute, which is dedicated to the study of Europe and which he founded in 1995. He has written or edited thirteen books, contributes to The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books and The New York Times and has been awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize and in 2009 the Orwell Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

Sadly, he is now suffering from Lou Gehrig's Disease, which is terminal, and he was seriously unwell when he wrote Ill Fares The Land with the help of his family, friends and colleagues.

Fundamentally, the book suggests that for a long time economists, politicians and media commentators have focussed almost exclusively on money/the bottom line when discussing how to run our (western) countries, as if they were "businesses" and that there seems to be no room for debate about the rightness or wrongness of policies, or about public and individual good.

Everything is measured by GDP, not about whether policies are morally or ethically beneficial. In fact, we have forgotten how to talk about such things in this way.

Tony cites examples in the past and ongoing present of previously publicly-funded enterprises that have been privatized, such as railways, roads, telecommunications networks and so on. Private education and hospitals are today cited as preferred models of civic enterprise.

He points to a number of other features of life today that he sees as symptoms of our current malaise:
* Income inequality: the poor stay poor, the rich get richer;
* Lack of trust and co-operation: the decline of the homogenous state and the rise of mass migration and the movement of refugees across borders; the growth of individualism;
* Impatience and disillusion with politicians;
* The growth of gated communities;
* The growth of the popularity of tertiary business education and a fall in enrolments in arts courses;
* The rise of fear and insecurity and the growth in the number of politicians who try to reassure us by introducing controls, restriction, erecting barriers; "As global threats mount, so the attractions of order will only grow".

Tony Judt believes that it is young people who have largely turned away from political debate but who will need to think seriously about these issues since it is they who will inherit the business model we now have. His book is aimed at senior secondary students and the language he uses reflects this. As a political and economic illiterate myself I found the book easy to read and engaging in its strong arguments for a move to ethical debate rather than the political point-scoring and the reiteration of the views of powerful vested interests that fill the news and comment media.

We must restore, Tony says, the notion of the value of usefulness, of prudence, of care, and recognize past achievements.

If you're at all interested in a critique of the way many governments in the West conduct their domestic policies I urge you to read this book. It's at once refreshing and thought-provoking and may partly explain the current resurgence of activity among the very wealthy and politically powerful.

This is an important book if only for its first chapter, which presents in graphs and text the startling facts concerning America's growing inequality and diminishing social mobility. Rich get richer, poor kids from poor families have increasingly less chance of leaving their family's income bracket. In that sense the US is even less socially mobile than the UK! These are the facts and trends that our tea party folk simply ignore, and the author describes the problems and causes nicely.

In subsequent chapters he presents our confusion over the economic problems Keynes accurately analyzed and his prescribed remedies, and how we need to rethink the role of the state to provide what the free market has not provided and will not. He might have noted that America's economic growth depended on government subsidies, from the Erie Canal, the intercontinental rail road, western damns through the Interstate Highway System. This is not a socialist prescription but a thoughtful review of what we haven't done and might do to correct market failures.

The book isn't long, and it could have been shortened, but it could have been improved by better tailoring his social remedies to the dynamics and peculiarities of our American love of enterprise. In aptly calling for us to reconsider the role of the state the author doesn't discuss ways in which government might address market failures by putting real costs on environmental and social impacts and thereby promoting more beneficial economic competition. For example, the government essentially subsidizes Appalachian coal power transmission to the east coast by considering it the "least cost" solution, but this calculation omits all the costs of mountaintop mining, air and stream pollution, and lost property values along the transmission corridor.

I strongly recommend this book for its statement of the problems we face and our need for remedies, even though those he favors may not suit Americans as they do Canadians or Western Europeans.

"Society is indeed a contract. But it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature... As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

-Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

The often controversial Anglo-American historian Tony Judt passed away this year on August 6, at the age of 62. His death was not sudden or unexpected, as he had been suffering from a rapidly advancing case of "Lou Gehrig's Disease," diagnosed in 2008, that had already left him bedridden before he finished Ill Fares the Land, his last book - and his last political testament, an attempt to bequeath his life's political project to his survivors. With the author's recent passing in mind, I found myself going through his words with special care and intensified focus, more conscious than usual of the reader's role in resurrecting the spirit of a writer - just as, when I write about the book, I become more poignantly aware of the convention that requires us to discuss an author's arguments in the present tense: "Judt argues...," one will say, as if he is holding forth in the other room or is currently on a nationwide speaking tour...

During the 2009 lecture that provided the outline for Ill Fares the Land, delivered from a wheelchair, Judt mentioned that he had been advised to find something uplifting to say about his illness. "I'm English," he said. "We don't do `uplifting.'" Yet despite Judt's disdain for false cheer; despite the book's circumstances of composition and its thoroughgoing, often alarmed and angry perspective on recent history, Ill Fares the Land is not a gloomy piece of writing. No reason to hide from it in fear of fear itself: Judt's review of 20th to early 21st Century history mainly emphasizes the measures taken, with creditable success, against the greatest of public "ills," including totalitarian and other temptations, in the shadow of catastrophes both real and threatened.

His themes come together in a passage a few pages from the end (again, it's hard to disassociate the end of the book from the end of a career and a life):

"We must revisit the ways in which our grandparents' generation handled comparable challenges and threats. Social democracy in Europe, the New Deal and the Great Society in the US, were explicit responses to them. Few in the West today can conceive of a complete breakdown of liberal institutions, an utter disintegration of the democratic consensus. But what we know of World War II - or the former Yugoslavia - illustrates the ease with which any society can descend into Hobbesian nightmares of unrestrained atrocity and violence. If we are going to build a better future, it must begin with a deeper appreciation of the ease with which even solidly-grounded liberal democracies can founder. To put the point quite bluntly, if social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear."

It's both typical and appropriate that Judt turns fear into his and our last and surest friend, though he is not advocating a campaign of alarmism - of fear-mongering. He emphasizes that "`defensive' Social Democracy" has a long and respectable history, based on the "close relationship between progressive institutions and a spirit of prudence." He is pointing to what he believes must be the main, concrete and durable, and thoroughly rational inspiration for a return to the bosom of the state.

In other words, Judt views the kind of leftism he advocates as distinctly and fundamentally conservative. He is therefore happy to turn our contemporary political vocabulary on its head:

"It is the Right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. From the war in Iraq through the unrequited desire to dismantle public education and health services, to the decades-long project of financial deregulation, the political Right - from Thatcher and Reagan to Bush and Blair - has abandoned the association of political conservatism with social moderation which served it so well from Disraeli to Heath, from Theodore Roosevelt to Nelson Rockefeller."

At other points, his defense of the progressivist state strikes a self-consciously Burkean note: "To abandon the labors of a century," Judt says, "is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come." The statements from the "father of conservatism" to which Judt is alluding were written in defense first and foremost of the English constitution - a whole system of laws, traditions, and customs whose defense was a conservative's duty and privilege, to be exercised in major part on behalf of those unable, because dead or not yet born, to speak for themselves in present deliberations. Explaining why those "labors of a century" are worthy of a Burkean defense against reckless innovation is one of the main objectives of Ill Fares the Land. What Judt is calling on us to conserve, the modern administrative state with its egalitarian, progressive, and re-distributive purposes, is, of course, what many or most nominal conservatives, especially in America, blame for all our woes.

If Judt was paying much attention to politics and public discussion in his last months, he would have seen further evidence for this thesis of political-historical inversion: The Summer of his passing has been the Summer during which even somewhat sober American conservative publications and web sites have turned to hyperbolic, quasi-revolutionary attacks on "the ruling class" alongside celebrations of a populist "great awakening" unified by hostility toward the state in all of its manifestations (except the armed forces, of course). Yet, in his response to conservative thinkers and leaders - from the Austrian economists, to Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, and Palin - Judt seeks something more substantial than mere revulsion at immoderate voices. He wants to encourage a revivified dialogue, particularly among young people, about political values, about what we really should demand from politics. A typical passage develops as follows:

"Is a system of 'cradle-to-grave' protections and guarantees more 'useful' than a market-driven society in which the role of the state is kept to the minimum?

"The answer depends on what we think 'useful' means: what sort of a society do we want and what sort of arrangements are we willing to tolerate or seek in order to bring it about? ...[T]he question of 'usefulness' needs to be recast. If we confine ourselves to issues of economic efficiency and productivity, ignoring ethical considerations and all reference to broader social goals, we cannot hope to engage it."

Of course, such reflections, or claims that "among the options available to us today, [social democracy] is better than anything else to hand," may ring rather less stirringly, than "Yes, we can!"

2008-2010 may not have been the historical moment to advance the conversation, and policies, that Judt and his ideological allies most wanted, even if conventional wisdom is now that Mr. Obama missed a major opportunity that may not come again for a very long time, if ever. Judt himself was something of a skeptic about Barack Obama, and in this book he refers to Obamacare as a "débâcle." Viewing the reactive swing to the right in the U.S., an ideological enemy might choose to go much further, grouping Judt with the other "liberals," and seeking to depict his politics as also suffering from an advanced, possibly even terminal malady. Other critics might be inclined to wonder whether Judt's socio-political diagnoses involved inescapable elements of projection. Yet such readings would require a culpable disregard for Judt's courage, and for the sacrificial dialectic of a message empowered, in our traditions even sanctified, by the death of the messenger.

That message, and new messengers, may be ready, or at least readier, when summoned by a greater crisis. Their next moment may not come until after a perceived failure of conservative governance, or even a perceived success that still leaves the populace unsatisfied and insecure. If a resuscitation and revival, a last ditch effort at salvation, or a transfiguration of social democracy is not on today's political agenda, that may be all the more reason to pass this book on, following Tony Judt's last requests, to a young person looking forward. It may even be the conservative thing to do.