Ill Fares the Land

Resumen del libro

'Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay' - Oliver Goldsmith. Something has gone profoundly amiss in our public affairs over the past thirty years. In the West, we are wealthy and secure enough to allow ourselves to drift very far off course before anything has to be done.

But we have forgotten how to think about the life we live together: its goals and purposes. Not only are we post-ideological; we have become post-ethical. When we ask ourselves whether a particular policy objective should be pursued - universal healthcare or investment in public transportation - we know only how to inquire about its efficiency: its profitability or cost, its impact upon growth and the National Product, its implications for taxation.

We have lost touch with the old questions that have defined politics since the Greeks: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society? A better world? The US and UK today are more unequal - in incomes, wealth, health, education, life chances - than at any time since 1914. Is this desirable? Is it prudent?Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. Until we have learned - or re-learned - how to pose them, we shall go on as before.

Can we go on 'like this'? Yes. Should we? No. If we are to replace fear with confidence then we need a different story to tell, about state and society alike: a story that carries moral and political conviction.

Biografía del autor

Tony Judt (1948 2010) was raised in the East End of London by a mother whose parents had immigrated from Russia and a Belgian father who descended from a line of Lithuanian rabbis. Judt was educated at Emanuel School, before receiving a BA (1969) and PhD (1972) in history from the University of Cambridge.<br><br>Like many other Jewish parents living in postwar Europe, his mother and father were secular, but they sent him to Hebrew school and steeped him in the Yiddish culture of his grandparents, which Judt says he still thinks of wistfully. Urged on by his parents, Judt enthusiastically waded into the world of Israeli politics at age 15. He helped promote the migration of British Jews to Israel. In 1966, having won an exhibition to King's College Cambridge, he took a gap year and went to work on kibbutz Machanaim. When Nasser expelled UN troops from Sinai in 1967, and Israel mobilized for war, like many European Jews, he volunteered to replace kibbutz members who had been called up. During and in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, he worked as a driver and translator for the Israel Defense Forces.<br><br>But during the aftermath of the war, Judt's belief in the Zionist enterprise began to unravel. "I went with this idealistic fantasy of creating a socialist, communitarian country through work," Judt has said. The problem, he began to believe, was that this view was "remarkably unconscious of the people who had been kicked out of the country and were suffering in refugee camps to make this fantasy possible."<br><br>Career: King's College, Cambridge, England, fellow, 1972-78; University of California at Berkeley, assistant professor, 1978-80; St. Anne's College, Oxford University, Oxford, England, fellow, 1980-87; New York University, New York, NY, professor of history, 1987--, director of Remarque Institute, 1995--.<br><br>Awards: American Council of Learned Societies, fellow, 1980; British Academy Award for Research, 1984; Nuffield Foundation fellow, 1986; Guggenheim fellow, 1989; Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction finalist, 2006, for Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. (less)