Uno de los más interesantes historiadores del siglo XX, de la política europea y de los debates de pensamiento que acompañó a este período. En memoria.
Arguing with Tony Judt
By Scott McLemee
Inside HigherEd, August 11, 2010
While scanning new magazines or newspapers, there are certain bylines you tend to notice. The list of them varies from person to person. But the habits of attention involved tend to be the same.
Usually the author is someone whose work you find informative, or stimulating, or otherwise agreeable (or some combination of these things). You tend to read the article immediately — or postpone gratification until you’ve perused everything you must. Of course, things are not always so pleasant. The author may be your bête noir — the very sight of his or her name provoking keen irritation. Which, to be sure, can involve its own pleasures.
Much of this speed-scan/instant notification is — in my experience anyway — involuntary, like a Pavlovian reflex. It would be possible to draw up a comprehensive checklist of authors whose bylines trigger my attention. But that would be after the fact. The “list” is unwritten and usually in flux. The whole process seems idiosyncratic and ad hoc. The brain knows what it wants, but isn’t necessarily that rational or deliberate about it.
The historian Tony Judt, who died over the weekend, got entered into my registry not quite 20 years ago, when he started writing for The New York Review of Books and other publications. Some of his work was stimulating and some of it was annoying. His books on the European Left proved to be both. Judt was dismissive of questions and figures I thought were important, or else ignored them entirely. Reading Judt on Marxism involved a certain amount of intracranial yelling. As C.L.R. James once said about T.S. Eliot, he was someone I read in order to remind me of what I do not think.
With Judt’s more recent writings on political topics (on the Middle East, the strange death of liberal America, and the prospects for a revitalized social democracy, for example), I noticed that other people were doing the complaining, in letters-to-the-editor columns and otherwise. This was gratifying, for Judt’s conclusio