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  • Tony Judt’s Twentieth Century
  • John Dunn (bio)

No human being can quite take in where they are in time or space, but historians especially must strain to, even to practise their craft. They have to decide what to try to understand, define a vantage-point from which it could be understood, find out what they judge to be true about it, and then and only then convey to others what they think they have discerned. Tony Judt was a historian of unusual buoyancy and vitality with a strong sense throughout his professional career of what he had discerned, and what, within it, most urgently to convey to others. He had a vision and a message, and a vision and message addressed with varying urgency to everyone within earshot, from a particular time and place.

When I first met him, in the first batch of historians in King’s College, Cambridge, it was my all too premature responsibility to try to educate, he already had that vision and message, and conveyed it with indefatigable and infectious zest. Four a half decades later, when his light at last went out, he still had his message; he was still struggling, through unimaginable densities of obstruction, frustration and suffering, to convey it to anyone within ear-shot, and, miraculously and astonishingly, his zest to do so was completely undimmed. That ending had a Roman grandeur which you would not think was still within the reach of a modern or postmodern professional lifetime. But there it was; and there its record will now stand.

Tony was overwhelmingly a historian of the twentieth century, and of Europe’s twentieth century and at least one of its more drastic impacts on its near periphery. He was not a historian of the United States, any more than of Africa or Asia or Latin America, though it was increasingly to Americans that he long chose centrally to speak. The twentieth century, as it was while it lasted, was very different for the humans who experienced and made its history across time and space. Most of it didn’t take place in either Europe or North America; and there’s no way in which all of it can be de-located from either time or space, impacted together, and somehow made intelligible to anyone at all, even a highly educated living American. History is not an achieved and potentially universal experiential transparency. It is an orientational aspiration of particular humans, in precarious communication with others who may or may not prove to be within earshot.

I value Tony’s vision and message, compulsively and urgently, because it overlaps so nearly with my own and because we cared about so many things [End Page 315] together and in much the same way. Each of us was a child, imaginatively speaking, of the shared austerities of the England which Clement Attlee left behind him, and of the proud, if no doubt largely mythic, sense of how we had come to share those austerities. We formed our intellectual imaginations on the same site, looking across the green lawns of King’s at Henry VI’s great chapel. We drew the purposes we shared, in ways neither of us appreciated at the time, from the College’s tutelary genius, Maynard Keynes. We did so particularly from the imagined economic basis of Mr Attlee’s England: the picture of taming and civilizing human productive power through cognitive mastery, by grasping the dynamics and limited plasticity of capitalist economies – to which Keynes had given the portions of his life left over from having a rousingly good time – resonated with us both. That basis was cognitively over-optimistic, at least as it passed into the minds of others; and the modest repertoire of techniques it suggested proved fearsomely insufficient over the next half century. What should be evident to everyone by now is that nothing else has since proved cognitively or practically more reliable on the same erratic passage. Keynes saw the ways of life he valued poised perilously above a vast crater. We now have every reason to see that crater as reaching right across the humanly inhabited surface of the world.

Tony’s vision...

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