Where Wealth Accumulates, and Men Decay

March 18, 2010

I love Tony Judt. This man is an absolutely brilliant brilliant brilliant historian with an unabashed lefty bent. (Have you read Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945? No? Please do, soon.) He also happens to be slowly dying of A.L.S. He’s written about that, too, movingly, winningly, wonderfully.

So I knew I wanted to read his new book, Ill Fares the Land, regardless of subject matter. As soon as I heard the title, borrowed from Oliver Goldsmith, I knew this book would be spot-on in timing. And now that I’ve read this review in the NYT, I want to read the book more than ever.  Consider this:

Mr. Judt’s new book, “Ill Fares the Land,” is a slim and penetrating work, a dying man’s sense of a dying idea: the notion that the state can play a significant role in its citizens’ lives without imperiling their liberties. It makes sense that this book arrives now, not merely during the hideous endgame of the national health-care debate but during mud season; this book’s bleak assessment of the selfishness and materialism that have taken root in Western societies will stick to your feet and muddy your floors. But “Ill Fares the Land” is also optimistic, raw and patriotic in its sense of what countries like the United States and Britain have meant — and can continue to mean — to their people and to the world.

This is one of the reasons I like Judt so much. I feel like his worldview, his views on the role of the state, are so close to my own. I like that although he sticks like anything to the wall of hard pragmatism, he continues to feel and espouse a sense of immense optimism about the world we live in. I mean, “the notion that the state can play a significant role in its citizens’ lives without imperiling their liberties”–this is YES. This is the way I feel about my country and my government.  YES YES YES.

I feel uplifted. I feel enlightened. I feel like I really, really need this book.