This is one of a series of posts that will ask what the most pertinent question raised by a prominent influencer of political economy might have been, and what the relevance of that question might be today. There is a list of all posts in the series at the end of each entry. The origin of this series is noted here.
After the first two posts in this series, the topics have been chosen by me, and this is one of those. This series has been produced using what I describe as directed AI searches to establish positions with which I agree, followed by final editing before publication.
Tony Judt is appearing because Jacqueline and I were, during a coffee whilst on our weekend away, discussing people whose books have influenced me. This is the first of three posts that follow on from that discussion.
Tony Judt was not an economist but a historian of conscience. In the years before his untimely death, paralysed by disease yet intellectually fearless, he became the moral historian of the neoliberal age. His book Ill Fares the Land (which I strongly recommend reading) was a cry from a lifetime of study: that a civilisation which abandons care for efficiency, and solidarity for self-interest, loses not just justice but meaning.
Judt's power came from memory. He remembered what Europe looked like when unregulated markets collapsed into depression, when fascism filled the vacuum, when decency was rebuilt from ruins. His warning was simple: we have been here before.
Hence, the Tony Judt Question: if we know that societies built on greed and neglect always fall, why have we forgotten how to care for one another?
The moral memory of reconstruction
After 1945, Europe rebuilt not only its cities but its ethics. The generation that emerged from war understood that the market could not be the sole arbiter of worth. The welfare state was born from trauma — a recognition that freedom without security was hollow.
In Britain, Beveridge's “giant evils” of want, ignorance, disease, and squalor demanded a collective cure. In France, the resistance's ideals became the basis for social insurance. In Scandinavia, the democratic state was recast as the guarantor of dignity.
Judt called this the moral memory of post-war Europe — a shared understanding that society is a verb, not a noun. It exists because we care for one another.
The great forgetting
By the 1980s, that moral memory had been deliberately erased. Reagan and Thatcher preached that there was no such thing as society. Market competition became the new civic virtue. Inequality, once seen as the problem, became the neoliberal solution.
Judt saw this as the great forgetting, and not as an accident, but as a cultural project imposed on society. The social democratic imagination was dismantled piece by piece. Public housing was sold off. Public utilities were privatised. The collective was redefined as inefficient.
Citizens became consumers. Rights became costs. The idea of a shared good was replaced by the metrics of private gain.
The cultural poverty of neoliberalism
For Judt, this was not only an economic catastrophe but a spiritual one. His argument was that the economist had been substituted for the moralist, efficiency for decency, and calculation for compassion.
Public life shrank to the management of GDP and inflation. Universities became marketplaces of credentials. Journalism became data without truth. Politics became administration without purpose.
Neoliberalism's great victory was not material but psychological — to make alternatives seem impossible, to convince citizens that selfishness was realism.
Thatcher said, "There is no alternative". Her aim was to make people believe that.
The new insecurity
Judt warned that when societies cease to care, insecurity returns, and these changes are not just material, but existential. People lose trust in institutions and hope in politics. Fear replaces faith.
The postwar welfare state had made citizens free from fear. Neoliberalism returned them to precarity. Housing became unaffordable, work was unstable, pensions were uncertain, and the young were burdened by debt, but we were told that these were the fruits of freedom.
In such a world, resentment festers: politicians promise false protection, nationalism masquerades as solidarity, and democracy erodes from within.
The politics of remembrance
Judt's last years were spent in physical immobility but intellectual revolt. He spoke of the need for moral rearmament, which embraced a recovery of the language of duty, decency, and care. He urged us to remember that taxes are the price of civilisation, that public goods are not charity but justice, and that government is not the enemy of freedom but its guarantor.
History, for Judt, was not nostalgia but moral instruction. We do not honour the past by worshipping it but by learning from its mistakes. Forgetting, he warned, is how societies die.
What answering Judt requires
To answer the Tony Judt Question, we must remember what post-war citizens knew instinctively: that the economy exists to serve people, not the other way around. That means:
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Rebuilding solidarity by restoring universal services such as health, housing, and education as expressions of mutual trust.
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Restoring moral purpose to politics, replacing managerialism with meaning. Governments must articulate what kind of society they seek to create, and not just how to fund it.
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Revaluing the public: public spending is not waste; it is the delivery of civilisation.
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Reclaiming decency. Justice must be spoken of again as a moral necessity, not an economic variable.
Inference
The Tony Judt Question is both elegy and alarm. It reminds us that civilisation is fragile and that societies forget the moral foundations of care at their peril.
Judt's message was not nostalgic but prophetic: we will rediscover solidarity either through memory or through catastrophe.
The choice, as always, is ours.
If we know how to care — and we do — the greater sin is not ignorance, but forgetfulness.
Previous posts in this series
- The economic questions
- Economic questions: The Henry Ford Question
- Economic questions: The Mark Carney Question
- Economics questions: The Keynes question
- Economics questions: The Karl Marx question
- Economics questions: the Milton Friedman question
- Economic questions: The Hayek question
- Economic questions: The James Buchanan question
- Economic questions: The J K Galbraith question
- Economic questions: the Hyman Minsky question
- Economic questions: the Joseph Schumpeter question
- Economic questions: The E F Schumacher question
- Economics questions: the John Rawls question
- Economic questions: the Thomas Piketty question
- Economic questions: the Gary Becker question
- Economics questions: The Greg Mankiw question
- Economic questions: The Paul Krugman
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I also wholeheartedly recommend Judt’s last book, Thinking the Twentieth Century, written with Timothy Snyder during the final disabling stages of Judt’s terminal illness.
Agreed, but it made less impact on me.
Agreed. But whichever you read first, you’ll then want to read the other
Thanks Richard. What an appropriate post for Remembrance Sunday. I found it very sad when I saw a WW2 veteran being interviewed on TV the other day when he recalled all his comrades who had fallen and, give the state of the world today, he questioned whether their sacrifice was worth it. A damning indictment.
I agree with him.
I’ve read ‘Ill Fares the Land’ (2010) and didn’t really rate Judt as a writer. He did not grab me.
Tim Snyder is a better writer for me. But maybe it was because I read Judt retrospectively? Never has a writer written in such a badly timed way – in the same year that brought us the Demolition Derby that was Cameron and Osbourne. ‘Ill Fares the Land’ was the book we needed in 2000, never mind 2010. Too late Tony! Too late.
Even better than a prophet though like Judt (ill timed as he was) is a writer looking for salvation; a turncoat. That writer is ex-Thatcher admirer John Gray in ‘The New Leviathans: Thoughts after Liberalism’ (2023). A book that it gives humanity a thick ear plus a consoling arm around the shoulder and hope at the end. Those of us who are fans of Abby Inne’s hypothesis about parallels between UK Neo-liberalism and Soviet style governance will feel more than at home with Mr Gray I assure you.
Because what Judt said would happen is happening now for sure – late or not.
Thanks, this is really helpful in crystallising some thoughts I’ve been having. My long term overriding concern is for the environment and what we as a species have done to the planet. My thoughts lately have been that essentially capitalism is heavily to blame and there is no way we can solve climate change and resource over exploitation under a capitalist system requiring neverending growth.
Ending capitalism would be a herculean task and surely not achievable in the timescales required, particularly since the plan for what comes next is not exactly agreed on! However maybe rolling back the neoliberal experiment would be enough, or at least give us breathing space. Dialing down the corporate power, de-emphasising growth, and the ‘free’ market, stronger regulation and genuine soveriegn money creation so the government can invest in ‘non productive’ fields of benefit to society and the planet.
Seems a more manageable goal with specific targets and ways to achieve them. Or is that still too much wishful thinking?
We have to think wishfully or nothing will happen.
Read the book. It is good. Ref PSR: read Snyder also good, read Gray – & New Leviathan – bit of a flip-flop man but New L’ is not bad.
The heart of the matter: Judt’s key point (for me) was Hayek and the the category error he made (The Road to Smurfdom); assuming that events in Austria (1920s socialism enabled the Nazis) could be extended to all countries that deployed some socialism (& that nazis would follow, inevitably). The logic was garbage at the time & remains so. Abby Innes’ book takes the point made by Judt and extends it (using the argument of utopianism)- cuts the head off the neolibtard market vampire, shoves garlic in its mouth and a stake through its heart.
Hayek proposed a utopian project (markets) that was wholly detached from reality. Clever people, getting it wrong right from the start. We have lived with this for 45 years, time to end it and consign Hakek et al to the dustbin of truly stupid ideas.
(the letters pages of the Times in the 1930s/1940s are worth reading as Keynes and Hayek tear lumps out of each other on the above subjects).
I’m actually re-reading Judt – it’s not a long book but I am struck already that he treated the 2008 crash as a ‘little crash’ (p. 2) which if you know about 2008 was not the case at all – it was far from localised, and financial engineering had amplified the risks and the losses in the system. One thing I have learned from this blog is that much of our woes lie in the financial system. Judt alludes to this factor but not in any real detail. In Ne-liberalism, the devil is in the detail.
One of the best points about the book are the quotes introducing each section. The one from p.72 is priceless:
‘Our nation stands for democracy and proper drains’ – John Betjeman.
🙂
Reading the phrase “Society is a verb, not a noun” struck me as being a deep and very profound statement. I then realised that Thatcher was inadvertently correct for once in her life (there is no such thing as society).
Nicely put. That quote of hers has been playing on my mind a lot lately. It seems to strike at the core of much of what has gone wrong in this country.
So yes, maybe society isn’t a thing that simply exists, it is the actions of countless people cooperating and working together for something better. She and others since have done their best to destroy it but you cannot destroy something that doesn’t exist. Maybe that should give us hope?
It always unnerves me concerning the fragility of the Keynesian post war settlement which never endeared itself to the anti-collectivist proto Thatcherism who occasionally put their heads above the parapet in the late 50s and 1960s. Heath was already comprised by Powellism and then the Selsdon Man pitch circa 1970. The Labour Party also dipped its toe to Hayekian territory courtesy of Callaghan’s famous anti Keynesian broadside (essentially Thatcher’s notorious TINA doctrine) under the tutelage of his monetarist son-in-law. Healey was arguably the first postwar monetarist chancellor in alliance with Chicago Boys of the IMF, fresh from their Chilean project.
The postwar settlement was predicated on avoiding the legacies of mass unemployment, yet it was being tossed aside some 25 years later as politicians became more relaxed about returning to the dole queues. Astonishing that they allowed it to happen, can we really ever understand why?