Prose Before Hos

Examining The Legacy Of Tony Judt

Posted on October 21, 2011 in Articles

The Article: Tony Judt: A Cooler Look by Dylan Riley in the New Left Review.

The Text: Accolades continue to be piled upon the historian Tony Judt, following his untimely death in August 2010. For the Guardian, he was ‘a fearless critic of narrow orthodoxies’, ‘a great historian’, ‘a brilliant political commentator’. For the New York Review of Books, ‘a source of inspiration’, who sought to ‘embrace difference’—‘like Isaiah Berlin’—within historical accounts that were ‘harmonious, convincing, and true’; like Camus, Blum and Aron, Judt knew what it was to bear the intellectual’s ‘burden of responsibility’. To the Economist, he was ‘erudite and far-sighted’, ‘a meticulous intellect’—‘an intellectual with a capital I’. More circumspectly, the New York Times saluted his ‘deep suspicion of left-wing ideologues’. In June 2011 a Paris conference, jointly organized by the NYRB and ceri SciencesPo, celebrated Judt’s ‘scholarly rigour, elegance of style and acuteness of judgement’. Morally, he was ‘fearless’, ‘prophetic’, a new Orwell; intellectually, he was ‘formidable’, possessed of a ‘forceful lucidity’; as a historian of French political life, happily ‘inoculated against the revolutionary ideas that had been the stock in trade of the intellectual engagé’. To what extent are these plaudits confirmed by a sober examination of Judt’s work, held to the normal scholarly standards of intellectual coherence and empirical plausibility? What follows will offer an evaluation of his writings, as the necessary precondition for an adequate assessment of his contribution as historian, publicist and scholar.

Tony Judt was born in 1948, the son of Jewish immigrants, and brought up in lower-middle-class circumstances in London’s south-west suburbs. ‘Coming from that branch of East European Jewry that had embraced social democracy’, he would explain, ‘my own family was viscerally anti-Communist.’ Educated at a small South London private school, he served as national secretary of a Labour Zionist youth organization before going up to King’s College, Cambridge in 1967. Post-graduate study took him to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he seems to have acquired his life-long distaste for Marxist intellectuals; and thence to southern France, where he undertook doctoral research on the history of French socialism in the Var. His first two books would draw extensively on this work: La Reconstruction du Parti Socialiste, 1921–1926 was published in Paris in 1976; Socialism in Provence, 1871–1914, a ‘study in the origins of the French left’, appeared three years later. The mid-70s was a time of heightened establishment concern in France at the prospect of a joint Socialist–PCF election victory, in the aftermath of the Portuguese revolution. This background informs the central preoccupation in both Judt’s books with why France had failed to produce a reliable social-democratic party, on the Anglo-Nordic model. Unlike its solidly anti-Communist counterparts, the British Labour Party or German sdp, the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO) had never quite shed the lexicon of Marxism and still appealed to a notion of socialism even after 1945, when its political practice was otherwise quite ‘acceptable’. The themes of his doctoral research would prove to be central to much of Judt’s subsequent career.

1. THE FRENCH LEFT

Judt’s first book, The Reconstruction of the Socialist Party, examined the re-establishment of the SFIO after its historic split at the 1920 Congress of Tours, where a large majority of the delegates had opted for the Third International and moved to found the Parti Communiste Française. In Judt’s view, it was the presence of a militant PCF to its left that forced the SFIO leadership to compensate for its reformist political practice with verbal commitments to socialism. The SFIO rank and file insisted that the party ‘remain what they had made it’; any attempts to dilute its message would have played into the hands of the PCF. As Judt put it:

The way was narrow: a too marked rapprochement with the PCF could allow the more radical and rigid party to destroy it, but too sharp a break from the communists could lead to the loss of elements who had remained in the SFIO only on the condition that it retained a revolutionary Marxist position.

The 1920 split had not cleanly separated reformists from revolutionaries, as happened in other northern European socialist parties after the Bolshevik Revolution; instead, a section of the left remained with the rump SFIO led by Léon Blum, constituting a majority of its membership. Apart from a small, right-wing faction, all the SFIO delegates rejected collaboration in bourgeois governments and advocated the dictatorship of the proletariat. Judt reported that Socialist mayors were obliged to get party approval before inaugurating Monuments to the Fallen, a sharply divisive issue for the party in the aftermath of the Great War. The SFIO leadership initially hung back from rejoining the reconstituted Second International, preferring to support the Union of Vienna, the ‘2.5 International’ established by the Austro-Marxists, although it duly signed up in 1923. Rank-and-file attitudes exercised a decisive restraint on the SFIO’s parliamentary leadership: in 1924 Blum and his fellow deputies were obliged to lend only external support to the Radical government under Edouard Herriot—as it pursued a programme of austerity at home, imperial war in Morocco and military occupation in the Ruhr—since the party membership would not tolerate full participation. Here was an example of the high price paid by the SFIO for the ideological ‘rigidity’ necessary for its survival, given the ever-present pressure from the left exercised by the PCF.