Tony Judt, RIP

I remember reading a news article about Tony Judt last year after he gave a 2 hour lecture at NYU, as it was striking that someone w/ALS could still do that. He died last Friday. Here is his incredibly moving essay entitled "Night", about living w/this disease, written in Jan. 2010.   Tim Rutten of the LA Times wrote an "Appreciation" of Tony Judt, and I share the end of that article, where Rutten describes that final public lecture Judt gave as ...

... a historian's moral testament and an argument for the rediscovery of the social democratic values that he believed kept the peace in the postwar West.

"Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today," Judt said. "For 30 years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest.... The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears 'natural' today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth."

As Judt subsequently told an interviewer for the London Review of Books, "I think what we need is a return to a belief not in liberty, because that is easily converted into something else ... but in equality. Equality, which is not the same as sameness. Equality of access to information, equality of access to knowledge, equality of access to education, equality of access to power and to politics. ... It is another way of talking about injustice. We need to rediscover a language of dissent."

That was a tongue Tony Judt spoke with utter fluency — to his great credit and the good of many.