Age of ideas

Sam Leith on Tony Judt’s rigorous, posthumously published examination of the great intellectual debates of the last century

When the historian and essayist Tony Judt died in 2010 of motor neurone disease, among the books he had planned was an intellectual history of 20th-century social thought. As the disease robbed him of the ability to write, his friend Timothy Snyder proposed making this book — out of the edited transcripts of a long conversation they would conduct over several weeks in 2009.

The book-as-conversation is, as Snyder points out in his foreword, a rather Eastern-European artefact. That’s apt to its content: Snyder is a historian of the region. Judt has his Jewish family roots there, and became deeply interested during his mid career in the under-explored complexities of the Eastern European 20th century. Among the thrilling things about Judt — who worked in Cambridge, Paris, Berkeley and New York — is his lack of parochialism.

This is, as you might expect from the method by which it came about, a digressive rather than a systematic look at the subject. It’s also a slantwise autobiography. If the book Judt intended would have resembled a map of the intellectual landscape of the 20th century, this is something different. It’s more of a stroll through that landscape in the company of a pair of ghillies who know it intimately; and one of whom doesn’t mind reminiscing about his own youth among the hills and crags.

There’s chewy stuff here, but you never have to read a sentence twice. I underlined very many of them. Judt had in abundance the virtues of scepticism, open-mindedness, the ability to pay sustained attention to and across several fields of study, a tolerance of complexity and (how I envy him the last above all) the skill of remembering in clear detail what he has read.