The role of the state

Tony Judt is a vivacious and controversial historian. He is Jewish but has turned against Israel. He is a thinker of the Left who has ended up in the USA. And now he has been struck down with a grievous illness, a virulent form of motor neurone disease which has left him paralysed from the neck down. As a result he has composed his latest book in his head and then dictated it to an aide, using the classic memory device of setting the text in different rooms of an elaborate building. This elegant essay is the result.

Judt’s illness has left him determined to restate his belief in what he calls social democracy. It is above all aimed at the younger generation. He fears that, because of the dominance of neo-liberalism, they have lost an appreciation of the good that the state can do.

This book is rather like a modern version of T. H. Marshall’s classic 1950 essay, ‘Citizenship and Social Class’. It is an attempt to mount a sustained argument about the pattern of human progress in which the state is a key agent for the expansion of prosperity and freedom. But this Whiggish narrative of human progress is interrupted by the rise of Thatcher and Reagan: it is their doctrines which he hopes to defeat.

I do not believe he quite carries it off. Oddly enough for a historian, it is his historical narrative which lets him down at two key points. His first mistake is his account of post-war Keynesianism. He regards this as an expansion of the role of the state compared with the pre-war period and the source of our post-war surge in prosperity and employment. This is ironically a caricature he shares with some Thatcherites who dismiss the entire period from 1945 to 1979 as pinko socialism.