“An intellectual feast, learned, lucid, challenging and accessible.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Ideas crackle” in this triumphant final book of Tony Judt, taking readers on “a wild ride through the ideological currents and shoals of 20th century thought.” (Los Angeles Times) The final book of the brilliant historian and indomitable public critic Tony Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century maps the issues and concerns of a turbulent age on to a life of intellectual conflict and engagement. The twentieth century comes to life as an age of ideas—a time when, for good and for ill, the thoughts of the few reigned over the lives of the many. Judt presents the triumphs and the failures of prominent intellectuals, adeptly explaining both their ideas and the risks of their political commitments. Spanning an era with unprecedented clarity and insight, Thinking the Twentieth Century is a tour-de-force, a classic engagement of modern thought by one of the century’s most incisive thinkers. The exceptional nature of this work is evident in its very structure—a series of intimate conversations between Judt and his friend and fellow historian Timothy Snyder, grounded in the texts of the time and focused by the intensity of their vision. Judt's astounding eloquence and range are here on display as never before. Traversing the complexities of modern life with ease, he and Snyder revive both thoughts and thinkers, guiding us through the debates that made our world. As forgotten ideas are revisited and fashionable trends scrutinized, the shape of a century emerges. Judt and Snyder draw us deep into their analysis, making us feel that we too are part of the conversation. We become aware of the obligations of the present to the past, and the force of historical perspective and moral considerations in the critique and reform of society, then and now. In restoring and indeed exemplifying the best of intellectual life in the twentieth century, Thinking the Twentieth Century opens pathways to a moral life for the twenty-first. This is a book about the past, but it is also an argument for the kind of future we should strive for: Thinking the Twentieth Century is about the life of the mind—and the mindful life. Judt's book, Ill Fares the Land, republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.
Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, ...
Many of the sources are available in English for the first time. Background information is provided on each source.
THE QUESTION OF MODERNITY In this introduction's first epigraph, Kant reflected on the apparent lack of moorings that ... Peter Osborne (“Modernity Is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category: Notes on the Dialectics ofDifferential ...
“Exhilarating . . . brave and forthright.” —The New York Times Book Review “Perhaps the greatest single collection of thinking on the political, diplomatic, social, and cultural history of the past century.” —Forbes We have ...
With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.
In The Art of Distances, Corina Stan identifies an insistent preoccupation with interpersonal distance in a strand of twentieth-century European and Anglophone literature that includes the work of George Orwell, Paul Morand, Elias Canetti, ...
But if you must suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked head." —Tony Judt The Memory Chalet is a memoir unlike any you have ever read before.
Extricating liberalism from the haze of anti-modernist and anti-European caricature, this book traces the role of liberal philosophy in the building of a new nation.
The chapters in this volume reflect a move away from a Western-centred analysis of Chinese history, as well as the new wealth of archival material made accessible over the last decade.