Tony Judt (with Timothy Snyder), Thinking the Twentieth Century ****

As its title suggests, Thinking the Twentieth Century is about how various constituencies interpreted the major events of the 1900s, primarily in Europe, and what those interpretations can tell us about the proper way to use history. At the same time it is an intellectual biography of Tony Judt, the historian and essayist who wrote Postwar and who was dying from ALS as he conversed with fellow historian Timothy Snyder for this final book.

The discussion presupposes knowledge of the events, so it's a good thing I read Postwar first (and not too long ago). My copy of Thinking the Twentieth Century bristles with Post-it flags marking notable insights, such as:

• The different moral and political lessons that Europe, the United States, and Asia took from the Holocaust –– and the French Revolution
• The fact that communists and free-marketers both think of people as economic abstractions
• The reason we tend to be sympathetic to intellectuals who supported the Soviets but not those who supported the Nazis
• Pre-World War I Vienna as the origin of so much 20th century thought
• The increased vigor of intellectual discussion when a party is out of power

The conversations happened from 2008 to 2010, so the final chapter includes dated talk about the Iraq War. It also include retrospectively disturbing warnings:

The wonderful mystery is that this [suspicion of the elite] has never effectively translated into real demagogic politics in the way that it has in most European countries ... [the right] managing to do just enough harm to threaten the quality of the republic but not quite enough damage to be seen to be what it really is. Which is native American fascism. ...

[This suggests] a certain mission for American patriotic intellectuals: ... are they defending institutions or are they rallying around a person who tends to make exceptionalist arguments about what should happen to those institutions?

 Judt reveals his fundamentally optimistic nature with this passage in the final few pages:

The twentieth century was not necessarily as we have been taught to see it. It was not, or not only, the great battle between democracy and fascism, or communism versus fascism, or left versus right, or freedom versus totalitarianism. My own sense is that for much of the century we were engaged in implicit or explicit debates over the rise of the state. What sort of state did free people want? What were they willing to pat for it and what purposes did they wish it to serve?

In this perspective, the great victors of the twentieth century were the nineteenth-century liberals whose successors created the welfare state in all its protean forms. They achieved something which, as late as the 1930s, seemed almost inconceivable: they forged strong, high-taxing, and actively interventionist democratic and constitutional states which could encompass mass societies without resorting to violence or repression. We would be foolish to abandon this heritage carelessly.