BOOK REVIEW: 'Ill Fares the Land'

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ILL FARES THE LAND
By Tony Judt
Penguin, $24.95, 237 pages

''Ill Fares the Land" makes for a brisk if chilling read. "We have entered an age of insecurity - economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity," it begins. "The last time a cohort of young people expressed comparable frustration at the emptiness of their lives and the dispiriting purposelessness of their world was in the 1920s."

I knew about the 1920s from my grandfather, Whittaker Chambers. In 1923, he visited Western Europe, still lying in the ruins of World War I. By 1925, he saw a "dying world ... without faith, hope, character." He came across a little book by Lenin called "The Soviets at Work" that won him over to communism. Still, when later defecting from the Soviet underground, he shared a curious doubt with my grandmother. "We are leaving the winning world for the losing world."

Losing? Followers of William F. Buckley Jr. say this was my grandfather's one truly false prediction. However, such people rarely consider a basic truth about "the losing world." Tony Judt notes it, though. "Unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy; sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses."

"Ill Fares the Land" picks up on this old doubt about capitalism. It comes - with near-perfect timing - on the heels of the ongoing global financial crisis. Without the bombast of the Old Left, it questions capitalism's survival. Mr. Judt offers real-world analysis of history, rather than Chambers' personal abstractions from ideals. His thoughts come from decades of study, rather than decades of political fighting (in writing) like Chambers. Best to read "Ill Fares the Land" right after Mr. Judt's magnum opus, "Postwar," as a critical coda that asks bluntly, what next?

Mr. Judt is an excellent writer. He riffs on the Communist Manifesto, turning its famous opening ("A spectre is haunting Europe") into disquiet: "Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today." He closes with Marx's final thesis on Feuerbach: Philosophers have only interpreted the world; "the point is to change it."

I imagine my Marxist-schooled grandfather finishing "Ill Fares the Land" and exclaiming, "Now, this is the kind of thing I meant to write!"

While it may seem to parade in Marxist trappings, "Ill Fares the Land" is closer to the American book of another British transplant and radical, Thomas Paine. Paine's incendiary manifesto, "Common Sense," includes "thoughts on the present state of American affairs" and on the "present ability of America" - as does Mr. Judt's book. To understand our 21st-century ability (or "the way we live today," as Mr. Judt puts it), he reviews the 20th. He outlines the two main economic schools of liberal (Keynes) and conservative (Hayek & Co.) thought. He manages clear use of vocabulary nowadays so degraded by mass media that others use it only to touch hot buttons. Mr. Judt engages brains.

Story Continues →

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