Tony Judt - When the Facts Change: Essays 1995 - 2010

C ONTENTS

A great thinkers final testament: a characteristically wise and forthright collection of essays from the author of Postwar and Thinking the Twentieth Century, spanning a career of extraordinary intellectual engagement. Edited and introduced by Jennifer Homans.

Tony Judts first collection of essays, Reappraisals, was centred on twentieth-century Europe in history and memory. Some of Judts most prominent and indeed controversial essays fell outside of the scope of Reappraisals, most notably his writings on the state of Israel and its relationship to Palestine. There would be time, it was thought, to fit these essays into a larger frame. Sadly, this would not be the case, at least during the authors own life.

Now, in When the Facts Change, Tony Judts widow and fellow historian, Jennifer Homans, has found the frame, gathering together important essays from the span of Judts career that chronicle both the evolution of his thought and the remarkable consistency of his passionate engagement and intellectual lan. Whether the subject is the scholarly poverty of the new social history, the willful blindness of French collective memory about what happened to the countrys Jews during World War II, or the moral challenge to Israel of the so-called Palestinian problem, the majesty of Tony Judts work lies in his combination of unsparing honesty, intellectual brilliance, and ethical clarity. When the Facts Change exemplifies the utility, indeed the necessity, of minding our history and not letting cheerful fictions suffice in its place. An emphatic demonstration of the power of a great historian to connect us more deeply to the world as it was, as it is, and as it should be, it is a fitting capstone to an extraordinary body of work.

TONY JUDT was educated at Kings College, Cambridge and the cole Normale Suprieure, Paris, and taught at Cambridge, Oxford and Berkeley. He was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University as well as founder and director of the Remarque Institute, dedicated to creating an ongoing conversation between Europe and America.

The author or editor of fourteen books, Professor Judt was a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, the New York Times and many other journals across Europe and the United States. Professor Judt is the author of The Memory Chalet, Ill Fares the Land, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, Thinking the Twentieth Century (with Timothy Snyder) and Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, which was one of the New York Times Book Reviews Ten Best Books of 2005, the winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. He died in August 2010 at the age of sixty-two.

Thinking the Twentieth Century (with Timothy Snyder)

The Memory Chalet

Ill Fares the Land

Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

The Politics of Retribution in Europe (edited with Jan Gross and Istvn Dek)

The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century

Language, Nation, and State: Identity Politics in a Multilingual Age (edited with Denis Lacorne)

A Grand Illusion?: An Essay on Europe

Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 19441956

Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France 19301982

Resistance and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe 19391948 (editor)

Socialism in Provence 18711914: A Study in the Origins of the Modern French Left

La reconstruction du Parti Socialiste 19211926

Apollos Angels: A History of Ballet

For Joe

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

QUOTATION COMMONLY ATTRIBUTED TO J OHN M AYNARD K EYNES

Other men will make history. All I can say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victimsand as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence.

A LBERT C AMUS , The Plague

The only way for me to write this introduction is to separate the man from the ideas. Otherwise, I get pulled back into the man, who I loved and was married to from 1993 until his death in 2010, rather than forward into the ideas. As you read these essays, I hope that you, too, will focus on the ideas, because they are good ideas, and they were written in good faith. In good faith may have been Tonys favorite phrase and highest standard, and he held himself to it in everything he wrote. What he meant by it, I think, was writing that is free of calculation and maneuver, intellectual or otherwise. A clean, clear, honest account.