Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century by Tony Judt

"We in the West have made haste to dispense whenever possible with the economic, intellectual, and institutional baggage of the 20th century," he warns. Thus we try "actively to forget rather than remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion".

These essays, written between 1994 and 2006, seek to redress that balance. They echo some of the preoccupations of Judt's magisterial history of Europe since 1945, Postwar (2005), but with a different focus, notably on currents in European intellectual history, and on recent developments in the United States.

A central theme is the responsibility of intellectuals, especially Left-wing ones. Part one's essays examine intellectuals grappling with the pull of communism in the 1930s to 1950s, a milieu shattered by the Holocaust.

Writing of the Galician-Jewish intellectual Manès Sperber, Judt observes wryly that "you don't have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps" because Sperber's generation of Jews best understood "the extermination of the past".

As in his earlier work on France, Judt is scathing of most of the European Left's failure to face up to the realities of communism, either in the Western parties or the Eastern Bloc after 1945. He champions anti-communist Left intellectuals such as Arthur Koestler and Raymond Aron. This remains a deeply unfashionable position on the Left, but Judt is insistent on its unfinished business in confronting Stalinism.

Part two examines "the politics of intellectual engagement" of figures including Albert Camus, Edward Said and Leszek Kolakowski — the latter an especially brilliant exposition of its subject's continued relevance. Again Judt finds the Left badly wanting. His demolition of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser is among the most unforgiving critiques I have read.

And while Judt acknowledges his debt to Britain's greatest Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, his review of the grand old man's autobiography is unflinching.

Hobsbawm stuck with the Communist Party for most of his life: Judt judges that "rested and untroubled, he has somehow slept through the terror and shame of the age".

In part three, "Lost in transition", Judt addresses the recent histories of countries including France, Belgium and Romania: here, his skill lies in using what might seem peripheral examples to illuminate much broader issues. Thus through his deft sketch of the appalling mess that is modern-day Belgium, he articulates another major theme of this collection, the renewed role for the state, standing between the individual and ever-morepowerful global forces.

The later essays also address an increasingly urgent problem for Judt, a Jewish intellectual: Israel's role as aggressor and its failure to find a peace settlement with the Palestinians. His trenchant views have won him the enmity of America's pro-Israel lobby: he now receives death threats.

Since moving from Britain in 1987 to teach at New York University, Judt has also paid increasing attention to America, the subject of part four of this book. Once again, Judt is not afraid to antagonise the Left. His sympathetic view of Whittaker Chambers, the man who betrayed the spy Alger Hiss, provoked outrage when originally published. But increasingly he despairs of the state of the US under George W Bush, and of the retreat of liberal intellectuals over Iraq, whom he lambasts in a controversial 2006 essay from the London Review of Books. Indeed in one recent interview he confessed to being "tempted at least twice a day to go back to Europe".

Yet if he ever does so, he is cleareyed too about the failures and intellectual vacuity of New Labour.

Judt's task for the European Left — to "reconstruct a case for the activist state" — is ambitious. But this volume at the very least refutes the assumption that most annoys him, that "the past has nothing of interest to teach us".

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

As Tony Judt argues persuasively in "Reappraisals", we have entered an 'age of forgetting.' Today's world is so utterly unlike the world of just twenty years ago that we have set aside our immediate past even before we could make sense of it. We literally don't know where we came from, and the results of this burgeoning ignorance are proving calamitous, with the clear prospect of worse to come. We have lost touch with three generations of international policy debate, social thought and public-spirited social activism. We no longer know how to discuss such concepts and we have forgotten the role once played by intellectuals in debating, transmitting and defending the ideas that shaped their time."In Reappraisals", Tony Judt resurrects key aspects of the world we have lost and reminds us how important they still are to us: now and to our hopes for the future. Judt draws provocative connections between a dazzling range of subjects, from the history of the neglect and recovery of the Holocaust and the challenge of 'evil' in understanding the European past, to the rise and fall of the state in public affairs and the displacement of history by 'heritage'. Ranging with his trademark acuity and elan from Belgium to Israel, from the memory of Marxism to the practice of foreign policy, he takes us beyond what we think we know to show us how we came to know it, and reveals how much of our history has been sacrificed in the triumph of myth-making over understanding and denial over memory. His book is a road map back to the historical sense we urgently need.