The late twentieth century was blessed with brilliant academic historians whose writing had a common touch; Tony Judt was one of them. Postwar was his crowning achievement. As Europe’s divided halves were conjoined politically and economically after the Cold War, Judt united their conflicted histories. For instance, 1968 was about more than students in Paris and Prague; it was a continental mass of common causes and misunderstandings – a thwarted dash for freedom of expression and thought, from which stronger collective identities must eventually emerge.
He was also an essayist, whose work merited the over-used label of ‘polemic’ – a form that seeks truth in confrontation, not ad hominem for its own sake. The last piece he wrote was for The New York Review of Books on Czeslaw Milosz, author of The Captive Mind. Judt argued that the age of pure ideology did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall: the market prevailed and it has since subjugated minds that are born free.
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