On Ill Fares the Land

Tony Judt wrote Ill Fares the Land, published in 2010, as a dying man's argument to the young. A great historian of postwar Europe, paralyzed by the disease that would soon kill him, Judt set down a passionate, urgent case that something had gone badly wrong in the way modern societies organized their common life, and that the generation coming up needed to recover a confidence and a vocabulary that his own generation had carelessly let slip away. It is a short book, more sermon than treatise, and it is animated by a sense that time is short, for the author and perhaps for the democratic settlement he cherished.

His diagnosis centers on what he saw as the triumph of a narrow economic way of thinking, the reduction of every public question to one of efficiency, cost, and private gain. For three decades, Judt argued, Western societies had been governed by the assumption that the pursuit of material self-interest through markets was the highest social good, that government was inherently suspect, that the only questions worth asking about any policy were whether it was profitable and efficient. In the course of this, he contended, people had lost the ability even to think about public life in moral terms, to ask whether an arrangement was just, or decent, or good for the shared society, rather than merely whether it paid.

Against this, Judt sought to recover the case for an active public realm and for the social-democratic achievements of the mid-twentieth century, the public institutions, the shared provision, the sense of collective responsibility, that had, in his view, produced the most decent and secure societies in history and were being dismantled and forgotten. He was not naive about their flaws, but he insisted that the wholesale abandonment of the idea that society has collective obligations to its members, that there are goods we hold and provide in common, had impoverished public life and corroded the trust and solidarity on which democracy depends.

The book's deepest concern is with the loss of a language. Judt argued that his contemporaries had lost the very vocabulary in which to make moral arguments about public life, and that recovering that vocabulary, the capacity to argue about justice, fairness, and the common good rather than only about efficiency and growth, was an urgent democratic task. He wanted to give the young permission and tools to think about politics in terms larger than the market, to ask not only what works or what pays but what kind of society we ought to want.

The book belongs in a library of the republic as an impassioned argument about the moral foundations of public life and the dangers of reducing citizenship to economics. It sits under the lens of showing up, because its call is ultimately for renewed engagement with the shared public world, and it converses with Putnam on civic decline and with the broader works on democratic health throughout this collection. Ill Fares the Land is in copyright and widely available in print and digital editions. It is brief and stirring. Read it as the urgent testament of a serious mind, arguing that a society must be able to talk about more than money if it hopes to remain free and decent.