Reappraisals
Subtitle: reflections on the forgotten twentieth century
By: Tony Judt
Publisher: William Heinemann
Published: 2008
Place of publication: London, England
Language: eng
Number of pages: 448
ISBN-13: 9780434017416
Subjects: Historiography; Twentieth century; 1900-talet; Historia; Historiografi; Geschichtsphilosophie
Description: The accelerating changes of the past generation have been accompanied by a comparably accelerated amnesia. The twentieth century has become "history" at an unprecedented rate. The world of 2007 is so utterly unlike that of even 1987, much less any earlier time, that we have lost touch with our immediate past even before we have begun to make sense of it. In less than a generation, the headlong advance of globalization, with the geographical shifts of emphasis and influence it brings in its wake, has altered the structures of thought that had been essentially unchanged since the European industrial revolution. Quite literally, we don't know where we came from. From the history of the neglect and recovery of the Holocaust and the challenge of "evil" in the understanding of the European past to the rise and fall of the "state" in public affairs and the displacement of history by "heritage," Judt takes us beyond what we think we know to show us how we came to know it and reveals how many aspects of our history have been sacrificed in the triumph of mythmaking over understanding, collective identity over truth, and denial over memory.--From amazon.com.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction. The world we have lost; title: pt. 1. The heart of darkness; title: ch. 1. Arthur Koestler, the exemplary intellectual; title: ch. 2. The elementary truths of Primo Levi; title: ch. 3. The Jewish Europe of Manès Sperber; title: ch. 4. Hannah Arendt and evil; title: pt. 2. The politics of intellectual engagement; title: ch. 5. Albert Camus : "the best man in France"; title: ch. 6. Elucubrations : the "Marxism" of Louis Althusser; title: ch. 7. Eric Hobsbawm and the romance of communism; title: ch. 8. Goodbye to all that? : Leszek Ko±akowski and the Marxist legacy; title: ch. 9. A "pope of ideas"? : Pope John Paul II and the modern world; title: ch. 10. Edward Said : the rootless cosmopolitan; title: pt. 3. Lost in transition : places and memories; title: ch. 11. The catastrophe : the fall of France, 1940; title: ch. 12. À la recherche du temps perdu : France and its pasts; title: ch. 13. The gnome in the garden : Tony Blair and Britain's "heritage"; title: ch. 14. The stateless state : why Belgium matters; title: ch. 15. Romania between history and Europe; title: ch. 16. Dark victory : Israel's six-day war; title: ch. 17. The country that wouldn't grow up; title: pt. 4. The American (half- ) century; title: ch. 18. An American tragedy? : the case of Whittaker Chambers; title: ch. 19. The crisis : Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Cuba; title: ch. 20. The illusionist : Henry Kissinger and American foreign policy; title: ch. 21. Whose story is it? : the Cold War in retrospect; title: ch. 22. The silence of the lambs : on the strange death of liberal America; title: ch. 23. The good society : Europe vs. America; title: Envoi. The social question redivivus.