Judt mistrusted the grand, encompassing theories of the twentieth century that answered all questions and produced inexorable outcomes. His skepticism toward Freud and Marx—especially the latter— is a recurring theme throughout his writing and caused friction with other academics in the humanities. Judt was raised in a Marxist household in London, where he watched his father fight a rearguard action against disillusionment, abandoning Stalin in favor of Lenin, then Lenin in favor of Trotsky, eventually retreating to a vernacular that “could explain anything and everything while demonstrating how everyone else had compromised and was selling out.” Marxist dialectics frustrated Judt because they are the art of always landing on your feet. The cleverest true believers parry every criticism in a way that somehow leads away from fresh thinking and back to the infallibility of dogma.
He championed George Orwell and Arthur Koestler: the men of the left who saw communism for the fraud it was and renounced it forcefully. As an apostate himself—from Marx, Zionism, and French intellectual life—Judt must have appreciated their perspective. A brilliant ten-page stretch of Thinking the Twentieth Century narrates the delegitimization of communism from World War II through Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Cultural Revolution in China, and Pol Pot’s madness in Cambodia.
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