Critique de Reappraisals par Josh

Reappraisals collects several of Tony Judt’s essays, many first appearing in the New York Review of Books. Until his death in 2010, Judt likely knew as much about 19th–20th century Europe as any living historian, and it shows. He can be an intimidating reviewer - fair but, when warranted, scathing.

The subjects range widely. His treatment of Hannah Arendt is tough but balanced: he accepts the criticisms of her research rigor yet argues that, even when she missed details, she grasped the big truths.

His piece on Edward Said is notably warm - partly an obituary for a friend. Judt disagreed with the central thesis of Orientalism, but admired Said’s intellectual honesty. He also notes that, despite Said’s vehement criticism of Israel, he never flirted with supporting Hamas, which both he and Judt regarded as corrupt, incompetent, and harmful to the Palestinian people.

Judt saves some of his harshest barbs for the American center-left circa 2006, which he portrays as standing for little beyond providing intellectual cover for the right. Curiously, he never engages Noam Chomsky, whose critiques of mainstream liberal institutions (e.g., the New York Times) often parallel Judt’s. Whether Judt considered Chomsky marginal, or more European than American in outlook, is unclear.

Among historians, John Lewis Gaddis receives the sharpest critique. Judt argues that while Gaddis is authoritative on the American experience of the Cold War, he is strikingly incurious about how the conflict looked from elsewhere; secondary powers become mere proxies, with few independent aims. Even his grasp of Russia appears limited. (When I read We Now Know ~20 years ago, I was surprised by Gaddis’s admission that he didn’t read Russian and depended on assistants for the newly opened Soviet archives.)

Most academics covered get a mix of praise and censure. An exception is Louis Althusser, who Judt deems a charlatan peddling gibberish. As a student, Judt sat in on an Althusser lecture and found it impenetrable; years later, after Althusser strangled his wife and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, Judt’s question became how someone so evidently unwell rose to such intellectual prominence in France.

One of the most interesting essays is Judt's appraisal of Nixon-Kissinger's foreign policy. He notes that even critics of Nixon and Kissinger are often apt to give them props for their foreign policy accomplishments but argues that in fact their foreign policy was often a disaster. He argues that this was largely because of N&K's mutual obsession with secrecy and with keeping power tightly concentrated. Both men favored backroom deals negotiated directly and outside the regular policy establishment. The results were sometimes catastrophic, as in Cambodia where U.S. military intervention paved the way for the rise of Pol Pot. Even some of the dynamic duo's "successes" look less impressive in hindsight: The CIA's infamous overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile served some short term U.S. policy aims, but at the cost of poisoning U.S. relations with Latin America for generations (they still haven't recovered).

As with any essay collection readers are likely to find some of Judt's "reappraisals" more interesting than others. But, in all of them he demonstrates a impressively deep understanding of his subjects and an masterful ability to tell interesting stories without sacrificing intellectual rigor.