



Ill Fares the Land. By Tony Judt. Penguin Press; 237 pages; $25.95. Allen Lane; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

“ILL Fares the Land” is poignant and arresting, both for who wrote it and for what it says. Its author, a British 20th- century historian at New York University, is dying of motor-neurone disease that has robbed him of movement and will soon rob him of speech. He dictated this cri de coeur about the need for social democracy to an amanuensis.

Social democracy, which Tony Judt calls “the prose of European politics”, is what Americans call liberalism. Though wounded as a theory, it limps on under assumed names as the practice of government on both sides of the Atlantic for want of credible alternatives. As an idealist, Mr Judt hopes for a revived social democracy that will again speak its name. As a realist, he recognises that it may be grievously, even terminally vulnerable.

He writes, he says, for the young, who have to deal with the mess he believes his own generation has made of Western society. He scolds it for letting inequalities grow. Not everyone will like the tone, although such charges are today harder to brush off than in the boom years. Preaching aside, his key point is sound: neither right nor left has any longer a plausible story to tell about the state.

Whichever label you use, liberalism or social democracy was the bipartisan outlook that underpinned American and European politics for 30 years after 1945. It achieved a balance between market and state. It oversaw a fruitful truce between business and labour that produced a golden period for capitalism with benefits all round. Then came stagflation, taxpayer revolts, fiscal crisis and a triumphant revival of free-market ideas. For the next 30 years, a new shrink-the-state “paradigm” ruled, with its own promise of open horizons and benefits all round. Now weakened and indebted governments are counted on for handouts from every side, banks and businesses included. Nobody is sure what to believe.

Though many will agree with that diagnosis, Mr Judt himself is hesitant about the cure. Ideally he wants another post-1945 social compact. But he is too aware of the internal conditions that made it possible—economic depression, sacrifice in war, the totalitarian shadow—to think it restorable on the earlier terms. The external conditions have changed utterly as well. The West has lost economic eminence. Increasingly social democracy must borrow from foreigners to pay for itself. That cannot last.

The future is not inevitably bleak for the Euro-American way. As the rest of the world grows richer, perhaps it too will see the benefits of a compact that, for those lucky enough to enjoy it, struck a unique balance between economic growth, social equity and personal freedom. Then again, perhaps not, he says. Mr Judt explores neither possibility in depth, ending instead with an eye cast back to the past century. How easily, he reminds readers, stable-looking societies can totter. His final case for social democracy is a “show-me-a-better-foxhole” plea. Nothing else looks more desirable. Without it, much that Western people value may be lost. “If social democracy has a future,” Mr Judt concludes, “it will be as a social democracy of fear.”