Tony Judt citáty

Tony Robert Judt [džat] byl britský historik, univerzitní profesor, který se specializoval na moderní evropské dějiny, a veřejný intelektuál. Je známý svými esejemi, v nichž se kriticky vyjadřoval k zahraniční politice USA, státu Izrael a budoucnosti Evropy. Ve svém mládí původně inklinoval jako teenager k levicovému sionismu, nicméně nedlouho poté opustil svoji víru v agrární socialismus a marxismus a prohlašoval se za "universalistického sociálního demokrata. Wikipedia

✵ 2. leden 1948 – 6. srpen 2010  •  Další jména Тони Джъд, 토니 젓

Tony Judt: 53 citátů2 lajky

Tony Judt nejznámější citáty

„Demagogové říkají davu, co si má myslet, a když se jim z davu vrací ozvěna jejich frází, tvrdí, že jen naslouchají hlasu lidu.“

Zdroj: [Drobník, Jaroslav, Genové inženýrství a evropská demokracie, vesmir.cz, 2010, 2011-02-06]

„Poláci a Židé toho mají společného mnohem více. Obě komunity mají tendenci si myslet, že pokud nevyhlásíte své ústřední postavení jasně a s přehnanou naléhavostí, neustále vám hrozí marginalizace.“

Zdroj: [Dějiny idejí a ideologií ve 20. století promýšleli v rozhovoru dva historici, rozhlas.cz, 2014-01-21, 2014-01-23, http://www.rozhlas.cz/mozaika/literatura/_zprava/dejiny-ideji-a-ideologii-ve-20-stoleti-promysleli-v-rozhovoru-dva-historici--1306064]

„Mladí důstojníci, s nimiž jsem byl v kontaktu, pocházeli především z metropolí a měst, ne z kibuců, a díky nim jsem pochopil, co jsem měl chápat už dávno: že sen o venkovském socialismu je právě jen sen. Těžiště židovského státu budou a musí představovat města.“

Thinking the Twentieth Century

„Zkrátka a dobře – lidem, kteří mluví o všem, hrozí ztráta schopnosti mluvit o něčem.“

Thinking the Twentieth Century

„A tak pokaždé, když nějaký trouba prohlásí, že Saddám Husajn je druhý Hitler, musíme se do sporu vložit a tyhle zjednodušující pitomosti zkomplikovat. Realitě odpovídající zmatek je mnohem lepší než elegantní nepravdy.“

Thinking the Twentieth Century

„dějiny nacismu – a vůbec všech forem totalitarismu – nelze plně pochopit, pokud je omezíme na vyprávění o zlých lidech, kteří se vědomě a záměrně dopouštějí zločinů s cílem páchat zlo“

Thinking the Twentieth Century

Tony Judt citáty a výroky

„Ovšem psát a vyjadřovat se s plným vědomím o svém omezeném vlivu je u intelektuálů, alespoň podle prvního zdání, výjimečně bezúčelný podnik – a přitom je to to nejlepší, v co můžeme doufat.“

Thinking the Twentieth Century

„Namísto abychom veřejně přiznali potřebu určitého společenského vybavení (muzeí, sportovišť, veřejné dopravy), vyhýbáme se nepopulárnímu danění tím, že podobné výdaje kryjeme z loterií – jichž se v disproporční výši účastní, a tedy je financují hůře informované a chudší segmenty společnosti. Britští dělníci, kteří možná za celý život nenavštívili divadlo, operu či balet, dnes svými sklony k hazardu financují kulturní aktivity úzce vymezené elity, jejíž daňové břemeno se úměrně tomu snížilo.“

Thinking the Twentieth Century

„Schopnost evokovat Hitlera, Osvětim nebo Mnichov má své přednosti: alespoň se tak současnost dovolává minulosti, místo aby ji zcela ignorovala. Dnes to činíme amatérsky a stále více způsobem, kterým sami sobě škodíme, ale aspoň to děláme. Nemáme se těchto aktivit vzdát, nýbrž provádět je s vyšší mírou historické informovanosti a vnímavosti.“

Thinking the Twentieth Century

„V následujících letech Izrael znehodnotí, podkopá a nakonec zničí význam a využitelnost holokaustu a omezí jej na to, co v něm již dnes přiznaně mnoho lidí vidí, totiž izraelskou výmluvu pro vlastní neblahé počínání.“

Thinking the Twentieth Century

„Ztráta víry samozřejmě zdaleka není tak atraktivní jako víra; i když odklon od ní může být racionální, ztrácíte tím víc, než získáváte.“

Thinking the Twentieth Century

„Celá kultura „cesty vzhůru“ do Izraele, alija, předpokládala přetnutí všech spojnic a zájmů směrem k diaspoře. Předáci mládežnického hnutí velmi dobře věděli, že pokud teenager setrvá v Anglii či Francii i po dobu univerzitního studia, je nejspíš pro Izrael navždycky ztracený. Oficiální postoj byl proto takový, že kandidáti univerzitního studia se mají evropských přijetí vzdát, zapojit se několik let v kibucu při sklizni pomerančů, řízení traktorů nebo třídění banánů a pak, pokud to okolnosti dovolí, se komunitě nabídnout pro možnost vyššího vzdělání – přičemž se předpokládá, že kibuc kolektivně rozhodne, jaká studia (pokud vůbec nějaká) mají absolvovat, a hlavním kritériem při tom byl jejich budoucí užitek pro kolektiv.“

Thinking the Twentieth Century

„Odjet do Španělska bojovat za republiku bylo nesmírně lákavé. Byl to způsob, jak se stát antifašistou, v atraktivním prostředí se zapojit do společnosti čelící velmi prostým dilematům.“

Thinking the Twentieth Century

„Marxismus je sekulární náboženství – to je evidentní. Ale které náboženství vlastně následuje, není vždycky zřejmé. Zahrnuje v sobě velkou část tradiční křesťanské eschatologie: pád člověka, Mesiáše, jeho utrpení, zástupné vykoupení lidstva, spásu, zmrtvýchvstání a tak dál.“

Thinking the Twentieth Century

„stejně jako mnoho dalších přeživších se v této době cítili bezpečněji v poraženém Německu než v osvobozených zemích na východě.“

Thinking the Twentieth Century

„Speciálně v Československu dospěl ústup od politiky a názorová privatizace od rozdrcení pražského jara velmi daleko. „Normalizace“, tedy čistky, jež odstranily tisíce mužů a žen ze všech veřejných či veřejně viditelných funkcí a profesí, proběhla úspěšně. Češi a Slováci se vzdali veřejného života a místo toho se uchýlili k materiálnímu konzumentství a formálnímu politickému konformismu.“

Thinking the Twentieth Century

Tony Judt: Citáty anglicky

“One of the very few things that I know I believe strongly is that we must learn how to make a better world out of usable pasts rather than dreaming of infinite futures. It’s a very late-Enlightenment view that says that the only way to make a better future is to believe that the future will be better. Smarter people than me used to believe very differently and I think it is time to listen to them once again.”

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in Tony Judt: the last interview http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/tony-judt-interview by Peter Jukes (2010)

“So I certainly don’t regard myself as brave. I just see myself—if I want to indulge a little immodesty—as rather more honest and outspoken than some other people I know.”

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Zdroj: Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012), Ch. 4 : King’s and Kibbutzim: Cambridge Zionist

“Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within.”

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Ill Fares the Land (2010), Ch. 1 : The Way We Live Now
Kontext: Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within. The impact of material differences takes a while to show up: but in due course competition for status and goods increases; people feel a growing sense of superiority (or inferiority) based on their possessions; prejudice towards those on the lower ranks of the social ladder hardens; crime spikes and the pathologies of social disadvantage become ever more marked. The legacy of unregulated wealth creation is bitter indeed.

“I hate publicity, celebrity, fame, and notoriety, all of which are associated with controversy in its public form. But, in fairness, all my life I've been rather upfront with my opinions and never hidden them on grounds of conformity or (I fear) politesse. However, until the wretched Polish consulate affair, I don't think I was ever controversial—I was certainly not known outside of the hermetic little world of the academy, and my contrarian scholarly writings aroused no great fuss.”

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quoted in Evan R. Goldstein, "The Trials of Tony Judt", The Chronicle of Higher Education (January 06, 2010)

“Europe is the smallest continent. It is not really even a continent—just a subcontinental annexe to Asia. The whole of Europe (excluding Russia and Turkey) comprises just five and a half million square kilometers: less than two thirds the area of Brazil, not much more than half the size of China or the US. It is dwarfed by Russia, which covers seventeen million square kilometers. But in the intensity of its internal differences and contrasts, Europe is unique.”

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Tony Judt kniha Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

Preface & Acknowledgements
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)

“We face today two practical dilemmas. The first can be succinctly described as the return of the ‘social question’. For Victorian reformers—or American activists of the pre-1914 age of reform—the challenge posed by the social question of their time was straightforward: how was a liberal society to respond to the poverty, overcrowding, dirt, malnutrition and ill health of the new industrial cities? How were the working masses to be brought into the community—as voters, as citizens, as participants—without upheaval, protest and even revolution? What should be done to alleviate the suffering and injustices to which the urban working masses were now exposed and how was the ruling elite of the day to be brought to see the need for change?
The history of the 20th century West is in large measure the history of efforts to answer these questions. The responses proved spectacularly successful: not only was revolution avoided but the industrial proletariat was integrated to a remarkable degree. Only in countries where any liberal reform was prevented by authoritarian rulers did the social question rephrase itself as a political challenge, typically ending in violent confrontation. In the middle of the 19th century, sharp-eyed observers like Karl Marx had taken it for granted that the only way the inequities of industrial capitalism could be overcome was by revolution. The idea that they could be dissolved peacefully into New Deals, Great Societies and welfare states simply never would have occurred to him.”

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Ill Fares the Land (2010), Ch. 5 : What Is to be Done?

“If the era of political irresponsibility in France lasted from 1918 to 1958, the age of moral irresponsibility may be said to have begun in the mid-thirties and endured for the best part of four decades.”

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Introduction: The Misjudgment of Paris
The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (1998)

“All change is disruptive. We have seen that the specter of terrorism is enough to cast stable democracies into turmoil. Climate change will have even more dramatic consequences. Men and women will be thrown back upon the resources of the state. They will look to their political leaders and representatives to protect them: open societies will once again be urged to close in upon themselves, sacrificing freedom for ‘security’. The choice will no longer be between the state and the market, but between two sorts of state. It is thus incumbent upon us to re-conceive the role of government. If we do not, others will.”

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Ill Fares the Land (2010), Introduction

“Political skepticism is the source of so many of our dilemmas. Even if free markets worked as advertised, it would be hard to claim that they constituted a sufficient basis for the well-lived life. So what precisely is it that we find lacking in unrestrained financial capitalism, or ‘commercial society’ as the 18th century had it? What do we find instinctively amiss in our present arrangements and what can we do about them? What is it that offends our sense of propriety when faced with unfettered lobbying by the wealthy at the expense of everyone else? What have we lost?
We are all children of the Greeks. We intuitively grasp the need for a sense of moral direction: it is not necessary to be familiar with Socrates to feel that the unexamined life is not worth much. Natural Aristotelians, we assume that a just society is one in which justice is habitually practiced; a good society one in which people behave well. But in order for such an implicitly circular account to convince, we need to agree on the meaning of ‘just’ or ‘well’.”

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Ill Fares the Land (2010), Ch. 5 : What Is to be Done?

“From the end of World War I until the middle of the middle of the 1970s, French public life was shaped and misshaped by three overlapping and intersecting forms of collective and individual irresponsibility. The first of these was political. Reading the history of interwar France, one is struck again and again by the incompetence, the insouciance and the culpable negligence of the men who governed the country and represented its citizens. This is not a political observation, in the partisan sense, but rather a cultural one.”

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Introduction: The Misjudgment of Paris
The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (1998)

“Sixty years after Hitler's death, his war and its consequences are entering history. Postwar in Europe lasted a very long time, but it is finally coming to a close.”

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Tony Judt kniha Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

Introduction
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)

“ What’s missing from public conversation and public policy conversation is precisely a sort of moral underpinning, a sense of the moral purposes that bind people together in functional societies. And part of the attraction of someone who otherwise didn’t appeal to me in the least—like, say, Pope John Paul II—was how he managed to connect with young people. Whether it was in Eastern Europe or Latin America or wherever, his was the sense of an absolutely, unambiguously, morally noncompromising view about what is right and what is wrong. It seems to me that we need to reintroduce some of that. We need to reintroduce confidently and unashamedly that kind of language into the public realm. And not expel it, so to speak, into church for Sunday. It’s not only on Sunday that some things are right and some things are wrong.”

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quoted in "Talking With Tony Judt", The Nation (April 29, 2010) by Christine Smallwood

“In practice, the writer or scholar who aspires to that public position which defines intellectuals and distinguishes them from mere scribblers has always had to choose between being the apologist for rulers or an advisor to the people; the tragedy of the twentieth century is that these two functions have ceased to exist independently of one another, and intellectuals like Sartre who thought they were fulfilling one role were inevitably drawn to play both. If their successors, in France or elsewhere, are truly to put this past behind them, it will not be enough to recognize past mistakes. It will also be necessary to accept that entailed in the very meaning for modern society of the term intellectual are a number of roles that writers and scholars today may no longer wish to fulfill; indeed, a refusal to occupy the post of the (engaged) intellectual may be the most positive of the steps modern thinkers can take in any serious effort to come to terms with their own responsibility for our common recent past.”

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Zdroj: Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (1992), p. 319

“Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.”

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Ill Fares the Land (2010), Introduction

“We don’t live in a world of fixed historical laws that says the—as you describe it—liberal state was born at a particular time, lived and died, and that’s what we’re stuck with. But there are reasons why some things are much harder to retain, to invent, to reinvent than others.”

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quoted in "Talking With Tony Judt", The Nation (April 29, 2010) by Christine Smallwood

“The past was neither as good nor as bad as we suppose: it was just different. If we tell ourselves nostalgic stories, we shall never engage the problems that face us in the present—and the same is true if we fondly suppose that our own world is better in every way. The past really is another country: we cannot go back. However, there is something worse than idealizing the past—or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it.”

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Ill Fares the Land (2010), Ch. 2 : The World We Have Lost

“God knows I can think of enough things that I did wrong both personally and as part of my cohort. But I never abandoned what I thought of as the benefits of the postwar consensus in favour of sectional advantage. Actually, I was always a bit awkward in this as other respects. As you know, I was against root-and-branch school comprehensivization on the grounds that the postwar arrangements combining meritocracy with opportunity, while imperfect and logically indefensible, were better than the radical schemes on offer – which have trashed much of the pedagogical gains of the early postwar decades.”

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in Tony Judt: the last interview http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/tony-judt-interview by Peter Jukes (2010)

“In writing this book, I hope I have offered some guidance to those—the young especially—trying to articulate their objections to our way of life. However, this is not enough. As citizens of a free society, we have a duty to look critically at our world. But if we think we know what is wrong, we must act upon that knowledge. Philosophers, it was famously observed, have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

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Ill Fares the Land (2010), Conclusion: What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?

“What, then, is to be done? We have to begin with the state: as the incarnation of collective interests, collective purposes, and collective goods. If we cannot learn to “think the state” once again, we shall not get very far. But what precisely should the state do? Minimally, it should not duplicate unnecessarily: as Keynes wrote, “The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.” And we know from the bitter experience of the past century that there are some things that states should most certainly not be doing.”

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" What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/12/17/what-is-living-and-what-is-dead-in-social-democrac/" (2009)

“I am, I discover in late middle age, a work in progress.”

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quoted in Samuel Moyn, "Intellectuals, Reason, and History: In Memory of Tony Judt", H-France Salon (2012)

“Even in Scandinavia, where social democratic institutions were far more culturally ingrained, membership of the EU—or even just participation in the World Trade Organization and other international agencies—appeared to constrain locally-initiated legislation. In short, social democracy seemed doomed by that same internationalization which its early theorists had so enthusiastically adumbrated as the future of capitalism.
From this perspective, social democracy—like liberalism—was a byproduct of the rise of the European nation-state: a political idea keyed to the social challenges of industrialization in developed societies. Not only was there no ‘socialism’ in America, but social democracy as a working compromise between radical goals and liberal traditions lacked widespread support in any other continent. There was no shortage of enthusiasm for revolutionary socialism in much of the non-Western world, but the distinctively European compromise did not export well.”

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Ill Fares the Land (2010), Conclusion: What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?

“Unfortunately, pragmatism is not always good politics. The greatest asset of mid-20th century social democracy—its willingness to compromise its own core beliefs in the name of balance, tolerance, fairness and freedom—now looks more like weakness: a loss of nerve in the face of changed circumstances. We find it hard to look past those compromises to recall the qualities that informed progressive thought in the first place: what the early 20th century syndicalist Edouard Berth termed “a revolt of the spirit against... a world in which man was threatened by a monstrous moral and metaphysical materialism.””

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Ill Fares the Land (2010), Ch. 4 : Goodbye to All That?

“The case for reviving the state does not rest uniquely upon its contributions to modern society as a collective project; there is a more urgent consideration. We have entered an age of fear. Insecurity is once again an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Insecurity born of terrorism, of course; but also, and more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of our daily life. And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have also lost control, to forces beyond their reach.”

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Ill Fares the Land (2010), Ch. 6 : The Shape of Things to Come

“It would seem to follow that the ‘invisible hand’ is not much help when it comes to practical legislation. There are too many areas of life where we cannot be relied upon to advance our collective interests merely by doing what we think is best for each of us. Today, when the market and the free play of private interests so obviously do not come together to collective advantage, we need to know when to intervene.”

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Ill Fares the Land (2010), Ch. 6 : The Shape of Things to Come

“History is not written as it was experienced, nor should it be. The inhabitants of the past know better than we do what it was like to live there, but they were not well placed, most of them, to understand what was happening to them and why.”

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Introduction: The Misjudgment of Paris
The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (1998)

“This book is about three Frenchmen who lived and wrote against the grain of these three ages of irresponsibility. They were very different men and would have been surprised to think of themselves as a group, yet they have something rather distinctive in common. All three played an important role in the France of their lifetime but lived at a slightly awkward tangent to their contemporaries. For much of his adult life each was an object of dislike, suspicion, contempt, or hatred for many of his peers and contemporaries; only at the end of their long lives were Léon Blum and Raymond Aron, for quite different reasons, able to relax into the comfort of near-universal admiration, respect, and, in some quarters, adulation. Camus, who had experienced all three by the age of thirty-five, died twelve years later an insecure and much-maligned figure; it would be thirty years before his reputation would recover.”

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Introduction: The Misjudgment of Paris
The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (1998)

“My concern tonight is the following: Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?”

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" What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/12/17/what-is-living-and-what-is-dead-in-social-democrac/" (2009)

“Where does that leave me? Trying, as usual, to square general truths with particular circumstances. That’s the difference between pure ethics and political theory; but it isn’t resolved by simply abandoning the tension and sliding to one end of the pole.”

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in Tony Judt: the last interview http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/tony-judt-interview by Peter Jukes (2010)

“What did trust, cooperation, progressive taxation and the interventionist state bequeath to western societies in the decades following 1945? The short answer is, in varying degrees, security, prosperity, social services and greater equality. We have grown accustomed in recent years to the assertion that the price paid for these benefits—in economic inefficiency, insufficient innovation, stifled entrepreneurship, public debt and a loss of private initiative—was too high. Most of these criticisms are demonstrably false.”

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Ill Fares the Land (2010), Ch. 2 : The World We Have Lost

“The ‘false precision’ of which Maynard Keynes accused his economist critics is with us still. Worse: we have smuggled in a misleadingly ‘ethical’ vocabulary to bolster our economic arguments, furnishing us with a self-satisfied gloss upon crassly utilitarian calculations. When imposing welfare cuts on the poor, for example, legislators in the UK and US alike have taken a singular pride in the ‘hard choices’ they have had to make.”

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Ill Fares the Land (2010), Ch. 1 : The Way We Live Now

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