Ill Fares the Land | Ill Fares the Land

A Book For Our Time | Ill Fares the Land | Tony Judt

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	• Ill Fares the Land Tony Judt Penguin Press HC, The, 2010 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 18 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Alternatives in a nutshell

Tony Judt's book distills cogent and critical data that should be required reading for the entire White House staff. The future of the nation and its priorities will benefit from this book.

Ill Fares the Land

This is a great book that all Americans,especially those people who consider themselves to be conservatives and/or libertarians, should read. I cannot recommend it too highly. With respect to customer service, the book arrived as promised and in the condition described by the seller.

A Book For Our Time

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
Oliver Goldsmith. The Deserted Village, 1770

Review by Alan Wheatley

Title: Ill Fares The Land
Author: Tony Judt
Publisher: The Penguin Press, New York
ISBN: 978-1-59420-276-6

Price: Varies in its current manifestation as a hard-back, but it has also emerged as an e-book and early next year will be available as a paperback. Check out online stores and local bookshops. Prices are around US$12.00, AU$30.00, GB£12.00.

I can't remember a work about politics/economics that has had such an effect on me as Ill Fares The Land. Not that I make a habit of actually reading such books, but in my 80 years on this planet I have experienced the application of both in three countries: in Britain, the country of my birth and for the first 40 odd years of my life, Canada (or more specifically Montreal) a brief sojourn in the 1950s, and now Australia, here since late 1974. But of course I have taken a lively interest in current affairs/news as reported in the media in those countries.

Tony's book is memorable for a number of reasons. He is British by birth, educated at King's College, Cambridge and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris and has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley and New York University, where he is currently University Professor and Director of the Remarque Institute, which is dedicated to the study of Europe and which he founded in 1995. He has written or edited thirteen books, contributes to The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books and The New York Times and has been awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize and in 2009 the Orwell Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

Sadly, he is now suffering from Lou Gehrig's Disease, which is terminal, and he was seriously unwell when he wrote Ill Fares The Land with the help of his family, friends and colleagues.

Fundamentally, the book suggests that for a long time economists, politicians and media commentators have focussed almost exclusively on money/the bottom line when discussing how to run our (western) countries, as if they were "businesses" and that there seems to be no room for debate about the rightness or wrongness of policies, or about public and individual good.

Everything is measured by GDP, not about whether policies are morally or ethically beneficial. In fact, we have forgotten how to talk about such things in this way.

Tony cites examples in the past and ongoing present of previously publicly-funded enterprises that have been privatized, such as railways, roads, telecommunications networks and so on. Private education and hospitals are today cited as preferred models of civic enterprise.

He points to a number of other features of life today that he sees as symptoms of our current malaise:
* Income inequality: the poor stay poor, the rich get richer;
* Lack of trust and co-operation: the decline of the homogenous state and the rise of mass migration and the movement of refugees across borders; the growth of individualism;
* Impatience and disillusion with politicians;
* The growth of gated communities;
* The growth of the popularity of tertiary business education and a fall in enrolments in arts courses;
* The rise of fear and insecurity and the growth in the number of politicians who try to reassure us by introducing controls, restriction, erecting barriers; "As global threats mount, so the attractions of order will only grow".

Tony Judt believes that it is young people who have largely turned away from political debate but who will need to think seriously about these issues since it is they who will inherit the business model we now have. His book is aimed at senior secondary students and the language he uses reflects this. As a political and economic illiterate myself I found the book easy to read and engaging in its strong arguments for a move to ethical debate rather than the political point-scoring and the reiteration of the views of powerful vested interests that fill the news and comment media.

We must restore, Tony says, the notion of the value of usefulness, of prudence, of care, and recognize past achievements.

If you're at all interested in a critique of the way many governments in the West conduct their domestic policies I urge you to read this book. It's at once refreshing and thought-provoking and may partly explain the current resurgence of activity among the very wealthy and politically powerful.

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Ill Fares The Land is one of the best and deeply critical american histoy books to come around!

Prof. Judt continues to write relevent and contemporary themes of American history as well as the world for that matter despite his ongoing illness. His mind is as sharp as ever!He consistently gives a valued criticism while not appearing to ally himself on the side of one idelogical camp or the other. He is in this graduate student's opinion a true historian who understands the nuance's of the craft of historical writing itself. I highly recommend his other books as well.

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we think about how we should live today.

In Ill Fares The Land, Tony Judt, one of our leading historians and thinkers, reveals how we have arrived at our present dangerously confused moment. Judt masterfully crystallizes what we?ve all been feeling into a way to think our way into, and thus out of, our great collective dis-ease about the current state of things.

As the economic collapse of 2008 made clear, the social contract that defined postwar life in Europe and America ? the guarantee of a basal level of security, stability and fairness -- is no longer guaranteed; in fact, it?s no longer part of the common discourse. Judt offers the language we need to address our common needs, rejecting the nihilistic individualism of the far right and the debunked socialism of the past. To find a way forward, we must look to our not so distant past and to social democracy in action: to re-enshrining fairness over mere efficiency.

Distinctly absent from our national dialogue, social democrats believe that the state can play an enhanced role in our lives without threatening our liberties. Instead of placing blind faith in the market?as we have to our detriment for the past thirty years?social democrats entrust their fellow citizens and the state itself.

Ill Fares the Land challenges us to confront our societal ills and to shoulder responsibility for the world we live in. For hope remains. In reintroducing alternatives to the status quo, Judt reinvigorates our political conversation, providing the tools necessary to imagine a new form of governance, a new way of life.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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