What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?

[Tetro Kornbluth]

I find Tony Judt a bit of a self-righteous bore sometimes (at least in his Postwar) and curiously obsessed with the history of the Marxism and Communism and yet only distantly with the Soviet Union (It's complicated).

I would also disagree with the whole Europe-America binary he employs which yet again pretends that 'Europe' (and Judt should really know not to do this) is a singular entity rather than a collective of over 50 nation states all with their different politics and systems of government

I like what he has to say about Clinton however - pretty much a perfect summing up of his time in office. And also on economism.

I'm taking it that Judt is confabulating 'the chicago school' with *shudder* 'neo-liberalism' in general.

As an otherwise social democrat I find it's mixed bag though he is surely true correct that social democracy is now identifiable as a conservative force. What he doesn't argue, which he perhaps should, is that that is its problem.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

I find Tony Judt a bit of a self-righteous bore sometimes (at least in his Postwar) and curiously obsessed with the history of the Marxism and Communism and yet only distantly with the Soviet Union (It's complicated).

Actually, he came off as quite conservative in Postwar, so something like this came off as a surprise.

Still, you can't begrudge a recent past historian like himself of seeing the value of social democracy through a twentieth century lens. The triumph of social democracy in the West was a twentieth century product.

That's not surprising (I've never read all of Postwar only large chunks of it - but I've read many of his online article like the one there) he is essentially a conservative social democrat. If that makes sense. Or if the representation of European social democracy the moment it seized to be 'reformist' and started being conservative - he's even going nostalgia for the 50s and 60s (though thankfully not in the way others are nostalgic are those particular decades).

I value him as a historian, I just said that he is a bit of bore sometimes. Especially on Marxism and its relationship to European especially French intellectuals.