Tony Judt

History writing can be perceived as one of the formative cornerstones of modern societies. What historians research and write yields the possibility of influencing a whole generation of people, especially since the late eighteenth century, when the ascendancy of the nation-state as the dominating political entity in the (Western) hemisphere began. Thus, it could be viewed as equally important how the experiences and becoming of historians, who consider themselves and are widely considered as intellectuals, shape their opinions that they later disseminate widely and sometimes vigorously.  Here, Tony Judt and Eric Hobsbawm are two cases in point. The essay explores different themes and elements of their way to becoming acknowledged as public intellectuals, narrating an interplay between the historians’ paths and their academic and essayistic output.

Najobszerniejszy jak dotąd wybór twórczości eseistycznej Krzysztofa Czyżewskiego umiejscawia Europę Środkową w samym środku najważniejszych dla współczesnego świata pytań i problemów: kryzysu wspólnotowości, pogłębiających się podziałów i coraz ostrzejszych wojen kulturowych.
Dla współtwórcy ośrodka „Pogranicze” Europa Środkowa nie jest tylko geopolityką i nie ma – jak chciał Peter Handke – znaczenia „wyłącznie meteorologicznego”. Jawi się bardziej jako etos i postawa, która wykorzenieniu przeciwstawia przynależność, kompleksowi prowincjonalizmu – siłę prowincji, a ostro zarysowanym granicom – przestrzeń przenikania i współistnienia.
Czyżewski zawzięcie poszukuje żywej i wychylonej ku przyszłości, scalającej narracji, zdolnej stworzyć przeciwwagę narodowych mitów, tak silnie określających naszą rzeczywistość w ostatnich dwóch stuleciach. W leksykonie najważniejszych dla niego pojęć znajdują się zapomniane słowa, takie jak „agora”, „pogranicze”, „obcowanie”, „tkanka łączna” czy magiczny „neimar” – budowniczy mostów.
W swoich eseistycznych peregrynacjach podąża po mapie wyznaczonej przez outsiderów, wygnańców i kontestatorów, wędrownych artystów czy niesfornych intelektualistów, dla których Europa pozostawała i pozostaje ciągle niezrealizowanym w pełni projektem. Często przywołuje Mickiewicza, Vincenza, Rotha, Stempowskiego, Giedroycia, Kołakowskiego, Tischnera, Barańczaka, Venclovę, a nade wszystko Miłosza, którego jest wyjątkowym i wnikliwym czytelnikiem.

How do we build civil society? How does a society repair itself after violence? How do we live in a world with others different from ourselves? These questions lie at the heart of Krzysztof Czyzewski's writing and his work with Fundacja Pogranicze, the Borderland Foundation, at the border of Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus. Writing from the heartland of Europe's violence and creativity, Czyzewski seeks to explain how we can relate better to each other and to our diverse communities. Building on examples of places and people in East-Central Europe, Czyzewski's essays offer readers concepts such as the invisible bridge, the nejmar (the bridge-builder), and the xenopolis (the city of others), which create community throughout the world. The three sections of the book-concepts, places, and practices-show how this cultural work bridges the divide between concepts and practices and offers a new map of Europe. Ultimately, Czyzewski hopes we can all move toward xenopolis, toward the understanding that others are, in fact, ourselves. This book offers an introduction to Czyzewski's work, with framing essays by specialists in Central and East European history.

Far from exclusively challenging Europe's present and future, the current cri-ses are also changing its relations to the past. The analogy with the 1930s has been repeatedly evoked as a key for understanding the current European crisis. Nevertheless , history, even the 'history of the present' (as paradoxical as it may seem), is always an essay in comparison and contextualization. The aim of this paper is therefore to rethink today's European crises within a broad historical perspective by proposing a historiographical overview of the crucial transitional periods in the twentieth century, such as post-1989, post-1945, and post-1918. Moreover, it intends to conduct a critical assessment of some master narratives of twentieth-century Europe and their effort to combine in many contradictory ways the post-1914 catastrophes with the post-1945 reconstruction. It is particularly designed to re-frame the 'history of the present' from two points of view: 1. how do some master narratives conceive the both catastrophic and progressive experiences of the twentieth century and the ways in which they still affect and shape the present? 2. in what sense and to what extent is it possible to understand over time the dynamics of both destruction and reconstruction, destabilization and stabilization, disintegration and integration?

The European Union has in the past few years made major steps to constitute itself as a polity, beyond the nation-states of which it is composed. Much of the debate about European integration in political theory, however, keeps adopting a purely sceptical look that fails to perceive that which is likely to be the most significant novelty of the process, namely its character as the founding of a polity through the deliberate interaction of the members of that new polity. Such founding, a rare event in political history, takes place against the background of the historical experiences made and with the resources provided across the history of political ideas. At the same time, it takes place in a given context, the present situation of –as one may call it– ‘globalization’ or emerging ‘empire’ and tries to place the new polity in response to the problematic features of that situation. Therefore, European integration needs to be analyzed in terms that reach beyond legal codification of existing structures and beyond institutional architecture and address the question of the ‘normative self-understanding’ of the emerging polity, in other words, the question of the self-understanding of European modernity (Habermas 2001).
It is exactly this self-understanding, which is connected with the issues of European citizenship, Europeanness/Europeanity, “European identity”, all themes that lie at the core of the INCLUDE project:  https://www.include-erasmus.eu/. In this perspective, this working paper argues that it will be proved fruitful for the project –and the concomitant scenarios– to be based on more hermeneutic/interpretative approaches to the European modernity which emphasize in reflexivity, historicity and agentiality, such as those of Peter Wagner, Gerard Delanty and Dick Pels. The paper is articulated in five units. In the 1st one there is the theoretical framework of the above-mentioned approaches. In the 2nd and 3rd units a historical-sociological account of the European modernity is presented, based on the theoretical premises of the interpretative approaches on modernity,  which I present in detail. Instead of following a linear trajectory, the emphasis is on the interpretations, the struggles and the tensions over the experiences of the major and significant moments of plural European modernity. In the 4th unit there is a reflection concerning the notion of “identity” which stems from the previous analysis. The paper is completed with the conclusions. Throughout its extent, general axes and themes for didactic scenarios are given, respecting teachers’ autonomy in the forming of their teaching material.

This paper assesses the legacy and impact of Tony Judt's work in the field of intellectual history.  By looking at two of Judt's works, Past Imperfect and The Burden of Responsibility, Kleinberg argues that Judt's most important contributions are as a moralist and not an historian.

Tony Judt: socialism, intellectuals and postwar Europe sketches an intellectual and historiographical profile of the British Jewish historian Tony Judt (1948-2010). His historical studies concerned French socialism between the 19th and the 20th century, the relationship between French postwar intellectuals and communism, and the East European dissidents. In his masterpiece, Postwar, Judt broadened his historical perspective to Eastern Europe and focussed on the political, social, cultural and economic experiences of the European postwar period.

Data structure is the way of organizing and storing data in storage. The way of arranging the data on a computer that can be efficiently accessed and updated whenever used. Now how to choose the correct Data Structures is a question? This is done on the basis of the type of project you are involved in. The order of arranging data determines which data structure must be used. For example, if you want to keep the sequential order of your data in the memory, then an Array can be used to store data.

How did intellectuals react to the economic crisis of 2007–2008 and its long-term backlash? What did they learn from the main twentieth-century political and social experiences, in order to make a new sense of the traditional cultures of the Left?
In order to answer these crucial issues, this proposal will analyze the paths of the well-known historians E. Hobsbawm and T. Judt and their apparently similar, but actually different reactions to the crisis. First, I will focus on their respective books: How to Change the World (2011) and Ill Fares the Land (2010). On the one hand, Hobsbawm’s critical approach to the post-1991 world, shaped by his lifelong fidelity to Marxism and his persistent sympathy for the Russian Revolution, was connected to his catastrophic vision of the end of the both conflicting and collaborative dynamics between capitalism and socialism. On the other hand, Judt’s re-thinking of the social-democratic tradition, compelled by the global transformations of the social question, was inspired by his connections with the East Central European dissidents’ anti-totalitarian liberalism and by his critical approach to the engagement of the French intellectuals. Second, I will investigate their different interpretations of the „Golden Age“ of post-1945 Europe (with special regard to the long-term impact of the crisis of 1929 and to the influence of Soviet communism) and of the causes of its crisis. Third, I will show how, in spite of their common reference to Marx, late Hobsbawm’s and Judt’s historical visions – respectively combined with determinism and moralism – provide opposite ways of coping with the legacies of the 20th century and of criticizing the language of neoliberal economy within the Left.

Análisis de la vigencia y sentido del proyecto político socialdemócrata en la actualidad desde la óptica del pensamiento de Jürgen Habermas y Tony Judt. El artículo profundiza en las causas de la crisis ideológica de los partidos políticos socialdemócratas occidentales y aborda posibles soluciones siguiendo las aportaciones que dichos autores han realizado al respecto.

In dit essay stel ik dat het individu in Nederland sinds de jaren zeventig de dominante maatstaf is geworden voor politieke besluitvorming. Het individu verving God of het algemeen belang voor politici. De Nederlandse politiek volgde daarmee een culturele individualiseringstrend die veelal wordt verbonden aan de jaren zestig en zeventig. De jaren zeventig leek politiek gezien een tijd van radicaal individualisme, neigend naar moreel relativisme, als gevolg van culturele ontwikkelingen in de jaren zestig. Vandaag lijkt zich een nationalistischer discours af te tekenen waar individuen weer als leden van een groep worden beschouwd. De uitdaging voor Nederlandse politici is geen sinecure. Hoe houden politici het midden tussen radicaal individualisme en generaliserend groepsdenken, terwijl zij tegelijkertijd niet bang zijn om problemen te benoemen?

No human being can quite take in where they are in time or space, but
historians especially must strain to, even to practise their craft. They have
to decide what to try to understand, define a vantage-point from which it
could be understood, find out what they judge to be true about it, and then
and only then convey to others what they think they have discerned. Tony
Judt was a historian of unusual buoyancy and vitality with a strong sense
throughout his professional career of what he had discerned, and what,
within it, most urgently to convey to others. He had a vision and a message,
and a vision and message addressed with varying urgency to everyone within
earshot, from a particular time and place.

In this paper, I want to discuss one of Arendt's best known statements, that of the contemporary breaking of the thread of tradition. Paradoxically, the crisis of tradition coincides today with the rise of memory. For this reason I want to ask the following question: Is this a contradiction and does this diagnosis force us to revise the thesis that tradition is in crisis? Or is it rather a logical consequence and must contemporary appeals to memory be understood precisely within the framework of the crisis of tradition?