In 1919, amid the ruins of the nineteenth-century Europe, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga assumed that "every age yearns for a better world and that the deeper the despair caused by the chaotic present, the more intimate is the sigh." Today, however, this adage is probably frustrated by this that, for many, projects an image of triumph, unlimited.
Going against this complacency, Tony Judt in Something wrong intends to resurrect this seemingly trivial act of yearning for a better world, wondering "why is it so difficult to imagine another kind of society? ". Born in England, Judt developed his career in the United States and is the author of Postwar , unequivocally, one of the most outstanding history books have been written in recent times. He died in August 2010, victim of a sclerosis that had him completely paralyzed.
Something's wrong, his last published work written in life and infamous conditions, is a response to this complacency, a romantic and sometimes desperate attempt to respond to those who would put a lock on the history and sit on its laurels. In just over 200 pages written with remarkable ease, this historian rammed against our time, declaring at the outset that "there is something deeply wrong with the way we live today." Without further ado, is thrown against the last two decades of economic pax free market, against the obsession with wealth creation, against the cult of privatization and private sector.
His essay, an outpouring of dissent and criticism of the "Washington consensus" around neoliberalism, proposes, against a claim of some basic notions of social democracy and welfare state, but of course without falling into the sterile nostalgia of all the past was better. In fact, the text is full of criticism of the left and socialism, its lack of story and impotence and, ultimately, to its historical failure. Hence our question: "Are we doomed to lurch ever between a 'free market' dysfunctional and highly publicized horrors of" socialism "?"
Respensar State
Between these two sides of the fanaticism of the twentieth century, Tony Judt presents an essay filled with insights on which, above all, invites us to reassess the idea of \u200b\u200bthe public, which defends the state's role in areas that today probably respingaríamos the nose, "railways, roads, pensions, education? Yes, Judt suggests again and again "the possibility and advantages of collective action for the common good, knowing that something was lost.
Indeed, this loss is the dismantling of the public and the state in pursuit of non-intervention and greater "freedom", the author sensed a paradox that perhaps since Chile is not so difficult to understand: a namely, that this economic process of state retreat away from lead to a reduction of state power and its ability to abuse of the individual, has involved strengthening. "The loss of social purpose articulated through public services actually increases the powers of a powerful state," he writes. Indeed a paradox that the classics of liberalism, De Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, for example, widely cited by Judt, surely reject.
However, as background to this critical diagnosis, Tony Judt bare the ironies of our time, the contradictions of an era that prides short, open and private, but that is based on an element of so obvious we tend to forget: the historicity of the human, yes, even of those great works and ideas that are supposed to be eternal, but that sooner or later, succumb to time and generations. This is what happened to the "Keynesian consensus" of the welfare state, is what happened with the fall of communism, is what is happening with the consensus around neoliberalism "So, what should have learned from 1989? Perhaps, above all, that nothing is necessary and inevitable."
The remarkable thing about this approach is that Judt traces the time to explain briefly the genealogy of both social democracy and the free market economy, describing the time and historical conditions that enabled each one emerged. And both, with all their differences, come in response to political and economic debacles of the interwar period.
Against this background, Something's evil raises the question can not avoid: what to do, what to offer as an alternative to what he calls an era of political pygmies. In short, how to build a new narrative to replace the mantra of the merits of privatization and the minimal state, knowing that winning formula once let alone social-democratic Marxism or socialism to which the author gave them stone-has fallen into disrepute.
Judt teaches a bet in which the State seeks to rethink, revamp the public conversation, to reopen the local issue and develop a new moral narrative that exceeds vacíos éticos a los que nos hemos acostumbrado. Sin embargo, lo más meritorio de su respuesta al qué hacer, es la conjunción de dos actitudes que pueden sonar dispares: la disconformidad activa que clama por "personas que hagan una virtud de oponerse a la opinión mayoritaria", puesto que "una democracia de consenso permanente no será una democracia mucho tiempo", con elementos de prudencia, defensa, cautela.
Desechando el reformismo radical que ha caracterizado a la izquierda desde la Revolución Francesa hasta nuestros días, Tony Judt realiza un giro hacia una especie de conservadurismo en el que nos sugiere, apoyándose en Edmund Burke, staunch conservative eighteenth-century English, that "all political arguments should begin with an assessment of our relationship not only with dreams of a better future, but with past achievements, our people and of those who preceded us."
Bet simple but bold with which, in addition to the right place at the brook "modernist to destroy and innovate on behalf of a universal draft, gives the keys to the rethinking of the left: to grieve for socialism to revalue a social democracy that, despite not represent or idyllic past or future, would, at least for Tony Judt, "The best option we have today."
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