The Burden of Responsibility

"Tony Judt is my hero. He died very recently. I think he is one of the most important and impressive English historians and philosophers of his time. People call him a dissident but I don’t think he was a dissident actually – he was more a defender of moral values in life, society, politics, history, war. He was a great thinker and a great humanitarian and in this book he describes three men of a similar vein, men he admires, and he brings out that great spirit of European honour and philosophical thought. His first subject is Leon Blum, the first socialist prime minister of France and also the first Jew. He was an intellectual, a good man, a man of principle and an idealist who came to power at the most terrible time – the 30s were really an agonising decade for most Europeans and Tony Judt’s portrait of Blum reveals what it was like when the Popular Front ruled France. Then we have Camus, a resistant but very much his own man, an independent thinker. What Judt points out are the resolute standards of morality and justice which Camus lived by and held to throughout his short life. And when it comes to the intellectual philosopher Raymond Aron, he does exactly the same thing. Aron was disapproved of by both right and left, as was Camus – none of the three were extremists; they were liberal thinkers. And what is important about this book is that it tells you about Tony Judt too. He would always see evil where evil lay. He was Jewish, raised in a Jewish family, lived on a kibbutz, and he spoke out about the injustices meted out by the Israeli government to the Palestinian people. And he was hounded because of it. In this sense this book about these three men echoes what happened to him in his own life."