EDITION: CLASS.
Despite its moral urgency, Judt's polemic struggles to explain the decline of social democracy – and his proposed solutions ultimately fall well short of addressing the systemic crises and injustices we face today.
Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land is an exceptional book, not least because it was born out of circumstances of extraordinary adversity. Written while Judt was afflicted by motor neurone disease, which took his life just months after the book’s publication in 2010, Ill Fares the Land originated in a lecture delivered the previous year. In his obituary for Judt, Geoffrey Wheatcroft recalled that the author had joked mordantly on that occasion that “since he was paralysed from the waist down, what the audience had was literally a talking head.”
In the 15 years since its publication, the book has continued to resonate deeply among left-liberal intellectuals. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who contributed a preface to a later edition of Ill Fares the Land, praised Judt for his clarity and depth, hailing the book as “a remarkable effort at sketching out what… durable hope might look like”. Its influence extends beyond high-profile individuals; it has repeatedly been cited as a touchstone in debates over the future of social democracy and has served as an enduring reference point for those seeking to revive the egalitarian ideals of mid-20th century politics.
For Judt to make such an impassioned intervention in spite of his own immense suffering implies not just great reserves of indefatigability: it indicates that he had something urgent to say. Both an elegy and a call to action, Ill Fares the Land grapples with the erosion of post-war welfare states and the rise of neoliberalism, offering an unabashed defence of the Keynesian social compact. Lamenting the rise of market-driven individualism, the book seeks to awaken a new generation to the virtues of social democracy, advocating for a political and moral realignment away from neoliberal acquisitiveness.
Despite its eloquence and moral urgency, however, Ill Fares the Land is hindered by some fundamental limitations that have only become more obvious with the passage of time. In particular, Judt’s polemic struggles to explain the decline of social democracy or account for its internal failings, while his proposed solutions ultimately fall well short of addressing the systemic crises and injustices we face today – underscoring the need for a much bolder vision to confront contemporary challenges.
The Eviscerated Society
Ill Fares the Land begins with a sobering observation: that despite the failures of neoliberalism, which many on the left assumed had been rendered self-evident by the 2008 global financial crisis, alternative political and economic models remain unimaginable to many. The pervasive influence of neoliberal ideology has not just restructured economies but also subjectivities, restricting the political imagination to a narrow set of policy options safely contained within the overarching neoliberal framework. The sharp-elbowed individualism and grasping materialism that have characterised the neoliberal era have so deeply penetrated social norms across much of the world that the idea of a more equal society appears, even to those who find it sympathetic, a peculiar relic of the past.
For Judt, neoliberal hegemony and its deadening effects on the human soul represent a profound political and moral crisis. Neoliberalism has created an “eviscerated society” in which social infrastructure is left to go to rack and ruin, inequality widens and social safety nets are shredded, leaving the most vulnerable to fend for themselves. This state of affairs, he argues, exemplifies a failure both of policy and, perhaps more importantly, of collective will. Whereas the post-war generation could envisage bold redistributive policies and generous public goods, political alternatives today are straitjacketed by the insistence that there is no alternative to market diktat.
This narrowing of political horizons is just one of neoliberalism’s many pernicious effects. Although Judt chides the soixante-huitard generation for its “overweening confidence” and “self-assured radical dogma”, he notes with alarm that many young people today struggle to imagine even modest reforms to the status quo (pp.2-4). This is more disturbing than mere apathy: Judt notes that many among the youth are deeply concerned about the deteriorating world around them, but for all their concern, they lack any clear ideas to build a fairer society. Some, he adds with dismay, drift into the “anti-politics” cul-de-sac of NGOism, satisfying themselves with single-issue campaigns and abandoning any idea of broader change.
Judt contrasts this contemporary stasis with the period immediately after the Second World War, which saw significant strides towards greater social equality and cohesion across the Global North. Robust welfare states and redistributive policies lifted millions out of poverty and gave them a sense of solidarity and shared purpose. The neoliberal counter-revolution from the late 1970s onwards obliterated this, replacing this ethic of collective betterment with one of short-sighted self-interest. The consequences have been profound, allowing the wealthy to run riot, amassing fortunes beyond the wildest dreams of their forerunners, while the public realm has been systematically degraded. The collectivist moral framework of social democracy has been replaced by a neoliberal ethos that celebrates greed and stigmatises poverty.
Economic insecurity, furthermore, is fanning the flames of racism and nativism, posing further dangers to social cohesion already badly atrophied by the devil-take-the-hindmost philosophy of neoliberalism. The most unfortunate members of society have been demonised and ostracised; the mere fact of receiving welfare benefits stands as “a mark of Cain: a sign of personal failure, evidence that one had somehow fallen through the cracks of society” while, with social mobility having gone into reverse, the “poor stay poor” in all but a few cases (pp.24-5). Philosophical considerations about the kind of society we want to live in are sneered at as otherworldly and fanciful, while politicians make a fetish of imposing ‘tough choices’, ramming through public spending cuts targeting those least able to withstand their impact.
Judt is withering about the political leaders brought into being by neoliberalism. The disengagement of citizens from the political arena, he argues, has given free rein to its “most venal and mediocre public servants”, and with liberal-democratic institutions hollowed out, “the language of politics itself has been vacated of substance and meaning” (p.165). The wealthy have become the object of hero worship; gaudy displays of wealth and power are applauded even by those who have no realistic chance of emulating them. Hearts are hardened against the less fortunate, who are rendered objects of suspicion if not outright contempt.
Social Democracy’s Secret Sauce
Righteously angry as Judt’s diagnosis is, it lacks a convincing explanation of why social democracy went into terminal decline from the 1970s. His account gives credit for the welfare state largely to far-sighted intellectuals – his great hero John Maynard Keynes, most of all – and public-spirited political leaders, but there is little recognition that pressures from below, or the wider international context, might have made the welfarist gains of the post-war period possible in the first place. Little credit is given to the role of popular movements or the trade union base on which social democracy rested. As Keynes placed his faith in the generosity of the “enlightened bourgeoisie” so, implicitly, does Judt.
Where movements from below do appear in Ill Fares the Land, they are cast as villains. The welfare state raised ambitions, but in time also drew attention to its shortcomings and exclusions. Its complicity with naked imperialist aggression in Vietnam, and its failings on gender and race – the New Deal having coexisted with Jim Crow apartheid into the 1960s1 – spawned new social movements pressing their own claims for justice. Judt is not just unsympathetic towards them; he ranks them among social democracy’s gravediggers. He charges the New Left with spurning the solidaristic ethos of the labour movement, arguing that “social justice no longer preoccupied radicals”, who instead valued “the rights of each” over “the interests of all” (p.87). His critique is sweeping but vague: Ill Fares the Land neither engages with any particular New Left thinkers nor cites any specific examples. Nevertheless, Judt castigates “the narcissism of student movements, New Left ideologues and the popular culture of the ’60s generation” for having “invited a conservative backlash” in the ensuing years.
What Judt fails to acknowledge is that these movements, whatever their missteps, addressed real failings of the post-war welfare state and represented sincere struggles for greater social equality; while he does concede, begrudgingly, that the anti-Vietnam War protests and US “race riots” of the ’60s were “not insignificant”, he dismisses them as a narcissistic spasm: Judt scoffs that while the New Left was “exquisitely sensitive to the collective attributes of humans in distant lands”, it was “divorced from any sense of collective purpose” at home, its protests mere “extensions of individual self-expression and anger” (pp.88-90). But the demands it raised for racial, gender and sexual justice, like its opposition to imperialism, were not distractions from the struggle for human liberation but attempts to broaden it to include those hitherto left out.2 Judt’s antipathy towards ’60s radicalism contrasts sharply with his indulgent view of Cold War liberalism (pp.93-4), as if the former did more to wreck the prospects of progressive change than the latter, with its steadfast loyalty to US imperialism and the periodic witch-hunts that so badly sapped trade unions, as well as countless other popular movements, of their vitality.3
Judt’s disdain for the soixante-huitards’ anti-imperialism and their excessive concern for “humans in distant lands” is especially revealing. Imperialism was social democracy’s secret sauce. Balking at the outright expropriation of capital, social democracy instead depended on the hyperexploitation of the imperial periphery to bankroll its social reforms in the core; for instance, while the National Health Service was still in its cradle, Clement Attlee’s Labour government was fighting viciously to put down the uprising against British colonial rule in Malaya, a vital source of cheap rubber and tin supplies.4 Social democracy was similarly reliant on the colonies as a source of imported labour to provide the manpower for its welfare state – the NHS remains reliant on overseas staff to this day – and to take on the most precarious, worst-paid jobs in its industries.
The reality is that social democracy in the West was never self-contained: it was sustained by the economic and military supremacy of the United States, which took on the stewardship of imperialism in a new, formally post-colonial guise while granting its allies access to cheap resources and violently suppressing challenges to its hegemony.5 The Vietnam War was not an aberration; it was a direct consequence of the geopolitical logic that also sustained European social democracy. The prosperity of the trente glorieuses was the product of a global order in which the West, led by the United States with its western European clients in tow, dictated terms to the developing world while systematically destroying movements that sought to redistribute wealth on an international scale.
Judt’s dismissal of the New Left as navelgazing narcissists is inadequate as an explanation and, moreover, it points to a deeper and more troubling problem with his own worldview. By portraying the anti-war activists of the 1960s essentially as neoliberals in embryo – more concerned with personal self-indulgence than collective liberation – Judt both distorts their motivations and sidesteps the fundamental issue at stake: namely, that post-war social democracy was inextricably tied to and lived off imperialism. His hostility to the New Left suggests an awareness, however repressed, that the welfare state he venerated was built on imperial extraction, exploitation, interference in the affairs of newly-independent nations and, when the occasion required it, outright military aggression.
Judt was willing to criticise specific wars – he was outspoken in his opposition to the Iraq War – as well as being a firm critic of Zionism,6 both of which put him at odds with much of his own centre-left milieu, but he stopped short of calling the deeper structures of global capitalism and imperialism into question. This is why his critique of the New Left, and of the anti-Vietnam War movement in particular, is ultimately a reactionary one. Instead of recognising the New Left as posing a necessary challenge to the failure of post-war welfarism to live up to its own moral aspirations, he treats its adherents as spoiled children disrupting an otherwise functional system. But if the ‘good society’ depended on empire, as it did, then the fault hardly lies with the New Left for pointing out that all it had done was made capitalism more palatable in the imperial core while continuing to plunder the periphery.
The Unbearable Lightness of Social Democracy
Ill Fares the Land does acknowledge that social democracy was “always a mongrel politics”, averse to theorising but combining “socialist dreams of a post-capitalist utopia” with a sincere commitment to “the rules of the democratic game” (p.73). Social democrats, as Judt observes, were “not uniquely or even primarily interested in economics”; rather, their creed was “in essence a moral matter… offended at the consequences of unregulated competition”. This lack of attention to political economy, far from being a feather in the cap of social democracy, goes a long way to explaining why it proved so helpless in the face of stagflation in the 1970s.
If social democracy “succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its founders”, as Judt puts it (p.229), why did social democrats roll back so many of their own achievements? The answer lies in this crisis, which shattered some of the key pillars on which social democracy rested. Specifically, the post-war boom had been fuelled by an abundance of cheap oil: with the oil price shock of 1973, which sent the price of crude spiralling higher, inflation rocketed and the entire Western economic model was plunged into crisis. Social democrats’ ability to finance welfare programmes, maintain full employment and keep organised labour quiescent was suddenly jeopardised. Governments now faced a choice: maintain public spending at the cost of rising inflation, or impose austerity to stabilise prices and calm financial markets.
In Britain, the neoliberal turn thus began not with Margaret Thatcher but with the Labour government under James Callaghan that preceded her in office. In 1976, Callaghan went to the International Monetary Fund seeking a loan to patch up his government’s finances, but this came with conditions – in particular, swingeing spending cuts – that would herald the denouement of Britain’s comprehensive, universalist post-war welfare state.7 Callaghan explained his volte face to that year’s Labour Party conference in terms that Milton Friedman himself hailed as “one of the most courageous and remarkable statements ever made by a leader of a democratic government”:
We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession, and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and that insofar as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.
Social democracy changed millions of working-class lives for the better, but it is striking how quickly so many of its achievements were overturned. There were radical tendencies within social democracy that contested the neoliberal turn, including Bennism in Britain, but these were mostly routed and marginalised by the mid-1980s, as were the more recalcitrant trade unions. Attempts to revive and radicalise Keynesianism, such as those of the government of Francois Mitterrand in France in 1981-83,8 were swiftly undone by the accelerated mobility of finance capital in a more porous, globalised economy; Mitterrand, like Callaghan, was compelled to adopt the new neoliberal orthodoxy (not entirely unwillingly, again like Callaghan) and accept defeat in his attempts to prop up the franc.
Social-democratic class compromises stabilised capitalism by giving the working classes of the imperial core reason to see a reformed, liberal capitalism as being preferable to any other system on offer, and by supporting at least a tolerable standard of living for the majority of these workers. But this class compromise could not have come about without the October Revolution, the Chinese Revolution and the wave of anti-colonial revolutions that swept the globe in the post-war decades.9 Social democracy put manners on capitalism, at least in the relatively privileged societies of the Global North, but it required a revolutionary threat to force these concessions. Although social democrats were frequently among the most inveterate anti-Communists, they gained leverage from Communism; in its absence as a mass political force in the West today, they no longer have any real bargaining power to wield against capital. Trade union leaders, with only a few exceptions, were likewise willing to play the Cold War game in return for improved welfare and wages, while dutifully purging their own ranks of industrial and political militants.10
But the post-war social-democratic project rested on the assumption that capitalism’s crisis tendencies could be managed indefinitely through Keynesian counter-cyclical policies, a strong welfare state and corporatist bargaining arrangements. When global capitalism went into crisis after 1973, the logic of class struggle upended this assumption. Capital would no longer tolerate the compromises of the previous years, while unions retained enough strength to demand wage increases but lacked the political power to transcend capitalism and reshape the economy in a fundamental way. The neoliberal turn that followed was not just a contingent policy shift but a reassertion of class power from above, designed to ensure that organised labour and its political allies could never again exert the same influence over economic policy. Unleashing mass unemployment helped break the power of the unions, a blow from which they have not subsequently been able to recover.
Yet Judt celebrates social democracy’s willingness to acclimatise itself to capitalism as evidence of laudable pragmatism. He comments that Keynesian social democrats “had no time for nationalisation in its own right”, even if they were prepared to accept its “practical advantages in particular cases” (pp.58-9). He adds, puzzlingly, that the Labour Party “doted on public ownership”; this might have been broadly true of its rank and file, whose ability to shape party policy was always tightly constrained, but its leaders certainly did not take Clause IV too seriously – with the partial exception of the Attlee government – and never came close to taking the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy into public ownership.11 Leaving the means of production firmly in private hands was precisely what enabled capital to unpick Labourist reforms when a crisis of sufficient magnitude presented the opportunity.
This is the paradox of social democracy: it can secure real gains within the framework of the existing system while the going is good, but unless it moves beyond merely regulating capitalism and instead seeks to replace it with socialised control over economic priorities, it will always be vulnerable to counter-offensives. The history of social democracy demonstrates that the choice is not straightforwardly between reform and revolution, but between reform as a step towards structural transformation and reform as a fragile and temporary accommodation within capitalism, leaving its fundamental prerogatives undisturbed – one from which capital will withdraw as soon as its interests are threatened.
The Limits of Incrementalism
Ill Fares the Land ultimately takes a defeatist view of the prospects for social change. It offers an appealing and highly articulate moral critique of neoliberalism but, wary as it is of anything resembling popular power, and fighting shy of actual opposition to capitalism, the book falls short of a truly compelling rallying cry. Judt concludes with a cautious call for what he calls a “social democracy of fear”, a concept borrowed from Cold War liberal theorist Judith Shklar. By this, he means a politics rooted in the amelioration of suffering and the maintenance of basic decency, instead of pursuing anything more ambitious.
This vision reflects a deep pessimism on Judt’s part; nostalgic as he was for the post-war welfare state, even he could not imagine building any equivalent to it today, let alone going any further. Social democracy, as Judt correctly observes, was not an attempt to transcend capitalism but to humanise it. But this model was historically contingent, the product of a unique set of domestic and global pressures that have not been replicated since, and that forced elites to accept a degree of redistribution and reform to improve Western workers’ living standards in exchange for their acquiescence – though this was never completely secured – to the capitalist system.
As these pressures ebbed from the 1970s, the conditions that sustained social democracy disintegrated. Not only was the capitalist system less dynamic and hence less able to accommodate demands for redistribution from below, but capitalists themselves faced little compulsion to continue sharing even a limited degree of wealth and power. Judt’s “social democracy of fear” offers little by way of a response to these seismic shifts. Amid deepening inequality, worsening environmental degradation and the increasing meaninglessness of liberal-democratic institutions, this cautious approach is especially ill-suited to the pressing demands of the 21st century.
This inadequacy is underscored further by the failure of left populism to revitalise social democracy in the Global North. It is impossible to say for sure what Tony Judt would have made of Corbynism – even if Jeremy Corbyn himself is the kind of internationalist soixante-huitard he generally held in low esteem – but the demands it raised were mostly in line with social democracy during its heyday: public ownership of essential utilities, strengthened employment and trade union rights, and more redistributive taxation. Corbyn’s personal anti-imperialism inflamed his critics, but its impact on Labour Party policy was limited: for example, neither Trident renewal nor Britain’s membership of NATO were called into question under his leadership. This reflects, it must be admitted, a certain narrowing of horizons on the socialist left after decades of defeat. Even so, Corbyn’s proposed domestic reforms aimed at restoring the egalitarianism of post-war social democracy while holding out the possibility of transcending its limitations.
However, movements like Corbynism, and Bernie Sanders’ two campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination in the United States, faced fierce opposition not only from the conservative right but also, and most damagingly, from self-proclaimed social democrats and liberals. Throughout Corbyn’s tenure, the Labour Party’s internal machinery was still dominated at most levels by the party’s right wing. This machinery was weaponised to actively undermine and sabotage the party leadership, which was never supported by more than a small minority of Labour MPs. Bourgeois media, with right-wing Labour ‘grandees’ chipping in at every turn, sneered at Corbyn’s policy platform and relentlessly smeared his character, while demonising his supporters – on the whole, some of the most humane, earnest and sincere people you could wish to meet – as thugs, bullies and frothing antisemites.
This scorched-earth resistance to left populism has done significant damage to the liberal-democratic system these self-proclaimed champions of democracy purport to uphold. By trashing a movement for social reform pursued through constitutional and parliamentarist methods, they have sent a dangerous message: that even peaceful efforts to achieve social change within the existing political framework will be met with implacable, insurmountable hostility. If such social-democratic policies – once the bedrock of the post-war settlement – are now deemed verboten, what conclusions are people supposed to draw about the viability of reform through electoral means? Why would they patiently channel their grievances into a system that permits them no effective remedy?
Judt’s “social democracy of fear” betrays a reluctance to engage fully with this dilemma. He warns of the fragility of liberal institutions, but does not truly reckon with how a decadent and unscrupulous political centre has eroded their legitimacy – something already apparent in his time, but unmistakable now. Having already destroyed the Labour Party as a vehicle even for mildly progressive reform, in government the flailing, rudderless Starmer regime has created a vacuum now being filled by reactionaries, demagogues and obscurantists, before whom it is eagerly prostrating itself and trying to outflank from the right. As the positive achievements of post-war social democracy recede ever further into the mists of time, it is surely evident – as James Callaghan himself might have put it – that that option no longer exists.
Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents was published by Penguin in 2010.
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See Robert L. Allen and Chude Pamela Allen. 2021. Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States (2nd ed.). New York: OR Books. ↩
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See: George Katsiaficas. 2018. The Global Imagination of 1968: Revolution and Counterrevolution. Binghamton: PM Press; Tariq Ali. 2018. Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties (3rd ed.). London: Verso. ↩
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See: Richard H. Pells. 1989. The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age (2nd ed.). Middletown: Wesleyan University Press; Samuel Moyn. 2023. Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. New Haven: Yale University Press. ↩
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Robert Clough. 2014. Labour: A Party Fit for Imperialism (2nd ed.). London: Larkin Publications, pp.91-3. ↩
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See: Vincent Bevins. 2020. The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. New York: PublicAffairs; William Blum. 2022. Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (3rd ed.). London: Bloomsbury. ↩
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See, for example, Tony Judt. 2015. ‘Israel: The Alternative’. In When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010, New York: Vintage. ↩
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See John Medhurst. 2014. That Option No Longer Exists: Britain 1974-76. London: Zer0 Books. ↩
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See Daniel Singer. 1988. Is Socialism Doomed? The Meaning of Mitterrand, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ↩
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Max Ajl. 2021. A People’s Green New Deal. London: Pluto Press, p77-8. ↩
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See: Ellen Schrecker. 1999. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Jeff Schurhke. 2024. Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labour’s Global Anticommunist Crusade. London: Verso. ↩
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See David Coates. 1975. The Labour Party and the Struggle for Socialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ↩