The diminishing standing of public authorities in matters of morality and personal relationships in no way supposed a decline in the role of the stat… - Tony Judt
" "The diminishing standing of public authorities in matters of morality and personal relationships in no way supposed a decline in the role of the state in the cultural affairs of the nation. Quite the contrary. The broad Western European consensus of the age held that only the state had the resources to service the cultural needs of its citizens: left to themselves, individuals and communities would lack both means and initiative. It was the responsibility of a well-run public authority to deliver cultural nourishment no less than food, lodging and employment. In such matters Social and Christian Democrats thought alike, and both were heir to the great Victorian-era improvers, though with far greater resources to hand. The aesthetic revolt of the Sixties changed little in this respect: the new (‘counter-’) culture demanded and obtained the same funding as the old.
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About Tony Judt
Tony Robert Judt (2 January 1948 – 6 August 2010) was a British historian, essayist, and university professor who specialized in European history.
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Tony Robert Judt
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Additional quotes by Tony Judt
Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within. The impact of material differences takes a while to show up: but in due course competition for status and goods increases; people feel a growing sense of superiority (or inferiority) based on their possessions; prejudice towards those on the lower ranks of the social ladder hardens; crime spikes and the pathologies of social disadvantage become ever more marked. The legacy of unregulated wealth creation is bitter indeed.
The ‘European project’, in so far as it ever existed outside the heads of a few idealists, had stalled by the mid-nineteen-fifties. The French National Assembly had vetoed the proposed European army, and with it any talk of enhanced European coordination. Various regional accords on the Benelux model had been reached—notably the Scandinavian ‘Common Nordic Labor Market’ in 1954—but nothing more ambitious was on the agenda. Advocates of European cooperation could point only to the new European Atomic Energy Community, announced in the spring of 1955; but this—like the Coal and Steel Community—was a French initiative and its success lay, symptomatically, in its narrow and largely technical mandate. If the British were still as skeptical as ever about the prospects for European unity, theirs was not an altogether unreasonable view.
Unfortunately, pragmatism is not always good politics. The greatest asset of mid-20th century social democracy—its willingness to compromise its own core beliefs in the name of balance, tolerance, fairness and freedom—now looks more like weakness: a loss of nerve in the face of changed circumstances. We find it hard to look past those compromises to recall the qualities that informed progressive thought in the first place: what the early 20th century syndicalist Edouard Berth termed “a revolt of the spirit against . . . a world in which man was threatened by a monstrous moral and metaphysical materialism”.
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