About the forgotten 20th century

The Sense of History to Build the Future.

Tony Judt states that we have entered an "age of forgetting." Today, the world is so radically different from just twenty years ago that we have set aside our immediate past even before we have been able to understand it. We literally do not know where we come from, and the result of this growing ignorance has proven to be dire and even tends to worsen.

We have lost touch with three generations of international political debate and social thought and activism. We no longer know how to discuss such concepts and have forgotten the role intellectuals played in debating, transmitting, and defending the ideas that shaped their time. In this book, Tony Judt revives key aspects of the world we have lost, and reminds us how important they remain for today and for what we expect from the future.

Judt finds suggestive links between an astonishing variety of topics, from the history of the abandonment and recovery of the Holocaust, or the difficult question of "evil" in understanding the European past, to the rise and fall of the role of the State in public affairs or the marginalization of history in favor of "heritage." He takes us beyond what we think we know to show us how we learned it, and demonstrates the extent to which much of our history has been sacrificed to the triumph of myth over understanding, of denial over memory. This book is the necessary roadmap to recover the sense of history that we so urgently need.

Critics have said...
"On the forgotten 20th century, it undertakes a relentless dissection of the dominant illusions of the postwar years. A compendium, essential for these times, by one of the greatest historians and political scientists of our era."
John Gray, The Guardian

"Judt is an authority, who abhors bloodshed but enjoys verbal combat. He is the intellectual's intellectual."
Niall Ferguson, Financial Times

"Judt reminds us that the past never completely disappears and that this century is as fraught with dangers as the last. This fascinating exploration of the world we recently lost - for better or worse, or both - is unsurpassed."
Publishers Weekly

"Few are better than Tony Judt."
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, New York Times