Ill Fares the Land

Judt argues that something is profoundly wrong with how we think about how we should live today: the social contract that defined postwar life in Europe and America—the guarantee of a baseline of security, stability, and fairness—is no longer guaranteed or even part of common discourse [citation:2]. He rejects both the nihilistic individualism of the far right and the debunked socialism of the past [citation:2]. The way forward, he contends, lies in recovering social democracy: the belief that the state can play an enhanced role in citizens' lives without threatening their liberties, and that fairness matters more than mere efficiency [citation:2].

The title is taken from Oliver Goldsmith's 1770 poem 'The Deserted Village': 'Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay' [citation:4]. Judt uses the phrase to capture his diagnosis of contemporary Western societies: the accumulation of private wealth has been accompanied by social decay, the erosion of public goods, and the degradation of the common life. The poem's contrast between wealth and human flourishing is the book's central tension, and Judt treats Goldsmith's couplet as a warning that has come true with unnerving precision in the decades since the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions.

Judt defines social democracy as a political tradition that 'blended socialist dreams of a post-capitalist utopia with practical recognition of the need to live and work in a capitalist world,' while accepting the rules of the democratic game [citation:19]. He champions it not as an ideal future or even an ideal past, but as 'better than anything else to hand' among available options [citation:9]. Social democracy, in his account, entrusts the state and fellow citizens rather than placing blind faith in the market [citation:2]. His argument is that it remains indispensable for the twenty-first century—not as defensive ersatz-conservatism, but as a sober and progressive political belief.

Judt traces the intellectual roots of laissez-faire economics to émigré thinkers who conflated any governmental interference in the economy with a precursor to authoritarianism, whether fascist or communist [citation:4]. This influence, centered at the University of Chicago, shaped American economic orthodoxy in ways Judt considers historically distorted. He also criticizes the new left of the 1960s for being too concerned with individualism and identity politics, which he argues led to a denigration of the state and its capacity to represent society as a whole [citation:4]. The result was a political landscape in which privatization and tax erosion became common sense.

Ill Fares the Land was written as Judt was paralyzed and dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS); he dictated the text to assistants and died in August 2010 at age 61 [citation:4][citation:14]. The New York Times called it 'a slim and penetrating work, a dying man's sense of a dying idea' [citation:14]. It was widely reviewed as a polemic rather than a work of history, with reviewers noting both its persuasive diagnosis and its occasionally 'soggy' passages [citation:14]. In the Netherlands, the book was available in every bookstore shortly after its original publication, while Judt's German publisher had not even announced a German edition [citation:9].

A frequent misconception treats the book as a nostalgic call to return to the postwar welfare state exactly as it was. Judt explicitly acknowledges that 'the past really is another country: we cannot go back' [citation:9]. His argument is not that mid-century social democracy can be restored, but that its underlying commitments—fairness over efficiency, collective provision over private accumulation, the state as guarantor of the common good—must be recovered in new forms for a different world. He also rejects the assumption that increased GDP automatically alleviates inequality, arguing that the evidence points to the contrary [citation:19].