Tony Judt in 'New York Magazine'

The latest issue of New York Magazine has a profile of Tony Judt, also available online. Judt, the author, most recently, of the brilliant Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehring's disease, in 2008 and has since lost the use of his body. Though the disease inexplicably stopped short of destroying his ability to speak (he does so with the aid of a microphone) and eat, he's essentially left with only his mental faculties intact. But what a mind. Judt is an aggressive, provocative, and stimulating thinker. He's also widely criticized, not least for his views on Israel. He's made enemies of friends, but I greatly admire his fearlessness and his belief in the intellectual's responsibility to stand apart and, often, alone.

“I think intellectuals have a primary duty to dissent not from the conventional wisdom of the age (though that too) but, and above all, from the consensus of their own community. . . . So liberals should look especially hard at the uninterrogated assumptions of liberalism. Otherwise we are just hacks for a party line. If I have an Archimedean ethical standpoint, it really just consists of telling the truth as I see it even if I don’t much care for the implications, or if it offends my friends and my political allies.”

The magazine has judiciously let stand lengthy, unbroken passages of Judt speaking, and it makes for great reading:

One thing I always felt very strongly empathetic about in my reading of [the Italian chemist and Holocaust diarist] Primo Levi was his absolutely clearheaded sense that none of what had happened to him in the camps had any meaning. You might draw lessons from it in terms of experience, you certainly might draw political lessons. But at the existential level of one man’s life, it had no meaning. This has no meaning. What I do with it is up to me.