Ill Fares the Land
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- ISBN13: 9781594202766
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Something is very much incorrect with the way we reflect about how we should live today.
In Ill Fares The Land, Tony Judt, one of our leading historians and thinkers, reveals how we have arrived at our present dangerously confused moment. Judt masterfully crystallizes what we’ve all been feeling into a way to reflect our way into, and thus out of, our fantastic collective dis-ease about the current state of things.
As the economic collapse of 2008 made clear, the social contract that defined postwar life in Europe and America – the guarantee of a basal level of security, stability and fairness — is no longer guaranteed; in fact, it’s no longer part of the common discourse. Judt offers the language we need to take up our common needs, rejecting the nihilistic individualism of the far right and the debunked socialism of the past. To find a way forwards, we must look to our not so distant past and to social democracy in action: to re-enshrining fairness over mere efficiency.
Distinctly absent from our national dialogue, social democrats judge that the state can play an enhanced role in our lives lacking threatening our liberties. As a replacement for of placing blind faith in the market—as we have to our detriment for the past thirty years—social democrats entrust their fellow citizens and the state itself.
Ill Fares the Land challenges us to confront our societal ills and to shoulder responsibility for the world we live in. For hope remains. In reintroducing alternatives to the status quo, Judt reinvigorates our political conversation, providing the tools necessary to imagine a new form of governance, a new way of life.
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“Ill Fares the Land” should become one of the most vital publications of the next decade.
In straight forwards, clear writing, Judt outlines the growing inequities between the rich and the poor in the United States and the failure of the ecomomic philosophy of the past 30 years. During this time the United States has become the most income stratified of the major manufacturing societies with the highest crime excise and the highest percentage of incarceration.
With devastating analysis Judt documents this growing inequality: The CEO of Walmart earns 900 times the wages of the average employee. The wealth of the Wal-Mart founders’ family tree – $90 billion is equivalent to the combined bottom 40% of the US population: 120 million people.
“Ill Fares…” should be required reading for everyone.
Hugh McIsaac, Santa Cruz
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
I want to thank Judt for defending with such clarity, eloquence, and passion the concept of social democracy– the modern welfare state and its set of linked freedoms. He identifies the failures of the new Left that have allowed the ideologies of the Right (wealth accumulation and privatization) to come to so dominate the political conversation that the tremendous gains of the early 20th century–the New Deal, the Fantastic Society etc. are being systematically ruined. He shows how the rise in inequality between the rich and everyone else is leading to a sick, uneducated, regularly imprisoned underclass. He then argues that the values of the pre-1960’s Left– equality, trust in government and between citizens, a belief that the public sphere was an vital and effective way to solve problems– are cut out of the public debate. To start to go away from this sad state of affairs we need to regain the ability to speak in moral terms and renovate a coherent narrative of the Left.
A deeply moving work that is fundamentally optimistic and practical. Should be read by every citizen.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5