28 quotes
‘Socialism’ is a 19th century idea with a 20th century history.
Ill Fares The Land (2010)
Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within.
Ill Fares the Land (2010)
The greatest beneficiaries of the modern welfare state, after all, were the middle classes.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
The paradox of the welfare state, and indeed of all the social democratic (and Christian Democratic) states of Europe, was quite simply that their success would over time undermine their appeal.
What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? (2009)
Sixty years after Hitler's death, his war and its consequences are entering history. Postwar in Europe lasted a very long time, but it is finally coming to a close.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
Eurocommunism was thus a contradiction in terms, despite the best efforts of its spokesmen.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
This fear of serving anti-Soviet interests was not new. But by the early fifties it was a major calculation in European intellectual debates, above all in France.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
Communism excited intellectuals in a way that neither Hitler nor (especially) liberal democracy could hope to match. Communism was exotic in locale and heroic in scale.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
The democratic transition of Mediterranean Europe was quite the most remarkable and unexpected development of the age.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
I am, I discover in late middle age, a work in progress.
Moments of great cultural significance are often appreciated only in retrospect. The Sixties were different: the transcendent importance contemporaries attached to their own times—and their own selves—was one of the special features of the age.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
So I certainly don’t regard myself as brave. I just see myself—if I want to indulge a little immodesty—as rather more honest and outspoken than some other people I know.
It was in the Second World War, then, that the full force of the modern European state was mobilized for the first time, for the primary purpose of conquering and exploiting other Europeans.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
Western Europeans owed their newfound well-being to the uncertainties of the Cold War. The internationalization of political confrontations, and the consequent engagement of the United States, helped draw the sting from domestic political conflicts.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
Perhaps the real difficulty facing anyone seeking intellectuals at the highest political levels in England is that the intellectual agenda which drove ideologically-configured political movements in continental Europe was quite absent in London.
The intellectual condition of post-war Western Europe would have been unrecognizable to a visitor from even the quite recent past. German-speaking central Europe—the engine room of European culture for the first third of the twentieth century—had ceased to exist.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
Behind the long ‘Social-Democratic moment’ in Western Europe there had lain not just pragmatic faith in the public sector, or allegiance to Keynesian economic principles, but a sense of the shape of the age that influenced and for many decades stifled even its would-be critics.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
In cultural matters, the Communists did not even need to take the initiative. Fear of American domination, of the loss of national autonomy and initiative, brought into the ‘progressive’ camp men and women of all political stripes and none.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
Communism was a very defective answer to some very good questions. In throwing out the bad answer, we have forgotten the good questions. I want to put the good questions back on the table.
History is not written as it was experienced, nor should it be. The inhabitants of the past know better than we do what it was like to live there, but they were not well placed, most of them, to understand what was happening to them and why.