Why Ill Fares the Land still unsettles
Book review: Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt
Ill Fares the Land begins from a refusal that feels almost impolite today.
Judt will not accept inequality as the price of growth, fear as political realism, or privatization as neutral modernization. He writes because public life has learned to speak fluently about costs while forgetting how to talk about consequences.
The book is not motivated by nostalgia or ideology, but by alarm.
Alarm that societies can become materially richer while growing socially thinner, and that this thinning can pass without argument once moral language slips out of use.
“We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.”
The work unfolds thematically, circling its subject rather than marching through it.
Judt moves between history, political economy, and moral reflection, showing how ideas about markets hardened into governing assumptions.
Inequality is treated as a social force that reshapes trust, health, and cooperation, not as an unfortunate but tolerable byproduct. Privatization appears not as a technical reform but as a transfer of responsibility that weakens public obligation without removing demand.
Throughout, Judt contrasts Anglo-American choices with European social democratic arrangements to make a simple point. Alternatives existed, functioned, and were later dismantled by choice rather than inevitability.
What the book reveals most clearly is how central trust is to any functioning society, and how casually it can be spent.
“There is quite a lot of evidence that people trust other people more if they have a lot in common with them: not just religion or language but also income. The more equal a society, the greater the trust.”
Judt keeps returning to the idea that markets do not create trust. They rely on it. Once inequality deepens, cooperation frays long before open conflict appears. As moral vocabulary retreats, politics becomes managerial and evasive. Problems are no longer named; they are only administered. Fear takes over because it thrives in vagueness and rewards deferral.
One of the book’s most unsettling insights is how quickly people adapt to unjust conditions once those conditions are stabilized, explained, and repeated often enough to feel natural.
Judt’s argument is careful but not seamless.
He rejects nostalgia while repeatedly leaning on the postwar settlement as proof that shared obligation can coexist with capitalism. He criticizes economistic thinking while relying on economic outcomes to demonstrate moral failure. He defends collective action while acknowledging that diversity and fragmentation strain trust, without fully resolving how plural societies rebuild shared commitments.
The state appears as both essential and hollowed out, diminished by its own habit of outsourcing responsibility while retaining surveillance and coercion. These tensions do not weaken the book so much as expose the difficulty of the problem it is trying to name.
This book is for readers who feel that contemporary politics sounds wrong even when it claims success. It is not for those looking for programs, roadmaps, or revived ideologies.
What Judt offers instead is a recovered way of seeing.
After reading, it becomes harder to accept talk of efficiency, reform, or growth without asking what kind of society those goals quietly assume.
The lasting effect is not persuasion but reorientation. The book leaves you listening differently, more alert to what disappears when moral questions are treated as accounting errors, and more aware of how much has already been lost simply because no one insisted on naming it.
Judt published his work in 2010. But he predicted the rise of Zohran Mamdani. Or at least someone who knows where capitalism stops and socialism works.
On my damage meter, this clocked at 4. Gets under your skin.