Renewing an Old Idea: Common Good

The British historian Tony Judt is dying, slowly and painfully, from a variant of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (A.L.S.), better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He has written matter-of-factly about his condition — he is now, essentially, a quadriplegic — in The New York Review of Books. At some point he will be able to communicate only by blinking an eye. For now he is dictating his words to assistants.

Best known for his book “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945” (2005), Mr. Judt has long been an engaged and unpredictable intellectual of the left, one who is sometimes given to controversial opinions. Mr. Judt, who is Jewish, has argued, for example, that Israel is an “anachronism” that should convert “from a Jewish state to a binational one” including Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. His prose tends to be as biting as his ideas.

Mr. Judt’s new book, “Ill Fares the Land,” is a slim and penetrating work, a dying man’s sense of a dying idea: the notion that the state can play a significant role in its citizens’ lives without imperiling their liberties. It makes sense that this book arrives now, not merely during the hideous endgame of the national health-care debate but during mud season; this book’s bleak assessment of the selfishness and materialism that have taken root in Western societies will stick to your feet and muddy your floors. But “Ill Fares the Land” is also optimistic, raw and patriotic in its sense of what countries like the United States and Britain have meant — and can continue to mean — to their people and to the world.