[Dialogue] articulating underlying contradictions of government

[John Cock]

excerpts from Ill Fares the Land, Tony Judt (March 2010):

Insecurity breeds fear. And fear-fear of change, fear of decline, fear of
strangers and an unfamiliar world-is corroding the trust and interdependence
on which civil societies rest. 
All change is disruptive. We have seen that the specter of terrorism is
enough to cast stable democracies into turmoil. Climate change will have
even more dramatic consequences. Men and women will be thrown back upon the
resources of the state. They will look to their political leaders and
representatives to protect them: open societies will once again be urged to
close in upon themselves, sacrificing freedom for "security." The choice
will no longer be between the state and the market, but between two sorts of
state [which he begins to articulate]. It is thus incumbent upon us to
reconceive the role of government. If we do not, others will..
As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich
and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed..

~excerpts from the opening chapter of Ill Fares the Land (3/2010) by Tony
Judt, as published in New York Review of Books
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/apr/29/ill-fares-the-land/ via
Bruce Lanphear, who read this book out loud to Fred during his last few
months (he died of ALS about four weeks before Fred)


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