Tony Judt, a well known English historian who operates in the US and keeps working undeterred by a disabling illness , has  written  a new book , a short one, for the English and  Americans young generation . He enters with great gusto in the discussion  between “ right” and “left”, between  the ultraliberals,  the enemies of the State , and the social democrats who believe  in social solidarity , and in a common approach to politics  as an instrument  to tackle  to-day  problems. The title “Ill fares the land “ comes from two 1770 verses of Oliver Goldsmith:
 “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a  prey
Where wealth accumulates , and men decay”,
which immediately state the problem: “private affluence  and  public squalor”.

It  is not a treaty , but rather a passionate discussion  on the economic and political situation of the West , and it is therefore not easy  to  summarize  without losing some of its poignancy. It starts with  a number of graphs on the incredibly huge   income inequality between rich and poor,  the US being at the top, followed at a  distance by the European countries .  Incredibly, the Gini coefficient, which measures  the difference in  income between rich and poor, has the same value  in the USA and in China, that is , in  the world’s  richest country, and in  one just getting out of poverty; and in the US poverty is not only lack of means, but also the  stigma,  and the feeling of impotence .

There, taxation is perceived as  “ an uncompensated  income loss” and not as the instrument  to reduce inequality; and freedom  is increasingly understood as the freedom to make money. This situation is in fact relatively new. In the past century , from the late ‘30s   to the ’60s and 70s, the European countries followed the Keynesian recipe  and the social democratic doctrine, while US  created first  the New Deal and then  the Great Society . Both influenced the market in order to raise the minimum standard of families and to increase social mobility. The Welfare State protected the weak majority from the strong and privileged minority. “In many respect  the social democratic consensus  signifies the greater progress which history has seen  so far. Never before have so many people had so many life chances” wrote Dahrendorf.
 
However, that successful system did not last.  To day, unskilled and  semiskilled  labour  is fast disappearing  not just thank to  mechanised and robotised production, but also because the globalization of the labour market . Mass unemployment  is beginning to look like  an endemic characteristic of advanced society.  The working class, the one  most interested in social security, is a shrinking  percentage of population, while the middle class grows bigger and bigger. It is not surprising  that  even the left wing  got out of the collectivistic  view , and  concentrated on the “Identity “ and freedom of the single individual. The famous Thatcher phrase “ there  is no such thing as society, there are  only individuals and families” cancelled  with one stroke solidarity  and collective interest. 

The “Austrians” economists of the '30s –ignored until  the seventies- gave their intellectual support  with a somewhat simplistic doctrine: taxes reduce  growth and the efficiency of the economy , State regulation creates  obstacles to free competition; the less the State , the better  the economy. Collective services supplied by the State are inefficient  and must be privatized. The cult of the “private” brought the  liquidation of a large part of public capital,  that is, reduced the investment in public services, and  increased the profits for the shareholders of the privatized companies.  Whatever was run by the State , hospitals and schools, prison  even police and the army, and transport services, must become private property. However, private owners cannot run these services according to the interest of the public, and their losses must be paid by the State, which  has happened over and over again, in  a sort of creeping  re-nationalisation . The negative  effect of all this has been quite serious.  Public services have become private, and the citizen is now tied to the State  only by obedience, and no more by the use of public services which reduce the inequality between citizens. 

The State has only a  ‘punitive’ function,  and the people loses interest in politics , which in turn is reduced to “the politics of interest, the politics of envy, the politics of re-election ” .The debate on the way  we govern ourselves is left  to “policy specialists and think tanks, where conventional opinion rarely finds a place,  and public are largely excluded. “ Perhaps too much State is not good, but there  is something worse, when there is not enough of it.  In the “failed” State, people  suffers violence  and a lack of justice,  and , more over, the services don’t work. On the other hand, capitalism is not a political system, but a form of economic life compatible with many  political  regimes, democratic or dictatorial; correspondingly, communism, although an enemy of a free market,  can be adapted to different  economic systems, although  it reduces their efficiency. Notwithstanding having been  the  one that gained most  from the welfare state, the middle class  or a good part of it, is  now  more and more sceptic on the welfare state and  worried of taxation  which  it has to pay to maintain at least some economic equality .
 
The result of all this, says Judt, is that poverty, however measured,  is on the increase in the US and in Britain, and in all countries  wjich have followed their example. It is therefore necessary to go back to the social question, with a new “moral narrative”. The simple thing that something would be in our direct interest is not enough. We have to find a new way  to give our action a scope  that may have a general effect. What do we want? We have to reduce inequalities,  because they cancel the sense of  fraternity, which is a political objective, but also a condition  for  political  efficiency.  Inequality is inefficient, and egoism is at the end unpleasant even for those who practice it. Globalisation reduces the economic differences between countries, but  increases the inequalities  among their citizens.

It is up to the State to mediate between the impotent citizens and  the great corporations that do not respond to anybody.  Only the Government can deal efficiently with  the  effects of globalization. In US , the country  more critical of the State, the Government  has supported and financed  a great number of different actors,  the railways barons , the  grain producers, the car and plane makers  etc, but everybody thinks exactly the opposite. We got rid of the idea that the State is always the best solution for every problem , but the fact is  that if the State does not  regulate the market , somebody else will do it, monopolies,  great  industrial companies, the unions,  making a fiction of the market freedom. Only the State can channel the energy  of every citizen into  a comfortable  collective  situation.

The main point is the public services, and Tony Judt  writes a short but pregnant story of the English Railways  and of the failure of their privatisation.  The world is to day dominated by fear, because of terrorism and immigration . If there are no institutions  the citizen can trust , every one will look for his own answer,  creating a society of closed groups , represented by the closed compounds of the rich, which fragment the urban continuity in so many semi autonomous satellites. Socialism, concludes Judt , wanted to displace capitalism, and it failed, while Social Democracy  “succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its  founders.” It is therefore the moment to state clearly the  social question . The Social Democrats  cannot limit themselves to  matter of economic efficiency, they cannot ignore the  ethic  side , and  the necessity of collective  objectives.  To make money is not enough , human society must have  an objective that looks  just and  reachable. 

As we can see  from this  very  short presentation ,Tony Judt’s book  tells how the present unlimited capitalism has become the norm, and  how  the human society can correct it.  The key point  is the moral sense of the people, their desire of living in  a pleasant environment , where the obsessive  race to riches  would not erase  what is the centre of  the common life ,  the solidarity   between citizens. Judt’s recipe  may appear weak , but  history tells us that  the extraordinary economic and social progress in  the last century was  produced in fact by a shared  moral imperative to contain and reduce the social and economic inequalities. The moral tension in Judt’s book  may have  led him to   avoid attempting  a description of the middle class, which is by now the majority of the population,  and of its   strong feeling of fear, and not only of terrorists and immigrants: above all, fear of loosing  the economic improvement that it has  reached in recent years,  fear of going back  to the previous situation,  to the misery  cancelled by the economic development of the fifties and seventies.

This, I believe , is in fact the obsession of the middle class, which supersedes any political discourse,  creating a sense of insecurity , which makes  a social   group originally not aggressive  to fall for  drastic solutions , and impedes  it to  realise that such a society  as we have now  can progress only  through a general consensus, which would free the social energy in all strata of society. There is nowadays a mass culture  of TV and , in general, of media, which  is the main instrument   for trapping the middle class in its   foibles. In conclusion, Tony Judt’s book  is a vibrant narrative,  perfectly suited for the young generation. One can only hope for many translations in  the other European languages.