Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt

norms and authoritarian purposes. But Marxism was the rhetorical awning under which very different dissenting styles could be gathered together—not least because it offered an illusory continuity with an earlier radical generation. But under that awning, and served by that illusion, the Left fragmented and lost all sense of shared purpose.
    On the contrary, ‘Left’ took on a rather selfish air. To be on the Left, to be a radical in those years, was to be self-regarding, self-promoting and curiously parochial in one’s concerns. Left-wing student movements were more preoccupied with college gate hours than with factory working practices; the university-attending sons of the Italian upper-middle-class beat up underpaid policemen in the name of revolutionary justice; light-hearted ironic slogans demanding sexual freedom displaced angry proletarian objections to capitalist exploiters. This is not to say that a new generation of radicals was insensitive to injustice or political malfeasance: the Vietnam protests and the race riots of the ’60s were not insignificant. But they were divorced from any sense of collective purpose, being rather understood as extensions of individual self-expression and anger.
    These paradoxes of meritocracy—the ’60s generation was above all the successful byproduct of the very welfare states on which it poured such youthful scorn—reflected a failure of nerve. The old patrician classes had given way to a generation of well-intentioned social engineers, but neither was prepared for the radical disaffection of their children. The implicit consensus of the postwar decades was now broken, and a new, decidedly unnatural consensus was beginning to emerge around the primacy of private interest. The young radicals would never have described their purposes in such a way, but it was the distinction between praiseworthy private freedoms and irritating public constraints which most exercised their emotions. And this very distinction, ironically, described the newly emerging Right as well.

THE REVENGE OF THE AUSTRIANS
    “We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.”
     
—FRIEDRICH HAYEK
     
     
     
     
    C onservatism—not to mention the ideological Right—was a minority preference in the decades following World War II. The old, pre-war Right had discredited itself twice over. In the English-speaking world, the conservatives had failed to anticipate, understand or repair the scale of the damage wrought by the Great Depression. By the outbreak of war, only the hard core of the old English Conservative Party and rock-ribbed know-nothing Republicans still opposed the efforts of New Dealers in Washington and semi-Keynesian administrators in London to respond imaginatively to the crisis.
    In continental Europe, conservative elites paid the price for their accommodation (and worse) with the occupying powers. With the defeat of the Axis they were swept from office and power. In eastern Europe, the old parties of the center and right were brutally destroyed by their communist successors, but even in western Europe there was no place for traditional reactionaries. A new generation of moderates took their place.
    Intellectual conservatism fared little better. For every Michael Oakeshott, embattled in his rigorous contempt for bien pensant modern thought, there were a hundred progressive intellectuals making the case for the postwar consensus. No one had much time for free marketeers or ‘minimal statists’; and even though most older liberals were still instinctively suspicious of social engineering, they were committed if only on prudential grounds to a very high level of governmental activism. Indeed, the center of gravity of political argument in the years after 1945 lay not between left and right but rather within the left: between communists and their sympathizers and the mainstream