THE period stretching from the collapse of communism up to the attack on Iraq was a time when western leaders prided themselves on their ignorance of history.

They embraced the defining delusion of the post-cold war era: the conflicts of the 20th century are safely behind us, and we have nothing to learn from the past. Backed by America’s seemingly invincible military might and the superior productivity of western economies, the world had entered a new epoch of peace and democracy.

Tony Judt has always been a dissenter from this consensus. In Reappraisals the British-born historian, now a university professor in New York, collects 23 essays, written between 1994 and 2006, in which he undertakes a ruthless dissection of the ruling illusions of the post-cold war years — “the years the locusts ate”, as he calls them.

A book of essays originally published over a period of 12 years may seem an unlikely place to find a systematic analysis of the follies of an era, and it is true that the pieces gathered here cover a remarkable range of writers and themes. There are illuminating assessments of Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt, a superb deconstruction of Blair’s Britain, a penetrating discussion of the fall of France in 1940, explorations of Belgium’s fractured statehood and the ambiguous position of Romania in Europe, analyses of the Cuba crisis and Kissinger’s diplomacy, and much else besides.

This breadth of reference may seem to militate against continuous argument, but in fact these articles and reviews pursue a single overarching theme. The book is a devastating critique of intellectual life over the past two decades, and it is mostly icons of the left that are smashed.

The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm is described as “a communist mandarin — with all the confidence and prejudices of his caste”, who by ignoring Stalin’s crimes “slept through the terror and shame of the age”. Louis Althusser, the founder of a hermetic type of Marxism whose gibberish blighted academic discourse for a generation, resembles “a minor medieval scholastic, desperately scrabbling around in categories of his own imagining”, whose theories are worth less than “the most obscure theological speculation, which usually had as its goal something of significance”.

These are severe judgments, but they are not unjust. Each of these writers insulated his political beliefs from any contact with historical realities — Hobsbawm by affecting a patrician silence, Althusser by retreating into incomprehensibility. As a result they have contributed nothing to understanding the past century. In contrast, Judt praises Arthur Koestler as “the exemplary intellectual” whose courageous nonconformity “has assured him his place in history”.

He describes Leszek Kolakowski’s reply to an “open letter” by EP Thompson in which the British historian berates the Polish philosopher for his departures from socialist orthodoxy as “the most perfectly executed demolition in the history of political argument: no one who reads it will ever take EP Thompson seriously again.”

In similar vein Judt writes sympathetically of Whittaker Chambers, the American former Communist party member who outed Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent, whose reward for speaking out at great risk to himself was to be defamed and detested by right-thinking liberals. In their different ways, these ex-communists demonstrated a kind of integrity that has been noticeably absent in the paragons of the intellectual left.

Judt is especially hard on America’s liberal hawks. These “ tough”, “muscular” liberals have collaborated with neocons in injecting into the centre of politics a type of thinking inherited from the old left.

As Judt sees it, left-liberals such as Michael Ignatieff and Paul Berman are not much more than camp followers of the Bush administration. “America’s liberal armchair warriors,” he writes sharply, “are the ‘useful idiots’ of the War on Terror.” A few pages later, he hammers the point home: “In today’s America, neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf. There really is no other difference between them.”

Judt entitles the essay in which he takes American liberals to task “The Silence of the Lambs: On the Strange Death of Liberal America”. This may be a little overdone.

A good many American liberals — not least Barack Obama — were opposed to the Iraq war pretty much from the start. But it is true that the organs of the liberal centre in America — the Washington Post and New York Times, for example — colluded with the Bush administration in a grotesquely ill-judged and demeaning way.

The job of countering pro-war disinformation was left to investigative journalists such as Seymour Hersh and Michael Massing, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The continuing carnage in Iraq is as much the responsibility of the liberals who legitimised the war as it is of the neocons who engineered it.

Analysing the motives of the liberal hawks, Judt finds a yearning for lost moral simplicities. He is surely right about left-liberal moral nostalgia. Though he does not comment on the fact, a similar shift has occurred on the eastern side of the Atlantic where, on some sections of the British left, the US has succeeded the former Soviet Union as the regime appointed by history to bring about a revolutionary transformation in human affairs.

Neocons and strong-arm liberals have not lost the taste for bloodshed in faraway places of the fellow-travelling left, they have merely fastened on a different regime as the vehicle for their fantasies of world revolution. Judt’s critique of the role of liberal intellectuals in politics is wide-ranging and unsparing. When he takes seriously a one-state solution for the Palestine/Israel conflict, or suggests looking to Europe for a 21st-century model of the good society, he is as remote from historically realisable possibilities as the writers he criticises.

Even when he is wrong, however, Judt writes with fearless integrity and moral seriousness. Like Raymond Aron, Judt is a liberal thinker dedicated to demystifying liberal illusions.

—The Guardian London