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Civilisation and Discontent: Niall Ferguson, Tony Judt and the Crisis of the West Nick Shepley Last October (2011) a furious row broke out between conservative historian Niall Ferguson and writer Pankaj Mishra, who reviewed Ferguson's latest book Civilisation: The West and the Rest in the London Review of Books. Mishra wrote a lengthy and critical essay about the book, prompting threats of libel action from Ferguson. Mishra claimed that Ferguson's argument required: "...sustained and complex analysis, not one hell-bent on establishing that the West was, and is, best." [1] The review was designed to be provocative, Mishra, a writer who focuses on the complex and often contradictory relationships between India and the West (having in recent years written the foreword to new editions of Kipling's Kim and E.M. Forster's A Passage To India) was given the task of critiquing the foremost proponent of empire itself. The results were predictable, Mishra, while acknowledging Ferguson's impressive scholarship, accused him of dismissing evidence that didn't fit his thesis out of hand. The Ferguson argument, which questions how and why Europe and then America have had such a long period of wealth and power, and whether this period is now at an end taps deeply into a growing body of thought about the state of Western society, and its ability to project power globally. Popular titles in recent years such as False Dawn and Black Mass by John Gray, Why the West Rules, For Now by Ian Morris and an entire industry of US non academic, quasi historical punditry, questioning America's relative decline have filled bookshops and the Internet. The world economic crisis has given these inquiries a renewed sense of urgency, as the beneficiary of the West's ills, China and the other BRIC countries begin to demonstrate their newfound prosperity, and old certainties about Europe and America's place in the world become less of a given. At the same time, long term perceived flaws and weaknesses in the way the economy of the Western World operates and the way wealth is distributed have also come under scrutiny, neoliberalism, the economic orthodoxy adopted in Europe and America since the 1970s has come under unprecedented criticism since the crisis of 2008, and in a number of landmark texts, the scale of social damage caused by it has been examined. In 2009 The Spirit Level, a statistics led inquiry into the corrosive effect on inequality, written by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett received critical acclaim and was required read-

ing by the leaders of Britain's three main political parties. It was followed in 2010 by Tony Judt's penultimate book, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise On Our Current Discontents, which covered similar territory to the Spirit Level, but from the perspective of a historian, not a social scientist. In this essay I will examine the two texts, Ferguson's Civilization and Ill Fares the Land by the late Judt, both are not so much conventional histories but treatises on the causes of economic and social crises in the West. Both have been written largely in response to the world economic crisis and both books have one similar theme, that values that made the Western world 'great' have been abandoned and that in order for the West to move forward, these values must be reinvigorated. Here is where the similarities end. Ferguson examines six key advantages that the west had, labeling them 'killer apps', property rights, competition, science, medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic. He argues that it was these practices and innovations that enabled the West to have half a millennia of global hegemony, one which he believes is now coming to an end. Ferguson believes that it is the abandonment of the 'killer apps' that made Britain the dominant global power in the 19th Century and America the 20th Century hegemon, that are leading inexorably to Western decline.[2] Judt, writing shortly before his death in 2010, laments the loss of a social democratic golden age, one which existed from the end of the Second World War up to the mid 1970s in Europe and America. He is less concerned with the West's growing failure to exert itself abroad, and more concerned about the collapse of society as he sees it as a result of the ideological and social pressures of neoliberalism. Judt interprets the West's comparative decline as the result of an abandonment of social democracy, which is consistent with his liberal left wing views. In order to make keep this essay to a manageable size, I will just examine Ferguson and Judt, though it goes without saying that there are other high profile and popular historians who frequently foray into the realm of topical debate and proffer solutions to contemporary problems. I have specifically chosen these two writers because they represent the poles of conservative and liberal politics, but even so, their proposed solutions to our present problems are remarkably similar. Ferguson introduces Civilisation with the assertion that, as the future of Western ascendency looks increasingly doubtful, that the most interesting question a historian can ask is how and why it came about in the first place, and also, based on the answers that arise, what predictions might be made about the future. [3] In starting from this less than optimistic position, Ferguson seems to have reached the end of a decade long journey of inquiries into the rise of the Western World. In 2003 he wrote Empire, a history of Britain's imperial past and an explicit defence of the benefits of British Imperialism. In the concluding chapter, he laid the groundwork for his next examination of

empire, Colossus, by arguing that American Empire, and the benefits of civilisation that it conferred onto its subjects, had now replaced that of Britain. When he wrote Colossus in 2004, a tone of pessimism had entered his writing, which had not been detectable in Empire, and Ferguson shifted his emphasis from simply conveying a historical narrative (albeit from a specific ideological perspective) to being critical of US policymakers. Colossus was an examination of American Empire, but one which concluded that the abandonment of thrift and the Protestant work ethic at home, combined with a weak and vacillating post Cold War foreign policy, had seen America substantially weakened[4]. As with Civilisation, however, Ferguson believed in Colossus that he was delivering a timely wake up call and an impassioned 'call to arms' to rouse Western Civilisation from it's slumbers and prepare to face the menace competition from the non Western World. Ferguson's role as an advocate of Neo-conservatism should be examined here. In an interview with the Guardian Newspaper last year he rejected the title of 'right wing' claiming it was an invention of the left, but clear positioned himself as the antithesis of Judt in terms of ideology. He said: "Ask me not are you rightwing, but ask me are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment? Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the Wealth of Nations and the Theory of Moral Sentiments, then I'm rightwing. If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I'm rightwing. If you think that it's rightwing to say that the welfare state has trapped 10-20% of the population of western Europe in a dependency culture, an abyss of social failure, then I'm rightwing."[5] Throughout the past decade, Ferguson has used his position as a high profile TV historian and celebrity academic to argue the case for US foreign policy under George W. Bush. In another interview with the Guardian, Ferguson reiterated the point that in general, he had approved of the Iraq War, but felt it had been mishandled due to a manpower shortage. He said: "The problem I constantly wrote about then was that if you invade and overthrow the bad guy, hold elections and then piss off, it doesn't work."[6] His solution, put forward in Colossus, to the lack of manpower that the US Army faces is the conscription of convicts, the unemployed and illegal immigrants. As with Civilisation, Ferguson here is also reaching back into the past to find solutions that existed in the heyday of European hegemony and trying to apply them to contemporary problems. He imagines that America can find troops to fight huge campaigns (the one which he thought should have been fought in Iraq, the occupation of the entire country) in the same way that Britain, with it's traditionally small standing army, found enough men to fight Napoleon and have a large colonial army. That Ferguson suggests these measures, ones which he must surely be aware no Western politician of bureaucrat would ever entertain, does raise questions about his intentions as a writer. Most contemporary commentators agree that the quality of his scholarship is

beyond rebuke, but the fact that Ferguson has become his own brand name, with books, TV. shows and DVD sales making him exceedingly wealthy casts some doubt over the sincerity of his conclusions. Some of his more provocative and controversial statements may well be born of an urge to live up to a well established caricature, that of professional contrarian and now TV pundit. In Civilisation, the indication as to how the economic crisis has affected his arguments can be seen in his examination of other competing cultures, particularly Chinese and Islamic, his work articulates a set of anxieties that are being felt across the West in its supposed time of decline. Ferguson notes that now that Protestantism has taken hold in China, that so too has the industriousness of the Protestant work ethic. He writes: "The rise of the spirit of capitalism in China is a story everyone knows. But what about the rise of the Protestant ethic? According to separate surveys by China Partner and East China Normal University in Shanghai, there are now around 40 million Protestant Christians in China, compared with barely half a million in 1949." [7] A possible inference that can be drawn from the comparison between Chinese capitalism and Chinese Protestantism, is that the West's economic decline and her growing secularism are directly related. Ferguson, whilst articulating anxieties also appears to be shaking his head ruefully at the West, reminding us that we only have ourselves to blame. Ferguson's belief about the rise of Western hegemony, and about the expansion of empires that accompanied it, is that on balance, the western imperial project was beneficial, and as with the example of America and Iraq, most of the tragedies and atrocities of imperialism were the result of incompetence rather than malice. When discussing the Treaty of Versailles at the Hay Festival with Eric Hobsbawm in 2009, Ferguson described Hitler, Stalin and Mao as the three 'great evil men' of the 20th Century, and the contrast is telling. Evil empires exist outside the Atlantic world, well meaning, if sometimes fallible empires exist within it. What seems to have changed in Ferguson's writing as a result of the world economic crisis is not a dimming of his enthusiasm for Western civilisation and its perceived merits, but a sense that its days might be up, and that the failure to uphold values that made the West great are to blame. Like Judt, as we shall see, Ferguson proposes a number of ideas that might 'save the day'. Firstly, he questions the well established tradition in academic scholarship of charting the 'rise and fall' of civilisations. Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee and more recently Jared Diamond have all created models that chart the lifespan of civilisation, all of which seem to have their inspiration in Edward Gibbons Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. [8] Ferguson argues that even though the reasons for the rise of empires can be clearly mapped, the causes of their decline are highly unpredictable, and it is doubtful that the idea of 'rise and fall' can be made to fit a simplistic historical narrative of 'inevitability'. Fer-

guson argues that there is still everything to play for, but that we must re-learn the strategies that have worked in the past. In the same chapter, however, he tempers his optimism by saying: "The financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007 should therefore be understood as an accelerator of an already well-established trend of relative Western decline."[9] Here the economic crisis is tied into a longer historical process, one caused, as Ferguson argues, not just by a Western disregard for innovation, thrift and effort, but by the nonWestern adoption of these values. However, in the next paragraph, Ferguson argues that the Chinese saved their economy by doing something decidedly un-Western after all. He says: "This was very nearly a Great Depression. The reasons it has been just a Slight Depression are threefold. First, Chinas huge expansion of bank lending, which mitigated the effect of slumping exports to the West."[10] What he means by this is that the Chinese Government directed state owned and private banks to intervene directly in the economy and inject huge sums of capital into subsidising manufacturers and other industries, hit by a collapse in orders from the West. Britain, America and other European countries chose to directly subsidise their banks to keep the banking system from collapsing, and both acts were a curious mis-reading of Ferguson's third Killer App, that of Private Property. Ferguson nowhere argues that a distinct Western advantage is the willingness of governments to subsidise and rescue private industry and finance that has found itself in trouble. It is arguable that Western governments have in fact subsidised and protected many of their major industries for centuries, but it is 'Killer Apps' such as these, which might be perceived by Ferguson's readers as 'cheating', that are left out of the historical narrative. In his book on the economic crisis First as Tragedy, then as Farce, Slavoj Zizek illustrates how Western state intervention in the commodities markets have given the First World a critical advantage over the Third. He writes: A couple of years ago a CNN report on Mali described the reality of the international free market. The two pillars of the Mali economy are cotton in the south and cattle in the north, and both are in trouble because of the way Western powers violate the very rules they try to impose on impoverished third world nations. Mali produces cotton of top quality but the problem is that the financial support that the US government gives to its own cotton farmers amounts to more than the entire state budget of Mali, so it is no surprise that they cant compete. In the north the culprit is the European Union: Malian beef cannot compete with the heavily subsidised European milk and beef. The EU subsidises every single cow with around 500 euros per year more than the per capita GDP in Mali. As the Malian minister for the economy puts it: we dont need your help or advice or lectures about the beneficial effects of abolishing excessive state regulation, please just stick to your own rules about the free market and our troubles will basically be over.[11]

In a final thought, Ferguson states that the West is currently its own worst enemy: "Maybe the real threat is posed not by the rise of China, Islam or CO2 emissions, but by our own loss of faith in the civilization we inherited from our ancestors."[12] He adds that the last great threat to Western civilisation, Nazism, was a product of the corruption of the West: "In 1938 those barbaric and atavistic forces were abroad, above all in Germany. Yet, as we have seen, they were as much products of Western civilization as the values of freedom and lawful government that Churchill held dear. Today, as then, the biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity and by the historical ignorance that feeds it."[13] Ferguson therefore treats the world economic crisis as the West's perhaps final wake up call, a challenge to us all to recapture values that we have foolishly abandoned. Now I will turn to Judt's essay, which like Ferguson's is a criticism of Western values that have culminated in crisis, but also which have featured as part of an overall long term trend. In order to understand Ill Fares the Land, it needs to be seen in its proper context, alongside Judt's other writing. By examining a wider body of his work it becomes possible to see how the world economic crisis has affected his writing. Ill Fares the Land was originally an essay published in the New York Review of Books, a magazine that Judt has contributed to frequently overhear the past two decades. In his anthology of essays from the New York Review, Reappraisals, Judt raises concerns that are echoed in Ill Fares the Land. The first of these is a phenomenon also identified by Eric Hobsbawm in The Age of Extremes, which is the Western World's appetite for dispensing with its past. [14] "Not only did we fail to learn very much from the past...But we have become stridently insistent-in our economic calculations, our political practices, our international strategies, even our educational priorities- that the past has nothing of interest to teach us. Ours, we insist, is a new world: its risks and opportunities are without precedent."[15] The extent of the world economic crisis was beginning to be comprehended when these words (in the introduction) were written, some time in early 2008, but the essays in the book to which the introduction refers were all written prior to 2007. This makes a comparison between Reappraisals and Ill Fares the Land is useful, in judging the impact on Judt's writing as a public intellectual. Throughout Reappraisals he is concerned with themes such as memory, the role and the responsibility of the intellectual and the uses and abuses of the past. Ill Fares the Land is far more focused on one central thesis, and whilst the world economic crisis is chief in guiding Judt's thoughts towards an examination of the social crises neoliberalism appears to have caused in the West, the fact that Judt had months to live also heavily influences the text. The book itself is short in comparison to most of his work, a mere 232 pages, and in it he attempts to convoy the culmination of a career's writing in political and intellectual history.

He starts by continuing with the theme of forgetting, but approaches the West's amnesia from his central thesis, that out abandonment of social democracy has been a disaster. "We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue...And yet we seem to be able to conceive of alternatives. This too is something new." [16] It would be easy to assume that Judt's writing about historical amnesia prior to the crash, and his notion that we seem incapable of conceive of alternatives are really a truncated form of the same idea, but on closer inspection they are worlds apart. In Reappraisals he writes about the hubris of a self confident culture, one that was fuelled by an enormous credit and housing bubble. It is this arrogance, he claims, that lead to a willful forgetting of the 20th Century and a sense of ahistorical detachment from the past. The reasons for the present inability to conceive of alternatives have little to do with confidence, Judt writes in Ill Fares The Land, but because both the left and the right have manifestly failed. Instead of creating an arrogant self assured generation, Judt believes the current wave of young people living through the crisis is beset by anxiety. He goes on throughout the course of the chapter 'The World We Have Lost' to explain the failure of Left and Right, arguing in both instances that the abandonment of the most basic ideas of collectivism and mutuality in the west has bankrupted both parties. The ideas contained within Ill Fares the Land are not particularly new, they closely resemble the ideas of the new left in the 1950s and 1960s, which were critical of the excesses of free market capitalism, but unlike the previous generation of the 1930s, did not look to the Soviet Union for answers. Following the suppression of the Budapest uprising in 1956, Western enthusiasm for the USSR all but vanished. The opening paragraph of Ill Fares the Land is strikingly reminiscent of Erich Fromm's 1955 treatise on the ills of modern America 'The Sane Society'. Judt writes: "Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them." [17] Nearly sixty years beforehand, Fromm had argued for a humanistic and democratic socialism, whereas Judt, with only a slight difference in emphasis, argues for a rediscovery of the values of Social Democracy. The idea that virtue has come from the pursuit of material self interest, and that self centred, acquisitive materialism has corroded the institutions that bind society together is a core theme within the book. The most serious damage that has been done, argues Judt, is the ruination of trust within western societies, this, he points out, is a paradoxical and unin-

tended side effect of unconstrained market forces, because without trust, capitalism itself founders. Fromm, in the Sane Society made a similar point, arguing that the spiritually corrosive effect that capitalism itself had on societies was that of alienation. Fromm was less interested in the decline of trust, writing, as he was, in the afterglow of Roosevelt's New Deal (a form of social democracy that Judt argues, is very conducive to societal trust), but believed that mass production divorced individuals from meaning in their labours and subsequently in their lives, creating the paradox of emotional depression in a time of material abundance. It was on this basis that he questioned society's sanity. Judt's question is slightly less focused on the sanity of the West, more on its quiet apathy, like Ferguson he marshals his argument as a 'call to arms' or at least a wake up call, claiming that the economic crisis has made it considerably easier to question a previously unchallengeable economic orthodoxy. He says: "The Washington doctrine was everywhere greeted by ideological cheerleaders: from the profiteers of the Irish miracle (the property-bubble boom of the Celtic Tiger) to the doctrinaire ultra-capitalists of former Communist Europe. Even old Europeans were swept up in the wake. The EUs free- market project (the so-called Lisbon agenda); the enthusiastic privatisation plans of the French and German governments: all bore witness to what its French critics described as the new pense unique. Today there has been a partial awakening. To avert national bankruptcies and wholesale banking collapse, governments and central bankers have performed remarkable policy reversals, liberally dispersing public money in pursuit of economic stability and taking failed companies into public control without a second thought. A striking number of free-market economists, worshipers at the feet of Milton Friedman and his Chicago colleagues, have lined up to don sackcloth and ashes and swear allegiance to the memory of John Maynard Keynes." [18] He adds that this alone does not constitute the solution to our ills, there is no real abandonment of an economic orthodoxy that has seen Western societies become mores economically polarised than at any time since the 1930s, Keynesian demand side economics is but a tactical retreat. He argues that even if it were wholeheartedly adopted in full it would still not address the huge moral deficit decades of neoliberalism has bequeathed to the West. Judt, like Ferguson, articulates the values that in his opinion, we have foolishly abandoned. He says: "To understand the depths to which we have fallen, we must first appreciate the scale of the changes that have overtaken us. From the late nineteenth century until the 1970s, the advanced societies of the West were all becoming less unequal. Thanks to progressive taxation, government subsidies for the poor, the provision of social services, and guarantees against acute misfortune, modern democracies were shedding extremes of wealth and poverty." [19] He adds: "Over the past thirty years we have thrown all this away. To be sure, we varies with country. The greatest extremes of private privilege and public indifference have resur-

faced in the US and the UK: epicentres of enthusiasm for deregulated market capitalism." [20] Judt's penultimate chapter in the book is quite knowingly titled 'What is to be done?' echoing the title of Lenin's revolutionary manifesto of 1903, where he set forward clear suggestions about how to overthrow Russia's ancien regime. Unlike Lenin, who's prescriptions were divisive enough to split the Russian Social Democratic Party in to the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Judt believes that a new flowering of democratic dissent within civil society is urgently needed and that official economic and political orthodoxies must be challenged He says: "Not many 'lay' people are likely to challenge the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Secretary of the Treasury or their expert advisors in such matters. Were they to do so they would be told, much as a medieval priest might have advised his flock-that these are questions with which they do not need to concern themselves. The liturgy must be chanted in obscure tongue, accessible only to the initiated. For everyone else, faith will suffice. But faith has not sufficed, the emperors of economic policy in Britain and the US, not to mention their acolytes and admirers everywhere from Tallinn to Tblisi are naked...we need to relearn how to criticise those who govern us." (20) Judt is as critical with the failings of the left as he is with the weaknesses of right wing economics. "The left has failed to respond effectively to the financial crisis of 2008-and more generally to the shift away from the state and towards the market over the past three decades. Shorn of a story to tell, social democrats and their liberal and democratic fellows have been on the defensive for a generation, apologising for their own policies and altogether unconvincing when it comes to criticising those of their opponents."[21] Judt's prescriptions for change are in some ways less clearly articulated than his analysis of the problems facing the West, he argues that the current anti statist discourse that is so strong in America, and to a lesser extent in Britain, is folly, as it is the state that has intervened to save the financial system. He also argues that as the state will be with us for a long time to come, that we should find ways to make it work for us instead of attacking it. What kind of state we should aspire to create in the future is unclear, and perhaps Judt, as with Ferguson, was hoping to commence a debate not write a comprehensive manifesto. Judt's analysis of the current crisis sees the financial crash of 2008 in the context of three decades where social democratic values were abandoned, and he argues that without social democracy, capitalism itself will cease to effectively function. These two historians are remarkably different in world view but are from relatively similar backgrounds. Both are British academics who crossed the Atlantic to live and work in academia in the USA, perhaps experience of life and research on both sides of the Atlantic has given them a more comprehensive view of 'the West' in general.

In both instances, the world financial crisis has been used by Ferguson and Judt as the prism through which to observe the west, and in both instances, from differing perspectives, the West has been found wanting. It seems increasingly the case that the world economic crisis would be perhaps more appropriately titled the Western World crisis, as China, India and Russia's economies, along with South Korea, Japan and Germany (who limited the amount of neoliberal orthodoxy she adopted) have all seen economic growth throughout the last four years. It seems hardly surprising in that context that voices on both the left and right are raising serious questions about the best way to resolve these crises. As mentioned earlier on in this essay, the discourse of decline is not uncommon in western historiography. In his intellectual history of the inter war years, Richard Overy dedicates the first chapter to 'Cassandras and Jeremiahs', citing Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee as the leading historians of western decline in the immediate post First World War era[22]. It does not take a great leap of imagination to conclude that the destructiveness of the war had a profound effect on the ability of historians or intellectuals to conceive of a future, one only needs to examine Freud's Civilisation and its Discontents to see that a profound anxiety about the future viability of civilisation had entered into popular thought. In the case of Ferguson and Judt, the overall sense of despair and inevitability is not quite as acute, though both use their positions as reputed interpreters of the past in order to have a contribution to, as EH Carr puts it, the ' unending dialogue between past and present.' The two historians do not see an end to Western civilisation yet, though both seem to agree that unless shared values that we have discarded are rediscovered and reinterpreted by today's generation, then a continuation in the West's comparative decline, with all that might entail will continue unabated. The two writers, as historians and public intellectuals have been affected by the economic crisis in as much as it has given both of them a historically unique opportunity to demonstrate the nature, as they see it, of the Western World's contemporary ills, and to suggest that the remedies do not lie ahead, in some imagined future, but are in our collective past, a place that historians instinctively visit for answers.

[1] P Mishra, 'Watch That Man', London Review of Books, 3 (Nov 2011), 10-12. [2] Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011) P 32-34 [3] Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011) P 1 [4] Niall Ferguson, Colossus (New York, 2004) P23-26 [5] D Aitkenhead, 'Niall Ferguson: 'The left love being provoked by me ... they think I'm a reactionary imperialist scumbag' G2 Guardian (11th April 2011) [6] W Skidelsky, 'Niall Ferguson: 'Westerners don't understand how vulnerable freedom is' The Observer, (Sunday 20 February 2011) [7] Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011) P 32 [8] Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011) P 368-374 [9] Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011) P 340 [10] Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011) P 340 [11] Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then As Farce (London, 2010) P16 [12] Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011) P 406 [13] Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011) P 406 [14] Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (Oxford, 1995) P18 [15] Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections On The Forgotten 20th Century (London 2009) P2 [16] Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents (London, 2011) P2 [17] Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents (London, 2011) P1 [18] Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents (London, 2011) P6-7 [19] Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents (London, 2011) P6-7 [20] Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents (London, 2011) P6-7 [21]Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents (London, 2011) P178 [22]Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (London, 2009)

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Carr, E.H, What is History? (London, 3rd Edition, 2002) Evans, Richard J, In Defence of History ( London,1997) Ferguson, Niall, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Harvard, 2011). Ferguson, Niall, Empire (London, 2003) Ferguson, Niall, Colossus (New York, 2004) Fromm, Erich, The Sane Society (New York, 1955) Gray, John, Black Mass (London, 2008) Gray, John, False Dawn (London, 2003) Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Extremes (Oxford, 1995) Judt, Tony, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents (London, 2011) Judt, Tony, Reappraisals: Reflections On The Forgotten 20th Century (London 2009) Overy, Richard, The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (London, 2009) Zizek, Slavoj, First as Tragedy, Then As Farce (London, 2010) Articles Mishra, P,'Watch That Man', London Review of Books, 3 (Nov 2011), 10-12. Aitkenhead, D, 'Niall Ferguson: 'The left love being provoked by me ... they think I'm a reactionary imperialist scumbag'G2 Guardian (11th April 2011) Skidelsky, W, 'Niall Ferguson: 'Westerners don't understand how vulnerable freedom is' The Observer, (Sunday 20 February 2011)