REZENSIONEN/BOOK REVIEWS Progress in an Age of Fear? TONY JUDT: Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents London 2010 Allen Lane, 237 pp. W ith the publication of his last book,»Ill Fares the Land,« shortly before his death in August 2010, the great British historian Tony Judt made an invalu­able contribution to the debate on the future of social democracy and progressive politics. The book is required reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of social democracy – as is Richard Wilkinson’s and Kate Pickett’s»The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better,« to which Tony Judt makes copious reference. Naturally, one is not obliged to agree with every word even of required read­ing. But it does not matter whether one agrees with Judt’s arguments or not: in any case,»Ill Fares the Land« compels social democrats to rethink their cus­tomary arguments. In the twenty-first century, can and should social democracy continue to conceive of itself as a party of progress? What direction should this progress now take? Or could it be that today»progress« represents rather the problem than the solution? These are the provocative questions that Judt poses. It is clear that belief in the necessity of progress and its possibility in principle was always a constitutive factor in social democracy. In contrast, conservatives have tended to believe in the existence of a»natural order of things,« which could not be radically changed. Conservatism, properly speaking, was always a funda­mentally pessimistic world view. That changed to some degree around 30 years ago with the emergence of the neoconservative and neoliberal hegemony. Judt rightly stresses the historical dimension of this turning of the tide:»It is the Right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project.« This observation is uncontroversial among social democrats. However, the conclusion Judt draws from it with regard to the task of social democracy is likely to give rise to some debate:»If social democracy has a future, it will be as a so­cial democracy of fear.(…) The first task of radical dissenters today is to remind ipg 4/2010 Rezensionen/Book Reviews 235