Free Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt

administrative elite, they don’t explain the radical transition in attitudes and expectations which has marked our own age. It is one thing to fear that a good system may not be able to maintain itself; it is quite another to lose faith in that system altogether.

CHAPTER THREE
    The Unbearable Lightness of Politics
    “A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.”
     
—JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES
     
     
     
     
    N othing, of course, is ever quite as good as we remember. The social democratic consensus and the welfare institutions of the postwar decades coincided with some of the worst town planning and public housing of modern times. From Communist Poland through social democratic Sweden and Labour Britain into Gaullist France and the South Bronx, over-confident and insensitive planners plastered cities and suburbs with unlivable and unsightly housing estates. Some of these are still with us—Sarcelles, a suburb of Paris, bears witness to the haughty indifference of bureaucratic mandarins to the daily life of their subjects. Ronan Point, a peculiarly ugly high-rise in east London, had the good taste to fall down of its own accord but most of the buildings of that era are still with us.
    The indifference of local and national authorities to the harm wrought by their decisions can stand for a troubling aspect of postwar planning and renewal. The idea that those in authority know best—that they are engaged in social engineering on behalf of people who do not understand what is good for them—was not born in 1945, but it flourished in the decades that followed. This was the age of Le Corbusier: how the masses felt about their new apartments, the new towns to which they had been moved, the ‘quality of life’ to which they had been assigned, was all too often a matter of indifference.
    By the late 1960s, the idea that “nanny knows best” was already starting to produce a backlash. Middle class voluntary organizations began to protest at the wholesale and abusive clearing not just of ‘ugly’ slums but also of prized buildings and townscapes: the wanton destruction of New York’s Pennsylvania Station and London’s Euston Station, the elevation of a monstrous office tower at the heart of Paris’s ancient Montparnasse quartier , the unimaginative redistricting of whole cities. Rather than an exercise in socially responsible modernization on behalf of the community, these began to appear as symptoms of uncontrolled and insensitive power.
    Even in Sweden, where the Social Democrats’ grip on office remained as firm as ever, the relentless uniformity of even the best housing projects, social services or public health policies began to grate on a younger generation. Had more people known about the eugenicist practices of some Scandinavian governments in the postwar years, encouraging and even enforcing selective sterilization for the greater benefit of all, the sense of oppressive dependence upon a panoptic state might have been greater still. In Scotland, where the municipallyowned tower blocks of working-class Glasgow housed upwards of 90% of the city’s population, their air of dilapidation bore witness to the indifference of municipal (socialist) councils to the condition of their proletarian constituents.
    The sense, widespread by the ’70s, that the ‘responsible’ state was unresponsive to the needs and desires of those for whom it spoke contributed to a widening social gulf. On the one hand, there stood an older generation of planners and social theorists. Heirs to the managerialist confidence of the Edwardians, these men and women remained proud of their achievements. Middle-class themselves, they were especially pleased at their success in binding the old elites into a new social order.
    But the beneficiaries of that order—whether Swedish shopkeepers, Scottish shipworkers, inner-city African-Americans or bored French suburbanites—were increasingly resentful