Tony Judt's final book, The Memory Chalet, is a wonderful and poignant memoir by a member of what looks like one of the luckiest generations ever.
The poignancy stems, of course, from his personal bad luck, the disease which steadily robbed him of all movement including, in the end, the ability to speak. The introduction to the book explains the memory chalet as the device he used to compose these essays alone at night, imprisoned in a quadriplegic body, by linking the words to remembered details of a Swiss hotel where he had spent family holidays in the late 1950s.
The circumstances of its composition, by a man who knew he was dying and would be unable ever again to visit the places he was describing, by themselves would give the book an elegaic tone. This is reinforced by his historian's perspective on the times in which he had lived; the viewpoint of the dying author of Postwar, a wonderful and extraordinary history of the whole of 20th century Europe, must be unique.
I particularly enjoyed the early chapters about growing up in post-war London, the pleasure of spending days wandering around discovering and observing the lie of the land and other people, and the joy of learning instilled by an inspirational teacher. Although Judt was born more than a decade before me, and grew up in a different place, I recognised all of this from my own experience (East Lancashire – see Fay Godwin's and Ted Hughes' Remains of Elmet for those landscapes – and the 60s/70s rather than the 50s, but the same freedom to explore and observe, and the same gift of a place at a direct grant grammar school).
There's little of either economics or history in The Memory Chalet, which is an intensely personal book, although it casts clear light on the good fortune of the baby boom generation through the prism of one man's experiences.
But there is one thought about markets well worth picking up on. Judt says:
“'The market' – like 'dialectical materialism' – is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question)…… The thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.” (p179)
He goes on to compare directly neoliberal ideology about markets with communism, both seen as historically determined inevitabilities in their time and place.
Although in the 30 years since Reagan and Thatcher there has certainly been a strong ideological drive behind the politics of market deregulation, I think we need to distinguish this 'marketism' from the way practising economists think about markets.
For example, the starting point of competition analysis is that every market is different, depending on the specifics of the products and services sold, the businesses engaged in it, their business strategies and even personalities involved, the regulatory framework and so on. To applied economists in consultancies and government, the idea of a 'free market' is certainly an abstraction. This is true also of academic economists in most branches of the discipline. All economists would also insist that there are very many circumstances in which markets do far better than any alternative type of social institution in co-ordinating the needs, preferences and choices of very many individual people, through the information transmitted by prices and quantities – although there would be disagreement about exactly which circumstances.
In other words, 'market' has come to have a political and rhetorical meaning which differs from its economic meaning, and this has turned into a source of tremendous confusion.
There was much else in The Memory Chalet which prompts reflection and remembering. I highly commend it. Here are some other reviews: Peter Preston in The Guardian; Jane Shilling in The Telegraph; Diana Athill in The Literary Review; John Gray in The Daily Beast; John Broening in The Denver Post.
