After publishing "Postwar," his sweeping history of Europe since 1945, Tony Judt prepared to write an equally ambitious intellectual and cultural history of 20th-century social thought.
But personal history intervened, in the form of Lou Gehrig's disease. By late 2008, Judt could no longer use his hands. Two years later, he was dead.
During that cruelly small window, Yale historian Timothy Snyder made weekly trips to Judt's home in New York City, where the two men conducted a long conversation on the story Judt had hoped to tell in his book.
The edited transcript has now been published as "Thinking the Twentieth Century," a sometimes dense but also bracing book that's both reminiscent of and leagues better than even the most memorable late-night college bull sessions.
"Thinking" is organized in nine chapters, each beginning with Judt's brief autobiographical account of an integral phase in his personal and intellectual development.
Touching on some of the same themes he sketched in "The Memory Chalet," Judt begins with his Jewish heritage and English upbringing, moving forward through his early allegiance to Marxism and Zionism, his sustained meditation on the French left and his growing interest in Eastern Europe.
The concluding chapters in "Thinking" recount Judt's recent role as an outspoken public intellectual and vigorous defender of social democracy.
In the second and larger section of each chapter, Judt and Snyder discuss topics in 20th-century intellectual history related to the opening autobiographical remarks. Reflecting what they know best, the two men concentrate on philosophy, politics and economics, and their focus is unabashedly Eurocentric.
But those are still broad parameters, stuffed with examples of what Judt pinpoints as the greatest "intellectual sin of the century: passing judgment on the fate of others in the name of their future as you see it."
Intellectuals consistently made this mistake, both men conclude, because of what Snyder - more conversational partner than interviewer - aptly describes as "the urge to insist that the complex is just a disguise for the simple."
"Thinking" is a passionate, deeply felt indictment of "simple" and seamless narratives that purport to explain everything: fascism and communism as well as Zionism and nationalism, identity politics and cultural studies, psychoanalysis and - our current infatuation - economics.
That indictment is interwoven with a look at the brave and often not-so-brave response of intellectuals living through the events that proved many such narratives false, from the Spanish Civil War and World War II to 1956 Hungary and 1968 Czechoslovakia.
True to form, the Judt we see in "Thinking" is unabashedly opinionated, and he doesn't pull punches in criticizing Israel, American foreign policy, free marketers, politically correct academics and journalists. David Brooks is dismissed as ignorant; Thomas Friedman's position on the Iraq War is described as "contemptible."
But Judt has heroes, too. Léon Blum and Albert Camus. Hannah Arendt and Arthur Koestler. John Maynard Keynes and Leszek Kolakowski and many, many more - most of whom took versions of Judt's own intellectual journey from a flirtation with one grand truth toward a belief in what Judt calls "smaller truths."
"Thinking" makes clear that such a journey doesn't mean everything becomes relative. It may be true, as Judt insists, that "the good society, like goodness itself, cannot be reduced to a single source." But Judt simultaneously insists that such goods exist and are worth fighting for.
In the rousing final chapter and an "Afterword" written one month before his death, Judt describes the current battle for hearts and minds as one between a "politics of social cohesion based around collective purposes" and a coercive politics of fear designed to protect private and unequal ones.
Judt leaves no doubt where he stands; he never did. Like the best of the intellectuals this book commemorates, he both thought for himself and had the courage of his convictions - undervalued traits in the last century, and increasingly rare in our own.
Mike Fischer is a Milwaukee writer and lawyer.