Why have you chosen Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land?

I found Tony Judt, who has just died, very honest and wise. All the obituaries said he was a wonderfully stimulating teacher, but I only know him through his writing. His thesis is that over the last 30 or 40 years life has been dominated by the pursuit of wealth, by an excessive individualism, and by the desire of people to express and fulfil themselves. He castigates the west for having that sort of philosophy, but then he gets interesting, because he admits honestly that now there is no persuasive left-wing narrative, and that what we’ve got to try and do now is to recover the moral framework within which we think about society.

Given the society we have now, there will always be the question of how we balance the action of the state and the action of private individuals. Because there is no political ideology that is going to be persuasive, we’ve got to have this moral framework by which we seek to evaluate policies. The last part of his thesis is that we now seem to have reached a stage where the state is always regarded as the worst possible solution to any problem. What he tries to show through examples of the Roosevelt government, France under de Gaulle and various others, is that the state is not always the worst possible actor. He tries to elicit a sense of what the state achieved under those governments, and, although it sounds very minimalist, he says we should recover a sense of gratitude, for example, for what the post-World War II government in Britain achieved. We should not just take it for granted but recognise and learn from its approach. 

It sounds as though he is saying that when the left-wing narrative died then ethics died with it?

Well, a Marxist analysis has never been concerned with the moral dimension in itself; it’s been a political narrative based on a particular reading of economic history. A lot of people may have been Marxists because of strong moral convictions, but Marxism itself is really just a reading of history. That was different from, say, Christian Socialism, which was very dominant in Britain for some time, and indeed half the members of Tony Blair’s government claimed to be Christian Socialists. This is a morally based socialism rather than a Marxist one. Harold Wilson said of the Labour Party that it ‘owed more to Methodism than it did to Karl Marx’. In short, it owed more to a morally based sense of social justice than to a simple reading of economic history.

So Judt is saying that we have to recover a moral framework to view politics, and this chimes with my own book Faith in Politics? 

Judt’s book reads very well, and his opening sentence sets the tone: ‘Something is profoundly wrong in the way we live today.’ But he’s not offering any easy or obvious solutions, which is where something of his honesty comes through. 

His other books have been history books, but this one, which he wrote while he was dying, is about the problems he sees today.

Yes, but it draws on history and his extensive knowledge of governments over the last 50 years, and how they tackled some of these problems. And one aspect of this history is the growing inequalities, not just in wealth but in health and life expectancy. 

It sounds like a familiar call for left-wing renewal.

It’s not quite so familiar as you might think, because, as I said, he thinks there is no persuasive left-wing narrative for people to latch on to, and politics as a whole is much less clear now. It’s much less satisfactory for those of us who like a clarion call for an unambiguous ideology. It’s a kind of centrist position, with a left-wing bias, one based on the recognition that very few are out-and-out statists and nobody with a sense of social justice is going to be an out-and-out free marketer. In deciding where to strike the balance we need a moral dimension. 

Was Judt a religious man?

I didn’t know him. He’s not either religious or anti-religious in the book. I assume that he was a secular agnostic. He seems to be writing from that standpoint.  

Tell me about the Habermas book. 

Habermas is also writing from what I imagine is a secular agnostic background. But what is so interesting about this book is that he is quite unequivocal in his affirmation of what religion has given to western society: concepts like the value of the person and solidarity in society, for example. He thinks our society has derived these values from Christian faith. He believes that in the politics we have at the moment something is missing, hence the very intriguing title of his book, An Awareness of Something Missing. He says that none of the political nostrums we have on show at the moment can motivate people or bind people together in society with a sense of belonging together in a way that religion at its best is able to do. We need to recover a moral vision, which for Habermas draws very deeply on the wells of religion. And he has a very interesting approach to religion, because he thinks that while religion has been essential and is essential now, religion must translate its concepts into what the philosopher John Rawls would call ‘public reasoning’, concepts which the ordinary citizen can understand. 

He is very critical of so-called enlightenment thinkers who regard religion as irrational, and says that religion does have a rationality in its own terms and that there must be a recognition of that by secular non-believers. The interesting phrase he uses about religion is das Unabgegoltene – the unexhausted force of religious traditions in what they have to offer to society; there is more that society can draw from religion.