Scott McLemee remembers Tony Judt

The historian Tony Judt, who died over the weekend, got entered into my registry not quite 20 years ago, when he started writing for The New York Review of Books and other publications. Some of his work was stimulating and some of it was annoying. His books on the European Left proved to be both. Judt was dismissive of questions and figures I thought were important, or else ignored them entirely. Reading Judt on Marxism involved a certain amount of intracranial yelling. As C.L.R. James once said about T.S. Eliot, he was someone I read in order to remind me of what I do not think...

Full article, which goes onto salute Judt's courage and commitment to fulfilling the role of the public intellectual against overwhelming odds to the end, here.