Judt's repudiation of the Zionist sympathies of his youth — he had spent two years in Israel and served in its army — was of a piece with his rejection in his final decade of the US, his adoptive homeland, in favour of European social democracy, which he championed in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 and in Ill Fares the Land. In earlier books, he had been critical of French intellectuals and of the European Union, but the transatlantic polarisation that followed 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq caused Judt to revert to what he saw as the uniquely prosperous, peaceful and civilised social experiment that had improbably emerged on European soil after Hitler and Stalin. Judt insisted that social democracy had brought with it an unprecedented security, which in turn had made possible a "private life" in which culture could flourish. The return, as he saw it, of a climate of fear and insecurity was the fault of free market ideologues, chief among them Friedrich Hayek, and their political adherents: Thatcher, Reagan, Blair and Bush. Thinking the Twentieth Century recapitulates this argument succinctly — and with more than a touch of bitterness.

For Judt lived to see his beloved social democracy decay from within. That process has only accelerated since his death. The debt crisis has made manifest the fundamental fact of life that Europe had contrived to ignore for decades: the promise of social security held out by the soft Left was always an illusion, because it mortgaged the future to pay for the present. There are too many drones and not enough workers. The European model has run out of Europeans. 

Writing in the Washington journal National Affairs this month, the Catholic writer George Weigel describes this "unprecedented reality: the systematic depopulation on a mass scale through deliberate and self-induced infertility" as the underlying cause of Europe's economic and political malaise. Others, too, have been warning for many years that Europe was not only living beyond its financial means, but consuming its moral capital too by squandering its Judaeo-Christian inheritance. It is no coincidence that the most powerful critics of this abdication of responsibility for civilisation are religious voices, such as Rabbi Lord Sacks and Pope Benedict XVI. An exclusively secular Europe is a Europe without a past or a future.