Abstract

This essay focuses on the complex approach to socialism that characterized the intellectual journey of the British historian Tony Judt (1948-2010). After coming to terms with the totalitarian legacies of the twentieth century since the mid-1980s, he started facing the new social question since the 1990s. His original version of the social-democratic thought was shaped by his personal and intellectual connections with the East Central European dissidents' liberalism, by his critical approach to the engagement of the French intellectuals and by his historical researches on post-1945 Europe. The peculiarities of his "moralistic" socialism will appear in full light against the background of Judt's confrontation with the Marxist historical and political conceptions of another great historian such as Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012).