It's been hardly a week since Tony Judt died, and Anglo-American intellectual life already feels poorer. He was diagnosed two years ago with amyotropic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease; within a year he had been reduced, as he wrote, to a 'cockroach-like existence', unable to move. Yet he continued to write and stir things up, producing a flurry of probing autobiographical essays (which he was forced to dictate); delivering from his wheelchair a stunning lecture on social democracy at New York University, which left some members of the packed audience in tears; and publishing an expanded version of the lecture as a book, Ill Fares the Land, a robust critique of free market ideology. He was so visible, and so lively on the page – in the New York Review of Books, in the London Review, in the Guardian, in the New York Times – that his death still came as a shock.
