Featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer , Ta-Nehisi Coates. “We are in for a fight . . . and in that fight Tony's work will be needed. This volume, in particular, will be needed.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates, from the preface Tony Judt called America "an eviscerated society," a nation tethered to its government more by tradition and law than collective benefit and unity. Written in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Ill Fares the Land takes on the nihilistic individualism of conservatives and the failures of liberals to defend effective government. It reintroduces forgotten alternatives to address our common needs, and asks the central question facing us today: How can we make a good society now? Tony Judt was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University, as well as the founder and director of the Remarque Institute, dedicated to creating an ongoing conversation between Europe and the United States. He was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and also taught at Cambridge, Oxford, and Berkeley. Professor Judt was a frequent contributor to  The New York Review of Books ,  The Times Literary Supplement ,  The New Republic ,  The New York Times , and many journals across Europe and the United States. He is the author or editor of fifteen books, including  Thinking the Twentieth Century ,  The Memory Chalet ,  Ill Fares the Land ,  Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century , and  Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 , which was one of  The New York Times Book Review ’s Ten Best Books of 2005, the winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He died in August 2010 at the age of sixty-two.