The first line is the verdict: something is deeply wrong with the way we live today.
Algo va mal (original Ill Fares the Land, 2010) is Tony Judt’s last book, written while ALS was taking his body and published months before he died. The argument: for thirty years we turned material self-interest into a virtue and lost any sense of doing things together. He goes back to the postwar consensus that built the Western welfare state (1945 to the late 1970s), follows how neoliberalism dismantled it from the 1980s on, and counts the bill: inequality, broken trust, run-down public goods. His conclusion is modest and stubborn: social democracy, flaws and all, is still the best option we have.
Reviewers read it as an elegy and as one of the most solid defences of social democracy of its time. It is on the list; I haven’t read it yet.