IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ
On
Jacob
L.
Talmon
Jacob
L.
Talmon is one of a special group of Central European Jewish
intellectuals who have helped define the nature of twentieth-century so–
cial and political life, giving shape to destructive potentials of our age
only dimly understood by those who worship at the altar of absolute
progress. Central neither to class enthusiasms below nor national hubris
above, these people were actually outsiders who understood the driving
forces of the times - the unitary character of the totalitarian threat, the
tragic gap between promise and performance in the revolutionary pro–
cess, and the failure of internationalist rhetoric to resolve national reali–
ties.
These emigres from Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw, Budapest and their
environs were, for the most part, not speaking and writing from a con–
servative bias or defending constitutional tradition; there was little to
defend in the world of crumbling empires in Central Europe. They were
not concerned with restitution or restoration of an old order, for they
knew old orders to threaten their own survival as Jews, intellectuals, and
cosmopolitans. They were motivated by a passion for economic justice
and elementary forms of democratic rule. Their involvement with the
socialist dream, minus the maddening character of socialist practice, gave
them a special rhetoric.
Among this group were, for instance, Hannah Arendt, Hans J.
Morgenthau, Hans Kohn, Franz Neumann, George Lichtheim, Walter
Laqueur, Henry Pachter, and Jacob
L.
Talmon. Talmon, who died in
1980, was the author of many works, among them
The Myth of the Na–
tion and the Vision of Revolution,
the final volume of a trilogy on two
hundred years of political life, begun a quarter of a century ago with
The
Origins oj Totalitarian Democracy
and followed by
Political Messianism. The
Myth oj the Nation,
the most sweeping and ambitious of these volumes, is
amasterpiece.
In this work, Talmon brings us to the twentieth century and to its
ideological polarization. Less concerned than in the earlier volumes with
establishing a tension based on dialectical opposites that are not quite as
reified as Talmon imagined - democracy and totalitarianism, or empirical
