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PARTISAN REVIEW
inner tensions within energy-rich and food-poor developing areas? The
strictly European context of his thought offered few clues, much less firm
answers.
Talmon's last work projects a feeling that a new world is unfold–
ing, a world unfamiliar to him and his European colleagues. In that
sense,
The Myth
if
the Nation and the Vision of Revolution
is a fitting con–
clusion not only to a personal career of outstanding brilliance but also to
the end of a social epoch, one in which the European sensibility could
still impose cultural order upon social chaos. Talmon understood that his
epoch began with the demands of the French Revolution for both a
revolutionary process and democratic goals implemented from above.
Europe became a center of political, social, and economic experimenta–
tion, where new social classes first tested Europe's commitment to
transnational economic involvements in contrast to strictly national po–
litical goals, and where nations then destroyed visions of class solidarity
and human brotherhood and, in doing so, deprived Europe of the op–
portunity to fulfill its highest and noblest dreams.
Whatever one thinks about Talmon's treatment of particular
themes, he provides remarkable insights into an era of European preemi–
nence that no longer exists, and that can no longer determine the fate of
worlds. Yet, we may still learn from the continuing emotional tug of
pan-Europeanism in the latter portion of the twentieth century - about
the value of pluralism and survival in the face of national struggles that
seem insuperable and unending.
That the price of the pacification of Europe proved so high and
exacted a toll in millions of lives can be reflected upon onJy with a deep
sense of tragedy. Still, a sense of triumph emerges from under the rubble.
Talmon's trilogy informs us of the high risks of all forms of fanaticism.
Perhaps the non-European world will profit by these lessons. But, as
Talmon makes perfectly clear, the chances seem slim given the impervi–
ousness of new nations to the history of older ones.
Talmon demonstrated to the squirming discomfort of many other
historians that the familiar and easy contrasts of reaction and revolution
made little sense. In fact, the totalitarian drive to destroy the old order,
to replace tradition with modernity, was the work of a similar mind-set.
The futurism of a Mussolini or the prole-cultism of a Stalin has the same
source: a belief in the need to start the world anew. And this impulse
was itself anything but new. The French Revolution, with its
Robespierrist insistence on a new art, a new politics , a new calendar,
announced a modernity seriously impaired from the outset, severed from
any historical moorings. For Talmon,
The Origins of Totalitarian Democ–
racy
arose from the wellsprings of an impatient reformist impulse,
