IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ
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matched by a certitude that political leadership could feel the pulse of a
people and regulate the springs of social change. The revolutionaries
were the patients in need of healing. Together they would move toward
the utopian future in lockstep. This was a dream that turned into the
nightmare of terror, or into bad medicine. But it also was a dream that
persisted beyond the terror to the utopian thought of the early nine–
teenth century.
In
Political Messianism,
Talmon gets into the discussions of the early
part of the nineteenth century, when romanticism flourished in art and
music and hence invited mannerism and exaggeration in politics - always
in the name of the good heart. The world of Fourier and Saint-Simon
and utopian socialism is seen by Talmon as little more than a benign ver–
sion of the revolutionaries who came to purifY French life fifty years ear–
lier. Utopianism provided a gloss that permitted the messianists to work
in a far more tolerant period; and hence less subject to the exaggerations
of cruel terror and overt assassination in the name of the anti-Christ as
typified by the extreme elements in the French Revolution.
Even though
Political Messianism
was by far a more thoughtful and
persuasive work than
The Origins oj Totalitarian Democracy,
it was received
without fanfare and without favor. Talmon himself thought that the
negative reception was due to the radical fervor of the Generation of
1968 - an explanation which, I believe, credits the
zeitgeist
with more
than it is entitled to. My own feeling is that the second volume was
more severe in its implications, since it in effect says that the utopianism
with a human face, no less than the earlier revolution of a heartless sort,
ends up in the same quagmire of bad thinking and fanatic action. In any
event, Talmon recognized the vast continuities between the French and
Russian Revolutions; he understood the identical theoretical wellsprings
of a democratic theory that ended in undemocratic practices; he saw
how national liberation efforts sweep away claims about international
and transnational claims of universal brotherhood; and he noted the final
irony of the century which was also the final answer to despotism: the
revolt of the peoples of Europe and Asia to rid themselves of saviors
turned despots. The great schism within revolutionary movements was
the struggle between communism and fascism, which then pitted the
supposed internationalism of the former against the nationalism of the
latter. Talmon shrewdly understood that there was something chimeric
about the mutually exclusive claims of proletarian internationalism and
national socialism, that the communist and fascist movements shared a
"bastard synthesis" of nationalism and internationalism.
The totalitarian ideologies shared a Manichean view of history,
possessed an all-embracing sense of truth and healing, never admitted to a
