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From Rousseau to Totalitarian Democracy: The French Revolution in J. L. Talmon'sHistoriographyAuthor(s): Jos BrunnerSource: History and Memory, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 60-85Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25618611 .Accessed: 15/06/2011 17:23

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Jose Brunner

From Rousseau to Totalitarian Democracy: The

French Revolution in J. L. Talmon's Historiography1

Past and Present

"L'histoire ne servirait a rien, si Ton n'y met les tristesses du present.'' Jules Michelet's dictum is the motto chosen by Jacob Talmon for The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of the Revolution. In the book's epilogue he explains that his fascination with the events of the French Revolution, its

ideologists and activists, started in 1937-38, when he was struck by the analogy between the Jacobin period's combination of an ultra-democratic constitution and terror

-

on which he was writing an undergraduate seminar paper -

and the Moscow trials which took place at the time.2

Undoubtedly, when a historian examines the past, he always writes in some way about the present. It appears, however, that

Talmon's historical experience not only provided the

background or subtext to his historical vision, but that its

overpowering impact on his thinking brought him to read

history backwards by means of analogies drawn from later events and projected onto earlier ones. For Talmon, the

meaning of the past - that is, the writings of the philosophes

and Rousseau, as well as the events of the French Revolution - is supplied by the present. The light that Talmon shed on the French Revolution was refracted by the lens provided by the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, with the result that

Robespierre became a Stalin, and finally even Rousseau turned - albeit indirectly - into an ideologist of the Gulag. Already

on the first page of The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (hereafter Origins) Talmon describes himself as writing in a

period of world crisis, in which an empirical and liberal

democracy collides with a totalitarian Messianic democracy. From the vantage point of this collision, the preceding one

hundred and fifty years were for him but a long period of

From Rousseau to Totalitarian Democracy

preparation leading up to a cataclysmic clash between the forces of good and evil. To be sure, considering the French and the Russian Revolution as two of a kind, and even

telescoping them into one, was also part of the Bolshevik

revolutionary self-image, such as when Lenin claimed in 1903 that

44 [a] Jacobin firmly committed to organizing a proletariat

that has become conscious of its class interest is precisely what a revolutionary social democrat is."3 Talmon's historiography adopts this metaphorical self-understanding of the Russian

revolutionaries, but - having learned the bitter lessons of Stalinism - extends its logic until it is made to self de (con) struct.

These comments are not meant to lead up to a plea for a neutral and transhistorical writing of history; for there is no

history without theoretical and political premises. As John Dunn puts it: "The value-free study of revolutions is a logical impossibility for those who live in the real world."4 Moreover, Francois Furet has pointed to the capacity of the French Revolution still to stir heated controversy, which is only comparable to that of its Russian counterpart. The Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution nowadays hardly ever arouse political passions among professional historians or their readers. In terms of their function in public rhetoric, they have become part of a commemorative consensus celebrated

in shared political rituals. This has not happened to the French Revolution - it is still common practice among its historians to take an explicitly political stand and to compare it to the Russian Revolution.5 Furet also acknowledges that the

identification of the two revolutions with one another has contributed to scholarship, since questions about the present may add new interest, perspectives and emphases to the study of the past. But in a condemning criticism of what he calls the "Lenino-populist vulgate" propounded by the French Revolution's left-wing historians, he makes a comment that is

equally apt as an indictment of its opposite, Talmon's anti

revolutionary catechism:

For it to be useful, the scrutiny of the present must remain just that, a questioning and a series of new

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Jose Brunner

hypotheses, not a mechanical and impassioned projection of the present onto the past ... the

interpretation of the French Revolution has gained neither in richness nor in depth for being accompanied, as in a minor key, by a second, implicit discourse on the Russian Revolution; that second and latent discourse has proliferated like a cancer inside the historical

analysis to the point of destroying its complexity and its

very significance.5

Since the book's appearance in the shadow of the Cold War in 1952, the various problems besetting Talmon's mode of

analysis have been repeatedly criticized in the literature.7 In this paper, too, I shall refer to elements vitiating Talmon's narrative strategy, but instead of simply denouncing them as fallacies I shall take them as guides to the deep structure of his historiography and build on them to reconstruct the

imagery, theory of truth, mode of emplotment, philosophical anthropology and ideological message of his text.8 In a critical

reading of Origins - and some complementary references to

the other two volumes comprising the trilogy that he

published over a period of three decades - I shall differentiate

three layers which together make up its textual edifice. These can be seen to represent the three authorial personae that Talmon adopts in writing history;9 for as I shall show, though Talmon's book ostensibly presents itself as the work of a

historian, none of its textual layers contains much that by today's standards would be considered the stuff of history. For

instance, little is said on details of historical processes and their specific and unique causes and purposes. Beyond general surveys and summaries of texts and events, one finds in Talmon's text above all metaphysical postulates, diagnoses of a lay psychoanalyst, and preachings of a moralist. Since each of Talmon's authorial personae transcends the history of the French Revolution in order to reveal a perpetual truth on the human condition, we are taught about the reality of faith and the effects of climates of ideas; about the fears, hopes and desires hidden in the inner world of human beings and their

impact on politics; and, finally, about the power of good and

62


evil and the nature of virtues and vices. My paper will be devoted primarily to an exposition and interpretation of these three layers in Talmon's text; but since Talmon was concerned

with origins it seems only fitting that I, too, shall attempt to establish the origins of his historiography.

Religion and Reality

What, then, is Talmon's historical argument? He claims that both totalitarianism and liberalism had a democratic core and that the two doctrines were a result of the decline of traditional religion and the disappearance of feudal status

society. The Enlightenment, he says, gave birth to two currents of democracy: an empirical, liberal one, which recognizes a

plurality of social realms, and a messianic, totalitarian one,

which tries to reduce all planes of existence to the political and claims to be in possession of the one absolute truth.10

According to Talmon, both these currents of thought are

democratic, since both of them represent a cluster of

Enlightenment ideals, such as individualism, freedom, polidcal participation and equality. However, liberal democracy is cautious, reformist, proceeds by trial and error, and recognizes various levels of human endeavor apart from politics. Totalitarian democracy believes in the perfectibility of human

beings and in the possibility of a preordained political order

reflecting the needs of a perfected humanity. Hence it demands the abolition of religious authority and extends the

scope of politics by stepping into the previously religious realms of thought and feeling. Aiming at a final scheme, at which humans are bound to arrive, it shows a disrespect for the wisdom of the ages which it justifies by its commitment to the unlimited power of abstract reason. Mobilizing the people and evoking public enthusiasm for an ideal future, a vanguard of prophets, saviors and Messiahs takes upon itself the task of

educating the masses for a radically new age - if necessary by

terror. Thus the faith of modern totalitarian democracy takes on its manifest political form as "a dictatorship resting on

popular enthusiasm.""

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Jose Brunner

64

However, Talmon's account of the development of totalitarian democracy does not focus on phenomena usually associated with the writing of political or intellectual history

-

let alone social history - such as individual actions and lives,

social processes and classes, public institutions, ideologies and texts. Certainly, references to all of these can be found in his

work; but his writings treat people, events, institutions and theories as epiphenomena of a spiritual essence which in his view constitutes the hidden propelling force of democratic totalitarianism. This essence is said to provide the impetus for a development which originated in French thought of the

eighteenth century, but reached full political objectification only in the twentieth century. As he explains in the introduction to Origins:

What this study is concerned with is a state of mind, a

way of feeling, a disposition, a pattern of mental, emotional and behavioristic elements, best compared to the set of attitudes engendered by a religion. ... [I]t can

hardly be denied that the all-embracing attitudes of this

kind, once crystallized, are the real substance of history. The concrete elements of history, the acts of politicians, the aspirations of people, the ideas, values, preferences and prejudices of an age, are the outward manifestations of its religion in the widest sense.12

A few pages later he postulates again that "[t]he modern secular religion must first be treated as an objective reality."1* He reiterates in the introduction to Political Messianism, The Romantic Phase that what he writes "is not a history of ideas. Its

subject is a climate of ideas, a frame of mind, we may say,

faith."u Though philosophers and politicians do play a role in his historiographic framework, his idealist ontology turns them into prophets and high priests of a political religion, which, for him, constitutes "objective reality." In contrast to the

reality of religion, Talmon considers material historical

developments to be but a series of "different rationalizations of a primary semi-religious impulse and

... successive


elaborations and applications of a single sustained endeavour," as he explains in the trilogy's third volume.15

The postulate that - in the last instance - history is made of

an intangible, spiritual climate of ideas, provides the

metaphysical layer of Talmon's historiography. Indeed, for Talmon such climates are metaphysical in the full sense of the word. They cannot be assessed and measured by quantitative methods or detailed investigations into the publication and distribution of political or philosophical texts. As Talmon asks

rhetorically: "How many people in our own days have actually read the Capital of Marx or the works of Freud? Few however would deny that the ideas propagated in these books have entered contemporary thinking and experience to a degree that defies measurement. There is such a thing as a climate of

ideas, as ideas in the air."]h

Talmon uses this methodology as a license for organicist reductionism, that is, for writing a history of the French Revolution which turns all its diverse programs, participants and events into components of one synthetic entity: the faith of democratic totalitarianism. Since he reduces everything to

parts of an aggregate whose importance is greater than any of its elements, Talmon can ignore or gloss over discrepancies and contradictions between theories, thinkers and activists

belonging to the various revolutionary factions, and make a

medley of Jacobins, Babouvists, Blanquists, Communists, Socialists and Anarchists.17 By preferring sameness to difference and repetition to uniqueness, Talmon's narrative

over-emphasizes aspects of similarity among these groups and thus creates cohesion and integration where there was none.

Another questionable effect of Talmon's idealist

historiography can be discerned in the trajectory of Origins, which depicts three stages of the inevitable metamorphosis of beautiful dreams of perfect freedom and harmony into ugly totalitarian monsters. The first part of the book is devoted to the eighteenth-century philosophical postulate of a rational

society, among which Jean Jacques Rousseau is singled out as the main villain. The second and third parts of the book deal

with Robespierre and Saint-Just, Babeufs and Buonarrotti's

program and the Babouvist plot of 1796. While Rousseau is

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Jose Brunner

the totalitarian faith's founder, the French Revolution is the event which turned it into historical reality: first in the Jacobin terror of Year II and then in the Babouvist plot. Hence

Talmon refers to the plot as the event in which "in a flicker of total self-awareness" an attempt was made to realize

totalitarian democracy to its full extent.18 He acknowledges that it is but "a dny episode from the point of view of the broad course of the Revolution"; but he argues that "[i]ts

significance ... for the evolution and the crystallization of ideas and as a historic myth, could hardly be exaggerated."19 This somewhat surprising conclusion of Origins with Babeuf demonstrates the shortcomings of Talmon's narrative, which transcends material phenomena of history in order to write about "ideas in the air." To place the French Revolution in a dialectic leading up to Babeuf

- who never managed to gather a sizable following and even within tumultuous post revolutionary France never got beyond plotting

- is, to say the

least, odd. Moreover, even in Talmon's own terms, Babeuf can

hardly be taken as proof for the sociological force which he ascribes to the totalitarian democratic faith.

Dialectics of Freedom

Yehoshua Arieli comments that "Talmon's historical vision and mode of analysis has a marked dialectical character."20

Indeed, Talmon's sweeping narrative on transcendental forces

and psychological drives reads like a -

possibly unintended -

meditation on Hegel's analysis of the French Revolution in the

Phenomenology of Mind. In a chapter entitled "Absolute Freedom and Terror" Hegel tries to come to terms with the

dialectical but inevitable route leading from the

Enlightenment and Rousseau to the Jacobin regime.21 Closely following Charles Taylor's lucid and elaborate exposition of the chapter, I would sum up Hegel's claim as follows: having become aware both of their nature as creatures capable of rational will and of the power of this rational will,

Enlightenment thinkers undertake to re-create the world

according to its precepts and to question all past authority and existing institutions. However, this aspiration is to be also

66


the Enlightenment's downfall since it gives rise to the abstract and universal principles of "absolute freedom" exemplified in Rousseau's General Will. The demands of absolute freedom cannot acknowledge any difference between the rational will of an individual and the will of society as a whole. For only if

they become one can it be said that society is fully rational and freedom absolute. Thus for a society to be free and based on rational will alone means that all that exists or happens has to be the result of decisions in which everybody not only takes part but also reaches the same conclusion. Otherwise,

the minority which has to conform to the majority's will could not be said to be absolutely free. Hence, the idea of absolute freedom cannot tolerate any social differentiation; for the existence of people, groups or institutions with particularistic interests of their own poses a threat to its universality.

However, since anything that exists, differentiates, the idea of absolute freedom can only destroy. First it eliminates the

existing regime, then all factions and individuals not explicitly aligned with the General Will, and finally even those who

might be suspected of lacking civic virtue and harboring different intentions. Since their very existence threatens the General Will, they deserve death, for what is being destroyed is irrationality and unfreedom.22

Talmon's affinities with Hegel are striking. For both of them

history is the slaughter bench on which high hopes are butchered because their philosophical principles are

fundamentally flawed. What Talmon refers to as the

perfectionism of the lofty principles that condemned the French Revolution to destructiveness, Hegel calls vacuity, but

basically the terms refer to the same characteristic. Thus Talmon's account of the issues and contradictions involved could just as well sum up Hegel's discussion as his own:

This was the central problem of Jacobinism: the dilemma of the single purpose and the will of men. It could be defined as the problem of freedom, conformity and coercion in a regime which claims to achieve two

incompatible aims, Liberty and an exclusive form of social existence. It is at bottom Rousseau's problem of

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Jose Brunner

the general will, with an equally strong emphasis placed on acdve and universal pardcipadon in willing the

general will as on the exclusive nature of the general will.23

However, when they extrapolate from the French Revolution to later developments and events, Hegel and Talmon part.

Hegel remains optimistic: his historical dialectic takes him from France to Germany, from flaw to completion, until finally a synthetic absolute is reached in which the particular is reconciled with the universal. The Phenomenology is a

philosophical Bildungsroman, where consciousness matures, learns from its errors and gains self-knowledge and freedom.

Moreover, in his Introduction to the Philosophy of History, Hegel portrays a cunning dialectic which ultimately gives birth to freedom for all and produces a rational scheme of things, even though it is engendered by the narrow-minded ambitions and actions of power-seeking egotistical individuals.24 Talmon's

melancholy dialectic knows no such happy end; it allows only for more of the same. In this sense, then, Origins departs from

Hegel's scheme of historical progress. By depicting a process in which hopes for a universal and perfectly harmonious social order always turn into power-seeking and narrow-minded

regimes based on coercion and terror, it remains without reconciliation or consolation.

According to Talmon, there are "two instincts most deeply embedded in human nature, the yearning for salvation and the love of freedom"; but, as he tells us, it is impossible to

satisfy both of them at once. Attempts to do so, "are bound to result, if not in unmitigated tyranny and serfdom, at least in the monumental hypocrisy and self-deception which are the concomitants of totalitarian democracy."25 Because they were

tempted by their drive toward rationalist perfection, the

proponents of the radical Enlightenment became trapped in what Talmon calls "the paradox of freedom." Aspiring to a

perfect and harmonious society, they invited the regime to

proclaim itself as representing and enforcing the natural order and to compel its subjects to obey in the name of freedom

-

that is, to obey their true future selves which will be

68


emancipated through the subjugation of their present, empirical selves.26 In this fashion, Talmon argues, totalitarianism arises from the doomed attempt to make

incompatibles compatible and to combine individual freedom with an exclusive and harmonious pattern of society. In the

epilogue to The Myth of the Nation he even postulates "the existence of some unfathomable and inescapable law which causes revolutionary Salvationist schemes to evolve into regimes of terror, and the promise of a perfect direct democracy to assume in practice the form of totalitarian dictatorship."27 Rather ironically, Talmon concludes fifteen hundred pages of considered argument against those who claim to possess absolute truth and to have knowledge of historical laws and the natural order by setting forth a historical law of his own,

which is no less deterministic, arbitrary, abstract and

speculative than the one he attacks. In After Utopia Judith Shklar points out that while such an approach turns the

principles of Enlightenment intellectualism against themselves, it maintains a belief in a rigid sequence of causes and events and in the power of grand rationalist ideas to drive history

-

only, if once they were thought to bring progress toward

perfecdon, now they are associated with totalitarian calamity.28

Politics and Paranoia

Let us now consider how Talmon's second authorial

persona, the lay psychoanalyst, appears in his book. Compared with the first two chapters, the third chapter, in which Talmon turns to Rousseau, opens with a drasdc change of tone. In a

move to psychobiography - which is absent from his discussion

of Holbach and Helvetius - he returns from the reification of faith as a historical force to real human beings. Talmon's Rousseau is "a motherless vagabond starved of warmth and

affection," who turns into "one of the most ill-adjusted and

egocentric natures who have left a record of their

predicament" and whose thought is "the envious dream of a tormented paranoiac."29 At the same dme Talmon accuses the

Geneva philosopher of having transformed what hitherto had been only "intellectual speculation" into "a great collective

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Jose Brunner

experience'' by a stroke of his pen. In his eyes, Rousseau's

concept of the General Will "marked the birth of the modern secular religion, not merely as a system of ideas, but as a

passionate faith." For Talmon the lay psychoanalyst, totalitarian

democracy is thus the brainchild of a sick individual. Later,

Robespierre, Saint-Just and Babeuf, too, are diagnosed as

suffering from paranoia.31 Never losing sight of the present, Talmon adds that his own period also produced specimens "of the strange combination of psychological ill-adjustment and totalitarian ideology."32 Times of crisis, stress and struggle, he argues, allow severely neurotic people to climb to the top and let them express their personality disorders in political theories and actions. Thus, those who are incapable of finding balanced relationships with others can escape into the lonely heights of dictatorship.

Much has been written on the problematic nature of psycho histories focusing on neuroses or psychoses of historical

personalities, and there is no need to repeat these criticisms here at great length.33 Suffice it to say that the evidence is

inadequate to justify labeling these figures as crazy and that ad hominem arguments enable historians to avoid detailed

inquiries into social issues and political events and circumstances. They legitimize, for instance, the neglect of

questions such as why a particular type of individual or

ideology attracts a large following at a certain period. More

specifically, as Ellen Wood has pointed out, the consideration of Rousseau's writings as the symptomatic outpourings of a

paranoiac frees Talmon from the need "to confront Rousseau's political thought as a serious social criticism."34

Talmon acknowledges that the quasi-psychoanalytic layer of his text serves a polemical or political purpose. He juxtaposes his psychoanalytically informed portraits of Rousseau, Saint

Just, Robespierre and Babeuf with what he describes as the

*'pencil-sketch" approach to human affairs, which he attributes to a doctrinaire mentality "completely unaware of the problem of the personal element in leadership and oblivious of the

place of the actual human personality in the working of

politics." According to Talmon, the fine lines of pencil sketches are incapable of capturing the irrational,

70


unpredictable elements of human nature. They neglect "the flesh of the intangible, shapeless living forces, traditions,

imponderables, habits, human inertia and lazy conservatism."35 As he explains, in its blindness the pencil-sketch mentality produces pencil-sketch doctrines which, in turn, lead to pencil sketch revolutions and, finally, to regimes of terror. In contrast, Talmon's history not only tries to reach the depths of human nature by paindng colorful portraits of his villains, it also carries a strong statement about the role of unconscious,

hidden impulses in history and about the consequences of

ignoring them. By bringing psychological forces to our attention and making us aware of the limits of human nature, he undertakes the ambitious task of writing therapeutic history, designed to achieve a kind of preventive psychological treatment, immunizing us against the totalitarian temptation to

which all of us are constantly exposed. Talmon's self-image as

lay psychoanalyst is made explicit in a statement on the

therapeutic task of the historian, which appears in the

concluding chapter of Origins', it is worthwhile to quote it at

length:

The power of the historian or political philosopher to influence events is no doubt strictly limited, but he can influence the attitude of mind which is adopted towards those developments. Like a psychoanalyst who cures by

making the patient aware of his sub-conscious, the social

analyst may be able to attack the human urge which calls totalitarian democracy into existence, namely the

longing for a final resolution of all contradictions and conflicts into a state of social harmony. It is a harsh, but none the less necessary task to drive home the truth that human society and human life can never reach a state of repose.36

Comedy, Romance and Tragedy

All perfectionist plans of harmony and freedom are doomed, says Talmon; moreover, in his eyes, "the very idea of a self contained system from which all evil and unhappiness have

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Jose Brunner

been exorcised is totalitarian."3' Thus he writes history not

only as metaphysics and psychoanalysis, but also as a moral tale where attempts to create a society free of evil are not only bound to fail, but are punished by the dialectic of history that turns the people who try to abolish evil into its terrible

harbingers and transforms Utopias into the curse of humanity. As moral preachers tend to do, Talmon tries to bring his

message home by painting a historical picture in strong and -

to my mind - crude colors and shapes. Nevertheless, some

seem to admire his flamboyant rhetoric; Arieli, for instance, describes Talmon's writings as 44a historical literary creation in the fullest sense," 4'abundant in convincing imaginative descriptions" and marked by 44a rich, sensitive and disciplined language indicating a remarkable literary gift."38 Whatever

literary merits may or may not be found in Talmon's writings, their dramatic style undoubtedly contributed much to their

appeal and forms the vehicle for their moral message. What kind of drama, however, do we encounter in reading

Origins? Adopting Northrop Frye's famous taxonomy of

literary plot structures for the analysis of the writing of history, Hayden White distinguishes four basic modes in which historical narratives are presented: romance, tragedy, comedy and satire.39 Applying this scheme to Talmon

- that is,

considering his work as a form of literature - it seems fair to

say that he cast his drama of good and evil in the tragic mode. In tragedy laughs are hollow, festive moments are

illusionary; at best there is a sobering of consciousness and

resignation. But confrontation with evil does not necessarily have to be tragic.

Charlotte Spivack points to the 44unholy alliance of hell and humor" in the arts and letters of medieval Christianity, which allowed for a comedy of evils. In medieval mystery plays, paintings and gargoyles, evil was made to look grotesque and could be mocked and laughed at. To be sure, laughing at evil did not mean taking it lightly. Rather, it marked the triumph of recognition of its fundamental nothingness and absurdity, its temptations, illusions and masquerades, which could not

hide its impotence when confronted with the substantiality of the good.40 As this example from a different literary genre

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shows, in comedy there is hope. Hayden White comments that

though there are no great victories in comedy, there are

temporary reconciliations, small liberations and releases.41 Yet it is not so much comedy that the moralist in Talmon

abhors as the French Revolution's historical self-emplotment as

romance, where good is said to win a decisive victory over evil, where virtue proclaims its proud triumph over vice and human beings pretend to possess the power to transcend their

imprisonment by the Fall.42 To the radical Enlightenment's opdmistic self-confidence Talmon opposes pessimism and doubt, against ideal plans and grand visions he pits a caudous method of trial and error. Thus his narrative expresses what

Judith Shklar has called "a philosophy of negation."43 By the 1950s Talmon was by no means alone in restyling

comic or romantic visions of history into tragedy. Rather, he

belonged to a large and prominent group of thinkers and writers on the Left and the Right

- among them George

Orwell, Theodor Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper

- who in the middle of the twentieth century reacted to their life experiences during

World War II and earlier decades by searching for the origins of totalitarianism. They had lost their confidence and laughter, since in the shadow of Auschwitz and the Gulag they had come to see evil as real and substantive.

Elsewhere I have provided a detailed exposition of this

generation's moral vision.44 Here let me just state that for them the notion of "totalitarianism" became synonymous with the idea of a radically evil society, where suffering is

systematically and cruelly imposed on its members. Though they categorically demanded that such radical evil be fought in the name of liberty, these thinkers also claimed that victories against it were temporary and precarious and that it was impossible to rid society of absolutely all evil. From the Frankfurt School on the Left to conservative liberals like Friedrich Hayek on the Right, they all opposed and criticized rationalist Utopias that promised to revamp society totally. Hayek argued in The Road to Serfdom that the growth of

commerce and science and the disappearance of medieval hierarchies had equipped modern men and women with a

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new sense of power and a mistaken "belief in the unbounded

possibilities of improving their own lot," and, he says, "[w]ith the success grew ambition."45 Growing impatience with slow advances brought by liberal policies led in the nineteenth

century to the idea that piecemeal improvements could be accelerated by deliberate planning in which the existing social order would be completely scrapped and replaced. However, as Hayek claims throughout his book, democratic socialism is

impossible, since planning brings dictatorship. To be sure, there is no evidence that Hayek's book

influenced the writing of Origins - which came out eight years

later - even though the dialectics it portrays do show

significant affinities with Talmon's picture. The notes of Talmon's book, however, do contain a reference to Karl

Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in London in 1945.46 Popper, too, juxtaposes piecemeal social engineering

with Utopian but doomed attempts to realize an ideal society. For Popper, the motivation to "close" society is anxiety rather than hubris. In his view the appeal of totalitarianism derives from the strain which the flux, insecurity, pluralism and abstract social relations of the "open" society impose on

people. Totalitarianism expresses a longing for a seemingly safe and cozy collective with magical solutions characteristic of

humanity's childhood. Rather than a push forward towards total change and novelty, he finds in totalitarianism an

attempt to arrest all change and to re-create an innocent and

beautiful social order so as to regain a tribal paradise lost.47

But since such dreams of perfection cannot come true, their

blueprints will sooner or later lead to attempts to realize them

by violent means and they will end up increasing suffering rather than reducing it. Therefore the only reasonable method to improve society, Popper suggests, is not to pursue ideal aims such as "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," but to work towards "the least amount of avoidable

suffering for all."48 He argues that this can be done only through small adjustments undertaken on a trial-and-error

basis, which accepts "that perfection, if at all attainable, is far distant." Hence, he explains, 44[t]he piecemeal engineer will ...

adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the

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greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good."49

Talmon follows both Popper and Hayek in claiming that radonalist Utopias are not only misguided and overly ambidous in their neglect of the complexities of social life that make total planning impossible, but also dangerous and inhuman since they inevitably turn oppressive and demand obedient

conformity.50 He also agrees with them that the attempt to eradicate evil in order to create the good society breeds evil and that reason can only play a modest and "negative" role in human affairs, fighting evil without ever being able to eliminate it completely. However, the Talmonian notion of totalitarian democracy, which conjoins into one concept what, at least prima facie, seem to be opposites, is an impossible hybrid from a Popperian point of view. Rather than mass

participation and ideals of freedom and equality, Popper takes the pluralist, critical and rational discussion of open societies as the criterion of democracy and opposes to it the organicist monism of closed societies.51

One should add, however, that the notion of totalitarian

democracy as a term to describe Rousseau's influence on the French Revolution - though not its systematic exploration and

exposition -

precedes Talmon's book. In his classic The Modern Democratic State - published in London in 1943, at the time when Talmon was completing his doctorate in Cambridge

- A. D. Lindsay claimed that Rousseau's way of representing the

opposition of the minority as selfish had sinister consequences and that his "general influence was towards totalitarian

democracy."52 Already in 1938 Aurel Kolnai had stated that the seeds of totalitarianism could be found in the evolution of

modern democracy, and had singled out Rousseau's General Will as a concept which played a particularly significant role in this respect.53 In 1946 Bertrand Russell's vulgar but widely read A History of Western Philosophy proclaimed Rousseau "inventor of the political philosophy of pseudo-democratic dictatorships." According to Russell, Rousseau's influence resulted from the emotional appeal of his thought, which turned it into a "social force." Thus Rousseau had led first to

Robespierre and then to the dictatorships in Russia and

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Germany; Russell even declared Hider to be 4'an outcome of Rousseau."54

Despite obvious similarides and parallels between Talmon's

approach and these comments, Talmon's analysis also differs from them significantly in that it clearly separates right-wing from left-wing totalitarianism and never relates Rousseau to the origins of fascism or Nazism. In the introducdon to

Origins, Talmon explains that only the totalitarianism of the Left can be called democratic, since it is universalist, aims at social harmony and "remains essentially individualist, atomistic and rationalist even when it raises the class or party to the level of absolute ends." Totalitarianism of the Right, however,

regards human beings as corrupt and unruly and hence "teaches the necessity of force as a permanent way of

maintaining order." It is particularist, organized around racial and organic concepts, and based on myths whose message runs counter to individualism, rationalism and universalism.55 Talmon further explores this universalism-particularism dichotomy in later books, where he writes of the complex antithetical relationship between socialism and nationalism.56 In

Origins, however, he still is exclusively concerned with the way in which a Messianic, revolutionary and totalitarian faith could be driven by the same stock of ideals that gave life to liberal

democracy.

Hubris and Humility

In the final analysis, Talmon's fascination with Rousseau,

Saintjust, Robespierre, Babeuf and other totalitarian prophets and high priests, carries him beyond metaphysics and lay psychoanalysis. He is opposed to the architects and activists of the radical Enlightenment and the French Revolution not

simply because they turn politics into a religion, but because

they act as false, self-proclaimed Messiahs of a faith lacking that basic virtue of religious traditions: humility. Adopting the authorial persona of the moral preacher, he explains the wide

ranging aims of the French Revolution as based on "this human hubris and impious presumption that frail man is

capable of producing a scheme of things of absolute and final


significance."07 Applying the ancient and deeply rooted myth of the hubris-nemesis sequence to the French Revolution and its regime of terror, he claims that the attempt to push society too far in one direction will end up moving it in the opposite direction. Thus he uses a vocabulary which Albert Hirschman has categorized as part of the reactionary "rhetoric of

perversity," that is, a rhetoric aiming to demonstrate that revolutions "produce, via a chain of unintended consequences, the exact contrary of the objective being proclaimed and

pursued."58 However, for Talmon the metaphor of the false Messiah

carries more weight than that of Greek hubris. Whatever rhetoric he may use, he invokes it as a preacher defending traditional Western, monotheist values against the secular

revolutionary religion in which philosophers and activists turn themselves into gods. For this reason he depicts the French Revolution not as an uprising against oppression and a

corrupt political order, not as a struggle for status, power and

political influence, but as sin. In this layer, his text is a writ of indictment, a description of the slow process in which a crime is conceived, planned and executed in the attempt to create a harmonious society and to remake humanity according to the ideal of republican virtues. The Revolution is a crime for

Talmon because the core of his historiography conceals a

quasi-religious commitment of its own, where a traditional

Judeo-Christian outlook provides the basis on which the other

layers of his textual edifice rest. After all that has been said, Origins might seem to be all

villains and no heroes - and yet, even though his presence remains almost unstated, a hero hides in the margins of the text. Edmund Burke is given the last word in the section of

Origins dealing with the Jacobin dictatorship, and in his notes Talmon writes that "the empiric Anglo-Saxon approach" is

"exemplified by Burke."59 Moreover, Talmon's historiography mirrors in many ways the oudook, rhetoric and values of Burke's diatribes against the Revolution. More than anybody else, Burke had incorporated the philosophes and Rousseau into the debate on the French Revolution; and more than with any other political philosopher, the notion that radical political

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change is presumptuous and impossible is associated with the Irish-born conservative.

Two centuries before Talmon, in a discussion of the influence of Rousseau on the French revolutionaries, Burke had accused the latter of totally abandoning "true humility, the basis of the Christian system" which, in his words,"is the

low, but deep and firm foundation of all real virtue." They aimed, he said "to merge all natural and all social sentiment in inordinate vanity."W) Since Rousseau was the "professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity," they had chosen to follow his teachings and celebrated this

* insane Socrates of

the National Assembly" by erecting the first statue of the

revolutionary Republic in his honor.61 Picturing the French thinkers as an 4'infamous gang" of atheist conspirators, who

deliberately plotted against throne and altar and destroyed the traditional bonds holding society together, Burke held their 4'ethics of vanity" responsible for all revolutionary excesses.62 In his words, "[t]he literary cabal had some years ago formed

something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion."M

Burke claimed that the makers of the Revolution had sinned the sin of pride since they had the belief that the world and human existence were amenable to the force of reason and wanted society to conform to their theories.64 "There is,*' he

objected, 4'by the essential fundamental Constitution of things a radical infirmity in all human contrivances."65 Instead of

heeding the lessons of history which should have taught them human imperfection, radical philosophers and politicians applied science to society. Thus they ignored not only the limits of change but also the apparently "irrational" aspects of human behavior, such as prejudice, custom and tradition, which had allowed the states of the Christian world to flourish without any blueprints of an ideal society. Like Talmon after

him, Burke condemned the commitment of French and British radicals to the idea of the perfectibility of humanity, since it legitimized the abolition of ancient privileges and other distinctions among human beings, thus reducing them to a mass of undifferentiated atoms. Against abstract

philosophy and science, Burke opposed what he called the

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"spirit'' of a people which had grown through the ages, and

praised Britain for pursuing "the greatest variety of ends" and for "taking the enure circle of human desires, and securing for them fair enjoyment."66 Ultimately, Burke viewed the

struggle against the Jacobins as a war for the survival of

religion and the fabric of European society; hence it was

impossible to make peace with revolutionary France. As he put it, war against revolutionary France, "is a war between the

partisans of the ancient civil, moral, and political order of

Europe against a sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists which means to change them all."67

Thus we find already in Burke all the basic characteristics of Talmon's discourse: a metaphysical explanation of the French Revolution as an event caused by ideas rather than social or economic factors, an attack on Rousseau and the philosophes as the main culprits who are condemned for their lack of

humility; a psychological emphasis on human imperfectibility and irrationality; and, finally, a moralistic dichotomy in which the wisdom accumulated in traditional practices of humanity is

opposed to what is seen as the self-defeating vanity of rationalism.

In the conclusion to their book on Burke's political theory, Paul Hindson and Tim Gray state that Burke's dramatic style aimed not only to show that politics often was dramatic, but above all to demonstrate "how a dramatic awareness yielded

insights, perceptions, and truths about the nature of politics which would otherwise have remained obscure."68 The same could be said about Talmon, who in his foreword to Romanticism and Revolt criticizes the turn to sociology and statistics in the writing of history and states that "it is time for a corrective in the direction of human drama."69 Moreover, Talmon's historical drama is as blunt as Burke's; it divides the world into irreconcilable antinomies, opposes friend to foe, hero to villain, and good to evil. By presenting its subject matter in such stark colors Talmon's perspective remains blind to gradations or nuances. His history knows no middle ground and none of philosophy's famous grey on grey, which Hegel mentions in the introduction to the Philosophy of Right Fearful of the religion of revolution, expressing a view of the world at

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war against a dangerous evil, Talmon's dramatic plot ends up creating a historical vision that is no less all-encompassing, simplifying, dichotomous and uncompromising than the

political faith he attacks.

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Notes

1 More than a decade ago Leah Rosen made me aware of the problems of Talmon's historiography and of ways of

criticizing it. Together with Lisa Amiel and Yoav Peled, she also commented on an earlier, shorter version of this paper, which I presented at the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Historical Society of Israel, Jerusalem, July 1989. Omer Bartov and Janette Yael Zupnik have commented on the draft of the present, extended version. I am grateful to all of them.

2 J. L. Talmon, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of the Revolution (London, 1981), 535.

3 Quoted in F. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution

(Cambridge, 1981), 86. 4 J. Dunn, Modem Revolutions: An Introduction to the Analysis of

a Political Phenomenon (Cambridge, 1972), 1. 5 For some recent summaries of the points of view involved,

see Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution', T. C. W.

Blanning, The French Revolution: Aristocrats versus Bourgeois? (Basingstoke, 1987); G. C. Comninel, Rethinking the French

Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge (London, 1987) ; W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1988) , 7-40; F. Feher, ed., The French Revolution and the Birth

of Modernity (Berkeley, 1990). 6 Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 87. 7 See, for instance, J. McDonald, Rousseau and the French

Revolution (London, 1965), 17-18; J.-L. Leclercle, "Rousseau et Marx," in R. A. Leigh, ed., Rousseau after Two Hundred

Years (Cambridge, 1982), 76; C. Blum, Rousseau and the

Republic of Virtue (Ithaca, 1986), 32-33; E. M. Wood, "The State and Popular Sovereignty in French Political Thought: A Genealogy of Rousseau's General Will," History of Political

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Thought 4 (1983): 281, 307; T. W. Luke, "On Nature and

Society: Rousseau versus the Enlightenment," ibid. 5 (1984): 214; Dunn, "Totalitarian Democracy and the Legacy of Modern Revolutions - Explanation or Indictment?" in Totalitarian Democracy and After (Jerusalem, 1984), 38-40.

8 The only comprehensive exposition of Talmon's oeuvre I have come across is Y. Arieli, "Jacob Talmon

- An Intellectual Portrait," in Totalitarian Democracy and After, 1 34. Though I am indebted to Arieli's highly perceptive and instructive comments, my own approach diverges sharply from the eulogizing tenor of his essay, which originally was

presented as the opening address at an international

colloquium in memory of Talmon. The theoretical framework on which my discussion loosely relies can be found in the introduction to Hayden White's Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), 1-42.

9 Throughout this paper, references to Talmon as author relate to him solely as the figure to whom his text points. I

make no claims about Jacob Talmon as an individual. See M. Foucault, "What is an Author?" in his Language, Counter

Memory, Practice, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca, 1977), 113-38. 10 Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy

(Harmondsworth, 1986), 1-2. 11 Ibid., 6. 12 Ibid., 11. (Throughout this paper, all emphases within

quotations are mine.) 13 Ibid., 13. 14 Talmon, Political Messianism, The Romantic Phase (London,

1960), 17. 15 Talmon, Myth of the Nation, 536. 16 Origins, 70. 17 Ibid., 12. See White, Metahistory, 15-16. 18 Origins, 80. 19 Ibid., 200; see also 231. 20 Arieli, "Jacob Talmon," 17. 21 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind (London, 1966). 22 C. Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, 1975), 185-88, 403-18. 23 Origins, 84; see also 2-3, 98-99, 102, 104.

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24 Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the

Philosophy of History (New York, 1978). 25 Origins, 253. 26 Ibid., 3. 27 Talmon, Myth of the Nation, 535; see also Origins, 133. 28 J. N. Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith

(Princeton, 1969), 237. 29 Origins, 38-39. 30 Ibid., 43. 31 Ibid.; on Robespierre, 81; Saint-Just, 81-83; Babeuf, 172. 32 Ibid., 39-40. 33 See, for instance, J. Barzun, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho

History, Quanto-History and History (Chicago, 1974); D. E.

Stannard, Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory (Oxford, 1980); R. C. Tucker, "The Georges' Wilson Reexamined: An Essay on Psychobiography," American Political Science Review 71 (1977): 606-18; T. H.

Anderson, "Becoming Sane with Psychohistory,'' The Historian 41 (1978): 1-20.

34 Wood, "The State and Popular Sovereignty," 281, n. 1. 35 Origins, 136. 36 Ibid., 254-55. 37 Ibid., 35. 38 Arieli, "Jacob Talmon," 28. 39 White, Metahistory, 7-11; N. Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism:

Four Essays (Princeton, 1957). 40 C. Spivack, The Comedy of Evil on Shakespeare s Stage

(Cranbury and London, 1978), 26-51. 41 White, Metahistory, 9. 42 Ibid. 43 Shklar, After Utopia, 221. 44 J. Brunner, "Comments on Political Evil," Theory and

Critique: An Israeli Forum (in Hebrew) (forthcoming 1991); "Toward a Political Economy of Evils," Philosophical Forum

(forthcoming 1992). 45 F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, 1944), 17. 46 Origins, 258. 47 K. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 5th ed.

(Princeton, 1966), 1:165, 200.

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48 Ibid., 285. 49 Ibid., 158. 50 See also Shklar, After Utopia, 218-69; B. Godwin, "Utopia

Defended Against the Liberals," Political Studies 23 (1980): 384-400.

51 For another standard juxtaposition of democracy with totalitarianism - in terms of one-party vs. multi-party systems - which represents them as mutually exclusive, see R. Aron,

Democratic et Totalitarisme (Paris, 1965). In contrast to Aron and Popper, Hayek construes the totalitarianism-liberty dichotomy in economic terms, as one separating a free market from centralized planning. His contention that "there has often been much more cultural and spiritual freedom under an autocratic rule than under some democracies" does seem to allow for the possibility of totalitarian democracy, though no such concept appears in his writings. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 70.

52 A. D. Lindsay, The Modern Democratic State (London, 1943), 14.

53 A. Kolnai, The War Against the West (New York, 1938), 162 63.

54 B. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1946; London, 1985), 660, 674.

55 Origins, 6-7. 56 See Talmon, "The National Brotherhood and the

International Confraternity. Nationalism and Socialism," in The Unique and the Universal: Some Historical Reflections (New York, 1965), 11-63; Romanticism and Revolt

- Europe 1814

1848 (New York, 1967); The Myth of the Nation. See also

Arieli, "Jacob Talmon," 20-24. 57 Origins, 27. Arieli comments that Talmon's usual parting

words before entering the classroom were "preach well" and that "teaching and lecturing possessed for Talmon the

dignity of the pulpit." Arieli, "Jacob Talmon," 3. 58 A. O. Hirschman, The Rhetoiic of Reaction: Perversity, Futility,

feopardy (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 11, 35. 59 Origins, 283. Some might consider Alexis de Toqueville to

be a candidate for the hero role. Talmon borrows the

epigraph for Origins from Democracy in America and credits

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de Toqueville with "the keenest perception of the current" of totalitarian democracy. On the whole, however, Talmon

is closer to Burke than to de Toqueville. For Talmon's own account of his agreements and disagreements with de

Toqueville, see Origins, 257. See also Arieli, "Jacob Talmon," 7-9.

60 E. Burke, "Letter to a Member of the National Assembly," in The Philosophy of Edmund Burke: A Selection from his Speeches and Writings, ed. L. I. Bredvold and R. G. Ross (Ann Arbor, 1960), 248.

61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 254, 249. 63 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth,

1968), 211. 64 S. Deane, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England,

1189-1832 (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 9. 65 Burke, quoted in P. Hindson and T. Gray, Burkes Dramatic

Theory of Politics (Aldershot, 1988), 178. 66 Burke, "Second Letter on a Regicide Peace," in The

Philosophy of Edmund Burke, 241-42. 67 Ibid., 240. 68 Hindson and Gray, Burkes Dramatic Theory, 180; for Burke's

literary sources, see P. Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Sxvift to Burke

(Oxford, 1965). 69 Talmon, Romanticism and Revolt, 8.

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Article Contentsp. [60]p. 61p. 62p. 63p. 64p. 65p. 66p. 67p. 68p. 69p. 70p. 71p. 72p. 73p. 74p. 75p. 76p. 77p. 78p. 79p. 80p. 81p. 82p. 83p. 84p. 85

Issue Table of ContentsHistory and Memory, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 1-136Volume InformationFront MatterDying of the Past: Medical Studies of Nostalgia in Nineteenth-Century France [pp. 5-29]Altar, Stage and City: Historic Preservation and Urban Meaning in Nazi Germany [pp. 30-59]From Rousseau to Totalitarian Democracy: The French Revolution in J. L. Talmon's Historiography [pp. 60-85]Jacob Burckhardt: Myth, History and Mythistory [pp. 86-118]The Angel of Forgetfulness and the Black Box of Facticity: Trauma and Memory in Claude Lanzmann's Film "Shoah" [pp. 119-134]Back Matter

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