The Wish to be Free. Society, Psyche and Value Change.

Talmon, Jacob; Weinstein, Fred; Platt, Gerald M.

doi:10.2307/2504607

History and Theory

1975

DOI: 10.2307/2504607

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The Wish to be Free. Society, Psyche and Value Change.

Jacob Talmon¹,

Fred Weinstein²,

Gerald M. Platt³

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“…According to Talmon's thesis, Jacobin and Bolshevik oppression did not simply resemble each other, but were in fact causally related. The philosophical foundations of totalitarianism had been laid by Rousseau, he asserted, for it was he who had first legitimated persecution, forced subjection, re‐education and ‘terrorist dictatorship in the name of freedom’ (Talmon 1975: 122) 3 . Therefore, the term ‘totalitarian democracy’ served not only to explain the novelty of the French Revolution, but also to offer a deeper explanation of the dark roots from which the twentieth century's ideological clash had evolved.…”

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Anti-cosmopolitan liberalism: Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Talmon and the dilemma of national identity

Dubnov

2010

Nations and Nationalism

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The debate between contemporary cosmopolitans and advocates of nationalism is hardly new. Nevertheless, much of it is based on the erroneous assumption that cosmopolitanism should be seen as an outgrowth of liberalism, and that both should be considered as the complete conceptual opposites of nationalism. In this article I focus on two of the post-war Jewish anglophile intellectuals who took part in this debate during the Cold War years: the Oxonian liberal philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-97) and the Israeli historian Jacob L. Talmon . I use their examples to argue that the dividing line between cosmopolitans and advocates of nationalism should not be regarded as signifying the distinction between liberals and anti-liberals; in fact, this debate also took place within the camp of the liberal thinkers themselves. I divide my discussion into three parts. Firstly, I examine Berlin's and Talmon's positions within the post-war anti-totalitarian discourse, which came to be known as 'liberalism of fear'. Secondly, I show how a sense of Jewish identity, combined with deep Zionist convictions, induced both thinkers to divorce antinationalist cosmopolitanism -which they regarded as a hollow, illusionary ideal associated with impossible assimilationist yearnings -from the liberal idea. I conclude by suggesting that, although neither man had ever developed a systematic theoretical framework to deal with the complex interactions between ethno-nationalism, liberal individualism and multiculturalism, Berlin's vision of pluralism provides the foundations for building such a theory, in which liberalism and nationalism become complementary rather than conflicting notions.

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confidence: 99%

Anti-cosmopolitan liberalism: Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Talmon and the dilemma of national identity

Dubnov

2010

Nations and Nationalism

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Gabel's "Micro/Macro" Bridge: The Schizophrenic Process Writ Large

Sica¹

1995

Sociological Theory

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Sociological Theory. Joseph Gabel s theoretical synthesis of psychiatry, political sociology, the sociology of knowledge, and Marxism is examined, partly by evaluating the use he makes of ideas common to the works of Lukdcs, Mannheim, Minkowski, Binswanger, Dupreel, Lalo, Meyerson, and others. Gabel's major contention-that false consciousness and schizophrenia are mutually illuminating phenomena at analytic and empirical levels-is considered, principally by hermeneutic analysis of his key concepts: "de-dialecticization, " "reified consciousness, " "socio-pathological parallelism, " and so on. His work is contextualized among competing theories of ideological expressiveness and collectively significant cognitive distortions of reality.The sociology of scholarly knowledge cannot as yet fully explain why certain new ideas are widely resisted or ignored, for a time, regardless of their manifest power to illuminate, while others are deftly assimilated. This phenomenon becomes most noticeable when theoretical material is reappraised at some remove in time and place from its point of origin.Why, for instance, has this century's social thought witnessed moments of such sharply contrasting enthusiasms (e.g., for Spencer, Durkheim, Pareto, Weber, Freud, Mead, Sorokin, Mannheim, finally Marx, and those he inspired, like Lukacs, Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School), during which each successive figure was hailed as the new and best guide to enlightenment, then allowed temporarily to rule as the favored stimulus for theoretical change and correlated research? (Though most of those named suffered translation into English, all finally received their due despite of it.) Two of the oddest cases that illustrate this fleeting centrality were the Hungarian friends, Lukacs and Mannheim. The former's major work finally arrived in English in 1971, 48 years after its German publication, and 35 years after is author had repudiated his most ingenious theorizing in favor of a circumspect Stalinism. His sometime companion, Mannheim, was luckier, for his early fortunes benefitted from the mighty sponsorship of Louis Wirth and the translation energy of Edward Shils (for details, see Kettler and Meja 1994). Yet his major work, Ideology and Utopia, now seems hesitant and theoretically unadventurous when compared with Lukacs'. Joseph Gabel, strongly influenced by both these theorists (Gabel, 1975; published a work in 1962 which remained unknown in this country until 1975, when its third edition appeared (under a British imprint) as False Consciousness. [A paperback version in 1978 did not add to Gabel's renown;...

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The Wish to be Free. Society, Psyche and Value Change.

Cited by 2 publications

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Anti-cosmopolitan liberalism: Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Talmon and the dilemma of national identity

Anti-cosmopolitan liberalism: Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Talmon and the dilemma of national identity

Gabel's "Micro/Macro" Bridge: The Schizophrenic Process Writ Large

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