Erasmus

This essay seeks to examine the history of the intellectual comradeship between J.L. Talmon and the philosopher, political thinker, and historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997). The scholarly dialog between the two began in 1947, continued until Talmon's death in 1980, and is well documented in their private correspondence. I argue that there were two levels to this dialog: First, both Berlin and Talmon took part in the Totalitarianism discourse, which was colored by Popperian terminology, and thus I claim that their ideas should be examined as part of the Cold-War political discourse. The second level stemmed from their similar East-European origin, their mutual Jewish identity, and their attitude towards the Zionist movement.

At times the two levels of discourse conjoined commensurably, but in other cases the juxtaposition of the two created conceptual tensions. Examining Berlin and Talmon's thought from this dual perspective, I argue, can shed new light on the inner conflicts and conceptual tensions that each of them had to face. In particular, I claim that both thinkers tried to integrate their Anglophile liberal heritage with their support of National movements in general, and the Jewish National movement in particular. Nevertheless, the different approaches of Talmon and Berlin present two concepts of liberal Nationalism: While Talmon assumed that Zionism solved the Jewish individual's dilemmas by making Jews members of a commune attached to soil; Berlin sought to preserve the individual in an inviolable sphere and thus was more ambivalent in his attitude towards the state of Israel. In conclusion, I offer to see Talmon as a classic Zionist liberal and Berlin as a supporter of what I call “Diaspora Zionism”, an approach, which would later provide the grounds for Berlin's celebrated pluralism.     

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

ABSTRACT. 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 (1916–80). 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 anti‐nationalist 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.     

The missing revolution: The totalitarian democracy in light of 1776

During much of his prolific career, the late historian Jacob Talmon was preoccupied with revolutionary movements, and was especially unsettled by, and attracted to, the force displayed by the French and Russian Revolutions. The young United States’ long and bloody war against the British Empire, followed by the creation of a republican novus ordo seclorum, supposedly fitted Talmon's revolutionary model and narrative. Hence, it is hard to account for the complete absence of the American Revolution from Talmon's extensive and celebrated trilogy.

This paper examines how Talmon understood revolutions and how the major historiographical schools interpreting the American Revolution could not accommodate, for different reasons, Talmon's paradigm of the nature and essence of revolutions. The paper further demonstrates how not only the failings of different historical interpretive schemes convinced Talmon to ignore the American Revolution. Rather, since the American Revolution could be conceived either as Lockean or Machiavellian, but in any event not as Rousseauian, Talmon overlooked its Atlantic nature; he chose to focus solely on messianic Europe. The paper will thus analyze the meaning and consequence of the fact that Talmon left the examination of the pursuit of happiness to Americanists, and chose to leave 1776 out of his corpus. Indeed, a missing revolution.     

The uses of rhetoric

This essay provides a general introduction to the special number on Jacob L. Talmon (1916–1980). The essay sketches the outlines of Talmon's intellectual biography, beginning with his study of the origins of totalitarian democracy, moving through his analysis of nationalism and political messianism, and ending with his study of the ideological clash of the 20th century. The essay raises the question of whether Talmon should be seen as a thinker wishing to defend existing traditions (i.e. a “priest”), or as a radical anti-authoritarian skeptic (i.e. a “jester”). Moreover, being both an anti-nationalist liberal, and a zionist at the same time, Talmon, the essay shows, was aware of the fact his own stance was problematic and at times even paradoxical. The last section of the essay presents the seven essays, which are included in the special issue.     

The political economy of socialism: A Marxist social theory

Talmon's treatment of nationalism varies in his different writings. This study will try to characterize his views as expressed in his final work, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution. Through most of the book Talmon's preference for dealing with the vision of revolution, its prophets and bearers is very conspicuous. Their total devotion to restructuring and refashioning the whole world in accordance with the socialist ideology fascinated Talmon before it provoked him into analyzing it to death. Nationalism, on the other hand, appears at best as a natural feeling of loyalty and at worst as a hateful, aggressive, and racist obsession. One of his outstanding interests in that book is in the internal debate among socialists about nationalism as a value and as a strategy, and in the tremendous prominence of Jews in this process. It is only towards the end of the book that Talmon presents his main thesis, the confrontation between the two totalitarian ideologies, Bolshevism and Fascism as deriving from socialism and nationalism, and embodying two kinds of determinism, economic and biological. Nationalism appears as an irrational phantasy, which had developed throughout the nineteenth century to its pivotal culmination in Nazism. This highly problematic thesis, though brilliantly expressed by captivating metaphors, should I think be explained and revised.     

Crisis in consciousness: The thought of Ernst Troeltsch

This article examines the ‘revolutionary liberal’ outlook expounded by the young Italian journalist and intellectual, Piero Gobetti, immediately following the First World War. It considers the historical evolution of his ‘agonistic’ liberalism according to which conflict rather than consensus serves as the basis of social and political renewal. The article traces the formation of Gobetti's thought from his idealist response to the crisis of the liberal state through to his endorsement of the communist revolutionaries in Turin and his denunciation of fascism as the continuation of Italy's failed tradition of compromise. Whilst Gobetti's views presently resonate with a growing interest in the agonistic dimension of politics, it is argued that his elitism and his understanding of liberalism as a ‘civic religion’ reveal challenging tensions in his thought.     

Social conflict and the global Cold War

This article offers a critical assessment of Fred Halliday's theorization of the Cold War and, in particular, his attempt to offer a more global perspective on it through a greater focus on the role of developments emanating from the Third World as constitutive of the Cold War. The author argues that although Halliday's theorization of the Cold War as ‘inter‐systemic conflict’ is a major advance in our understanding of the Cold War—through the attention it pays to the causal linkages between capitalist development and imperialism, revolutionary transformations and superpower geopolitical confrontations—it fails, ultimately, to fulfil its potential as a theory of global Cold War. Halliday's temporalization of the Cold War and his insistence on the autonomy of the superpower arms race and strategic competition end up detaching developments in the Third World from the axis of superpower conflict and, consequently, suggests a residual Eurocentrism within his theory. The article begins by contextualizing the wider theorization of the Cold War and the (absence) place of the Third World in it. It then proceeds to assess critically Halliday's conceptualization of the Third World in the Cold War. The final section outlines an alternative theoretical framework for a theory of global Cold War that builds on elements of inter‐systemic conflict focused on how geopolitical confrontations involving the superpowers derived from the revolutionary consequences of uneven capitalist development.     

Paul Cohen-Portheim: questions of nationalism,messianism and nostalgia in a prison camp in England, 1914–1918

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the little-known Jewish writer Paul Cohen-Portheim (1880–1932) and his notions of nationalism and Zionism. Born in Berlin to Austrian parents of Sephardic origin, Cohen-Portheim was interned during the First World War in various English prison camps. This experience profoundly affected his intellectual outlook and he dedicated much of his effort to the fight against nationalism. It was in the English prison camps that he developed an eclectic theory of nationalism which combines a quasi-evolutionary progress towards global justice with a messianic notion of Zionism. The Jewish people play a crucial role in Cohen-Portheim’s vision of a world devoid of nationalism, whose absurdity is disclosed in the arrival of Zionism. Juxtaposing Europe’s crisis of culture and Asia’s spiritual vitality, Cohen-Portheim ascribes to Zionism a bridging of the gap that separates Europe and Asia, and fragments modern nationalistic man. This article follows Cohen-Portheim’s intellectual development and highlights shifts and continuities in his writing, arguing that he shows two different types of nostalgia, namely a longing for the East as developed in his early works and a longing for the past as displayed in his last major work.     

Defending the West in All Its Amplitude: The Liberal Conservative Vision of Roger Scruton

This article explores the mixture of conservatism and liberalism that informs Roger Scruton's political and philosophical reflection. It highlights his response to the “culture of repudiation,” his resistance to totalitarianism, his defense of national loyalty (as opposed to ideological nationalism), his conservative-minded environmentalism, and his defense of order—and government—against libertarian and leftist assaults on legitimate authority. In particular, it explores a fruitful tension in Scruton's thought between a robust acknowledgment of the Christian features of Western civilization (a civilization that is unthinkable without a Christian emphasis on confession and forgiveness) and Scruton's forthright defense of the secular state against Islamist fanaticism. The article also explores affinities and differences between Scruton's understanding of the West's conjugation of Christianity and secularism and Pierre Manent's critique of radical secularism. The article concludes with reflections on Scruton's judicious melding of truth and liberty, and philosophy and Christianity.     

Commentary: In the shadow of liberalism? Comments on Neil Smith's “The Endgame of Globalization”

In this commentary, I respond to Neil Smith's essay “The Endgame of Globalization.” Smith's analysis of the three rounds of U.S. administrations' attempts to complete a project of global economic dominance and the recurrent nationalism that undermines such a project is an important and insightful contribution to understanding the workings of American imperialism and current national politics. However, I argue that his critique of liberalism and theorization of globalization in this essay are weakened by, on the one hand, a narrow definition of liberalism and a failure to address some key philosophical and political questions that arise as a result of its critique, and, on the other, a notion of power that obscures the paradoxical nature of globalization and the centrality of gender and other markers of difference to its operation. In line with critical feminist and postcolonial scholarship, I suggest that important theoretical insight is lost by neglecting conflicting accounts of liberalism, neoliberalism and globalization from alternative perspectives.     

Liberalism in the Cold War: Norberto Bobbio and the dialogue with the PCI

In this article I study the theoretical impact of Cold War ideology on Italian democracy through the dialogue between Norberto Bobbio and the leaders of the Italian Communist Party in the mid-1950s, in particular the philosopher Galvano della Volpe and the General Secretary Palmiro Togliatti. I claim that Bobbio's choice of dialogue with the 'enemies' of the western model of democracy was in itself a criticism of the Cold War logic and its Manichean theology of good and evil. What I call Bobbio's politics of dialogue has been roundly criticized in Italy, particularly since 1989, when revisionist scholars accused the non-Communist intellectuals of previous generations of not understanding Communist totalitarianism. I take the revisionists' challenges as my point of departure for an analysis of Bobbio's politics of dialogue and its underlying theoretical implications. Bobbio challenged the Communists on three related topics: the theory of the state, the philosophical character of Marxism, and the theory of liberty. Keeping the door open to illiberals did not imply relativism or passive acceptance of any opinion: failure to understand this basic fact led late revisionists to misinterpret Bobbio's dialogue with the PCI as a sign of weakness rather than strength. The dialogue strengthened Bobbio's conviction that it was crucial to link the defense of individual liberty to the defense of democracy, and thus avoid the dualism between negative and positive liberty, liberalism and democracy, a trait peculiar to Cold War liberalism as well as its leftist antagonists.     

Reading Iran: American Academics and the Last Shah

Despite the nature of American influence in postwar Iran, and despite the fact that Iranian studies has grown into a flourishing field in the United States, scholars have not explored the field's origins during the Cold War era. This article begins with the life of T. Cuyler Young to trace the critical genealogy within the field as it developed, in cooperation between American and Iranian scholars, during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. It proceeds to analyze two cohorts of American scholars whose political inclinations ranged from liberal reformism to revolutionary Marxism. As revolutionary momentum swelled in Iran in the late 1970s, critical scholars broke through superpower dogmas and envisioned a post-shah Iran. However, Cold War teleologies prevented them from fully grasping Iranian realities, particularly Khomeini's vision for Iran. This article argues that the modern field of Iranian studies in the United States was shaped by multiple generations of critical voices, all of which were informed by historically situated encounters with Iran and expressed through a range of methodological and theoretical perspectives.     

Byron to D'Annunzio: from liberalism to fascism in national poetry, 1815–1920

ABSTRACT. From Byron's death at Missolonghi in 1824 to D'Annunzio's capture of Fiume for Italy in 1919, the nationalism of universal liberalism and independence struggles changed, in literature as in politics, to cruel dictatorial fascism. Byron was followed by a series of idealistic fighter‐poets and poet‐martyrs for national freedom, but international tensions culminating in World War I exposed fully the intolerant, brutal side of nationalism. D'Annunzio, like Byron, both a major poet and charismatic war leader, was a key figure in transforming nineteenth‐century democratic nationalism into twentieth‐century dictatorial fascism. The poet's ‘lyrical dictatorship’ at Fiume (1919–20) inspired Mussolini's seizure of power in 1922, with far‐reaching political consequences. The poet became the dangerous example of a Nietzschean Übermensch, above common morality, predatory and morally irresponsible. This article shows how the meaning of nationalism was partly determined and transformed by poets, illustrating their role as ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’.     

Hebrews and phoenicians: An ancient historical image and its usage

The modern nation-state is the most common, and so far the most stable, vehicle for modern democracy. The case of Zionism offers a unique opportunity for inquiring into this connection since mainstream Zionism consciously founded its institutions on the premise that democracy and the national state are mutually dependent. Moreover, ever since the early days of Zionism, opposing plans to separate the two—a non-democratic national state and a non-national democratic state—have been, and still are, hotly debated. This article surveys the origins of these ideas and argues that, both politically and theoretically, neither the party of non-democratic nationalism nor the party of non-national democracy offers a viable or even coherent plan. It would seem that non-national democracy will subvert democracy as well as nationalism, and non-democratic nationalism will undermine the national as well as the democratic character of the state.     

The Forgotten Menzies: Cultural Puritanism and Australian Social Thought

Recent debates on the social thought of Australia's longest-serving Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, describe his career as a programme either to realise liberalism, conservatism, or liberal conservatism in Australian institutions and national identity. While these analyses have some merit, they fail to capture the historical context of Menzies' age, particularly the kind of Britishness for which he stood, a Britishness compatible with modes of liberalism and conservatism, but far more comprehensive than either of those traditions conceived narrowly as systematic ideologies. We contend that what Menzies was trying to do for much of his career was to reinvigorate what modern historians, and Menzies' contemporary social commentators, identified as a cultural puritan inflexion to British character. Once the nature of this cultural puritanism is understood, Menzies' political ideas, at least up until the Cold War, look less like attempts to promote liberalism or conservatism, and more as a project to reinvigorate a conception of Britishness that many during Menzies' time feared was in mortal danger by the forces of affluence, individualism, and socialism. We focus on his most well-known speech, “The Forgotten People” (1942), and analyse it in the context of many of his other writings, published and hitherto unpublished.     

The Partisan Nature of Race and Imperialism: Dadabhai Naoroji,M. M. Bhownaggree and the Late Nineteenth-Century British Politics of Indian Nationalism

This article examines Dadabhai Naoroji's and Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree's contribution to politically partisan ideologies on Indian empire as London MPs and reform advocates late in the nineteenth century. Exploring politically nuanced, cultural definitions of racial difference, this article reveals how their participation in British parliamentary and press debate on Indian nationalism adhered to distinct liberal and conservative imperial political conceptions of race and governance during this period. Beyond an analysis of Naoroji and the Indian National Congress's relationship with British liberalism, this essay explores Bhownaggree's contribution to a sustained conservative imperial tradition. This article postulates that Edmund Burke's separation from a liberal imperial rationality and a British Tory critique of liberalism informed a nineteenth-century conservative governing justification in India predicated on conciliating organic national racial difference. As Naoroji's devotion, as a Liberal MP for Central Finsbury (1892–95), to a liberal civilising mission informed an advocacy of political self-governance in Britain and India, Bhownaggree's pursuit of female and technical education reform while Conservative MP for Bethnal Green N.E. (1895–1905) represented a conservative espousal of racial difference.     

Nationality in the open society: Popper versus Hayes and Kohn

Popper's attitude to nationalism can be analysed by comparison with the position taken by Hayes and Kohn, who distinguished between a communal, malevolent form of nationalism, and a civic and constitutional variant that could coexist with liberalism. By contrast, Popper welcomes communal affiliations whose diversity he perceives as essential to liberalism, while rejecting sovereignty, whether or not invested in a representative body, as a threat to the liberal open society. This perspective reverses the normative priorities that Hayes and Kohn attribute to liberalism. Its basis is Popper's adherence to a pluralist liberalism, which centres on protecting social ties rather than on representation and state organs. This denotation of liberalism competes with the legalist individualism that Hayes and Kohn identify with liberalism and therefore accommodates nationalism differently.     

Taking sides: cosmopolitanism,internationalism and ‘complex solidarity’ in the work of Fred Halliday

Fred Halliday's life and work were intimately associated with the theory and practice of internationalism. In his later writings, the notion of ‘complex solidarity’ emerges as a key component of Halliday's worldview. This article explores the conceptual interconnections between different historical expressions of internationalism, cosmopolitanism and solidarity. It considers the intricate relationship between these categories and their place in our understanding of international affairs, emphasizing the divergence between liberal and revolutionary conceptions of internationalism and cosmopolitanism. The article discusses diverse understandings of ‘solidarity’ in International Relations, arguing that beyond the cosmopolitan and communitarian approaches, there exist other ‘Grotian’ and ‘republican’ ideas of solidarity. Halliday drew on these to present his own defence of universal human rights and solidarity, arguably developing a distinctive brand of republican internationalism. The latter part of the article gives content to ‘complex solidarity’ by suggesting it is built on three inter‐related components: a methodological internationalism, an egalitarian reciprocity and a critique of global capitalism. Overall, these guiding features of complex solidarity deliver a unique rendition of internationalism which reflect Halliday's eclectic combination of radical liberalism with a residual historical materialism.     

Alfred Marshall's economic nationalism

ABSTRACT. Alfred Marshall has been seen as an economic liberal and one of the founders of the neo‐classical school. However, this article challenges such conventional wisdom and argues that Marshall is best understood as an economic nationalist. Economic nationalism has been falsely associated with mercantilism, the zero‐sum view of international economies, and so on. However, a new approach for studying economic nationalism has recently been proposed to redefine its conception. The present article shows that Marshall's economic thought is compatible with this new conception of economic nationalism. Marshall emphasised the role of nationality in the economic process. The characteristics of his economic thought, such as the evolutionary view of economy, conform more closely to Friedrich List's economic nationalism than to economic liberalism. By portraying Marshall's theory as that of economic nationalism, the author concludes that economic nationalism can have a systematic theory.