ABSTRACT
A special group of Central European Jewish intellectuals has helped define the nature of twentieth-century social and political life, giving shape to destructive potentials of our age only dimly understood by those who worshiped at the altar of absolute progress. These emigres from Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw, Budapest and their environs were, for the most part, not speaking and writing from a conservative bias or defending constitutional tradition; there was little to defend in the world of crumbling empires in Central Europe. Jacob Talmon was the author of many works. The complex nature of the political fabric sometimes got lost in earlier volumes of the trilogy. Talmon did not write history in any conventional sense; strictly speaking, he transcended dynastic history and social history. His was a special kind of intellectual history, history as written by political ideologists who were either politicians or close enough to the political marrow to inform practicing politicians.
