Jacob Talmon: Combining histories and presents

Combining Histories and Presents: Jacob Talmon on Universities, Judaism, Intellectuals and Politics is not the biography of a historian. Rather, it is a discourse on a mind tormented by fear of the masses as well as the mistakes of the leadership. Talmon often applied his views on contemporary events and trends to his own actions as a humanist and historian. The changing role of the university, the decline of the liberal arts in favor of technology and the social sciences and the displacement of humanism by the market economy were of particular concern. His brilliant and paradoxically prophetic interactions with Arnold Toynbee, David Ben-Gurion, and Menahem Begin have been vindicated by the very history he sought to avoid. And now for the first time, through the English language, Talmonic wisdom is available to the largest possible audience.