Raymond Aron
RAYMOND ARON (1905-1983)
He was a small man with big ears, blue eyes, and a melancholic gaze, always extremely courteous. He had been born into a secular, assimilated, and quite well-off Jewish family. He spent his childhood in Versailles, in a house with a tennis court, and in his early years he was quite a successful tennis player until his intellectual calling took him away from sporting activities. But he remained a rugby enthusiast, though he only followed games on television. In the Ecole Normale, where he studied in the 1920s, he obtained the best marks in his year but he was so discreet and cautious in class discussions that his friend and fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre said to him one day: "Mon petit camarade, pourquoi as-tu peur déconner?" (My little friend, why are you so afraid of putting your foot in it?). Sartre never knew this fear and throughout his life, he often put his foot in it, with all the force of an intelligence that disguised the worst sophisms as truths. Raymond Aron, by contrast, maintained his decorum throughout his productive life, which ended in late September 1983 in the Paris Palais de la Justice, where he had gone to testify on behalf of his friend Bertrand de Jouvenel in a libel case. Then, as always, he gave his opinions with the same moderation and good manners he had shown from his early years. The only exception, perhaps, was his response to student revolution of May 1968, which made him furious.
- At a young age he became interested in German philosophy, learned German, and in 1930, on completing his studies at the École Normale, he set off for the land of Goethe. He taught in Cologne for a couple of years and then spent a further two years at the Franzosische Akademiker-Haus in Berlin. He was there in 1932, the year of Hitler's electoral triumph. Some time later he witnessed, along with his friend, the historian Golo Mann, the auto-da-fe in which the Nazis burned thousands of "degenerate" books at the gates of the University Humboldt. These traumatic political events did not distract him from his intellectual work, which, on his return to Paris, led to the publication of two key books on philosophy and sociology that introduced to a French audience figures such as Dilthey, Simmel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Max Weber: Essai sur une théorie de l'histoire dans l'Allemagne contemporaine, and, more significantly, his doctoral thesis, Introduction a la philosophie de l'histoire (both published in 1938).
He was a somewhat eccentric thinker within the French tradition that adores extremes: he was liberal and moderate champion of that Saxon political virtue common sense, an amiable skeptic who, without always much luck, but with great wisdom and lucidity, defended for more than half a century in books, articles, and lectures—in academia and in journalism—liberal democracy against dictatorships, tolerance against dogmas, capitalism against socialism, and pragmatism against utopias. In an era fascinated by excess, iconoclasm, and insolence, the good sense and urbanity of Raymond Aron were so unostentatious, so against the whirlwind of frenetic fashion, that even some of his admirers seemed in secret to concur with the malicious phrase coined by someone in the sixties that "it was better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron." During the fifties and sixties, in the midst of the intellectual tumults in France, when the left had the monopoly over cultural life, he was a sort of exile within his own country. Later, from the seventies, when his predictions about, and analysis of, the U.S.S.R. and its satellite countries were confirmed, he was increasingly recognized, and his 1983 Mémories met with almost universal acclaim. But it did not long. Although this vindication must have pleased him, he did not show it: he was too focused on editing his final masterpiece, the two hefty volumes of Penser la Guerre: Clausewitz ( 1976).
He was a dispassionate intellectual, with a penetrating but unshowy intelligence and a cold and clear prose, who could reflect serenely on the most burning questions and comment on current affairs with the same lucidity and objectivity as when he was teaching in the Sorbonne about industrial society or about his masters Montesquieu and Tocqueville. But he could be at times a master of irony and sarcasm as in his lecture on the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Marx's birth, delivered at UNESCO in the midst of the May 1968 revolution, when he stated that Berlin students were preparing for the peaceful society of their Marxist future by "defenes-tient their professors." The only thing that made him impatient, like Valery's Monsieur Teste, was betise, or human stupidity. Once, commenting on the populist demagogy of the Poujade movement, he wrote: "Quand ca devient trop bête, je csse de comprendre" ("When it becomes too stupid, I cease to understand").*
With his passing, we have lost one of the last pean intellectuals, and one of the most accessible
cialists, a moralist, philosopher, and sociologist of order who, at the same time, worked in journali
the talent—which is today very rare among intel: being able to elevate commentary on current affaif
egory of a creative essay and to imbue his acade and his sociological or historical reflections with t
a good newspaper
column. A professor in the
France, a columnist who for more than half a c(
mented weekly on
political affairs first in Combal
Figaro, and finally in L'Express, he was living pro
cialists could also be good communicators. Intelle
are, and write for, specialists; there is a seemingl
able chasm between their knowledge, which is tn.]
often esoteric language, and the ever cheaper and
rupt intellectual offerings disseminated by the m(
Raymond Aron's great
achievements was that thr
life he could be a bridge between the two sides o
pice that is widening at an alarming rate.
A tireless worker,
Aron's life forced him contir
his ideas against the proof of reality A Germani
lectual from his student days, he found himself li
many, learning about
the sociology and philosc
country, when the development of Nazism and i
power led him to
discover his own situation as
thing that he had been scarcely conscious of befoi
ism of Raymond Aron
requires a separate menti
Isaiah Berlin, with whom he shares a similar o
many issues, his ideas on this topic, which is so of
by passion and prejudice, are instructive. Born af
family that had stopped practicing religion and
RAYMOND ARON (1905-1983)
183
tted, and as an
agnostic himself (his parents never took him
o a synagogue), Aron often criticized the religious
intolerance
nd the nationalist
extremism of those he called, somewhat
iumorously, his Jewish "co-religionaries." He
never had faith
n the "chosen people" and the "sacred
history" of the Old Tes-
tament. But when in a
press conference in 1967, de Gaulle
called Jews "an elite people, self-assured and
domineering,"
Aron responded with a
book that is one of the most intelligent
descriptions of the Jewish condition and the problem of
Israel:
De Gaulle, Israel et
les Juifs (1968).
Among the many homages written at his death,
Liberation
stated that "Raymond
Aron saved the right from drowning in
stupidity," an example of the French obsession with
classifica-
tion and its often cheap leftism. Pigeonholing him in this
way
erases the nuances of Aron's thought. Quoting Ortega y Gas-
set, he once said that right and left were "two
equivalent hemi-
plegias." Considered right wing, he was so in a very
particular
way, a very liberal way. After the defeat of France in 1939,
he
was one of the first
intellectuals to leave for London to join
the Free French forces, but de Gaulle did not allow him to
become a combatant,
as he had intended, and made him the
editor in chief of the Resistance magazine, La France Libre.
His support of de
Gaulle was always independent, mistrust-
ful, and critical: he was often a severe critic of the Fifth
Re-
public and of the
general himself, accusing both of being
authoritarian. After the student revolution of 1968, which
he
opposed with a
passion that was rare in him, he wrote in La
Revolution introuvable (1968) that he was not a Gaullist and
that General de Gaulle had a particular dislike for him.*
* Raymond Aron, La Revolution introuvable: reflexions sur
les evenements
de Mai, Fayard, Paris, 1968. Text references are from the
Spanish edition,
La revolucion estudiantil, Editorial Desclee de Brouwer,
1970.
Furthermore, he
was the first intellectual who da
gue that the
independence of Algeria was inevitat
Tragedie algerienne (1957), a book written at a time
almost the entire French left, including the Socialist 1
a reactionary, nationalist position on the issue. Miche
has analyzed the
scandal that erupted in the right-wir
Raymond Aron's
stance against the jingoistic natic
from the socialists
to the extreme right in France—
manded the
preservation of Algeria under French sc
and the extermination of the insurrectionary FLIN
ideas were coherent
and incontrovertible: one cann
liberalism and democracy
and, at the same time, an
ist and colonialist policy against a people claiming t
to be independent. It
is true that when France inv
occupied Algeria in the nineteenth century, the mos
sive minds in France (in all of Europe) thought that
ing" was to guarantee progress in societies living
obscurantism, was to
fight against slavery and to bi
acy, modern science,
and technology to these so(
short all the myths deployed to give the colonial pow
conscience. But in the
twentieth century, these fa'
had been exposed by a cruel and flagrant reality—
exploitation of the colonized by the racist, discrimin
abusive policies of the colonizers—and Aron explain
with his customary
objectivity and intelligence: F
champion of
freedoms, could not deny Algerians th
create their own state and elect their own governm
Practically the
entire right in France felt betra
man they considered
their most significant intellect
* Michel Winock, "La tragedie algerienne" in
Raymond Ar
politique: Textes et temoignage, op. cit., pp. 269-273.
Llts were rained on
Aron, with critics calling him "a
ntellectual lacking
in humanity" (D. Arlon),
con-
his "glacial stoicism" (Jules Monnerot), his
"desiccated
(G. Le Brun Keris)
and his "icy clarity" (Francois
. Others accused
him of having become
a "spokes-
US capital" and
there were also anti-Semitic attacks,
rticle in Revell de la France that compared him with
France and
Servan-Schreiber (both of Jewish origin)
Iplained of "these Frenchmen who were
still not used
e."
THE OPIUM
OF THE INTELLECTUALS
mond Aron
was in the main opposed to the radical
Lkers of his generation. He was a tenacious, and for
;ars, almost solitary critic of the Marxist and existen-
Leories of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Louis Althusser,
e seen in his polemics, essays, and articles collected in
mes Polemiques (1955)
and D'une sainte fondle a l'autre
Ind his splendid analysis
of Marxism and culture,
des intellectuels,
published in 1955, which Francois
scribed very well as
"a combative and
philosophical
this "incorrigible liberal," as he called himself,
surveys
udes of intellectuals toward power and the state since
Idle Ages, and he describes the similarities and differ-
tween intellectuals in the Soviet Union, subject to the
of the Communist
Party, and the
"skeptical" intellec-
Id Aron, Polemiques, Gallimard, Paris, 1955. Raymond Aron,
nte famille a l'autre, Gallimard, Paris, 1969. Raymond Aron,
des intellectuels, Calman-Levy, Editeurs, Liberte
del'Esprit,
;5.
tual, which was his way of saying "free": "If thq
fanaticism, let us pray for the advent of the skep
For Aron, Marxism is, as was Nazism, a t)
religion" of our time, a definition that he first 1,
articles published in La France Libre in 1944. Ai
interesting pages in this book is his close analys
matic Marxism has become. It was Marx who
the "opium of the people." Aron argues that
many great similarities with the Catholic Chui
first sight: both share a messianic optimism—a
ety will herald the end of history and will begin
of peace and justice for all of humanity. In t
dogma of Marxism, history is the work of class
the Communist Party at the vanguard, a war
proletariat represent the righteous men and wor
the custodians of all that is good and the instru
which the exploitative bourgeoisie will be def
last shall become first. The book was written will
priests," who had offered a bridge between Ca
communism, had been called to order by the Vat
mond Aron offers a subtle analysis of these be
principal mouthpiece was the journal Esprit, wl
Marxism and Christianity were compatible
among the most prominent "fellow travelers" o
nists. Their alliance, for Aron, was an insolubl
because the Church, whether it likes it or not,
idates established injustice" and "the Christia
the people passive" while the "communist opil
to revolt" (p. 300). But at least in some r(
* Aron, L'Opium, p. 334. All the quotations from t
translated from this French edition.
RAYMOND ARON (1905-1983) 187
religions—the sacred and the secular—are alike because the
"Stalinist religion," like the Christian religion, justifies all sac-
rifices, excesses, and abuses in the name of paradise, "a future
which recedes as one approaches it, a moment in which the
people will harvest the fruits of their long patience" (p. 301).
Taking all this into account, we should point out that
L'Opium des intellectuels is directed not so much at commu-
nists, but at crypto-communists, fellow travelers, or useful
idiots represented in postwar France by left-wing Christians
and existentialists, above all Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, who are subjected to incisive criticism.
Aron illustrates that both the right and the left are fraught
with so many divisions that it is fanciful to talk of a united
left, heirs to the great revolution of 1789, which is secular and
in favor of an egalitarian, liberal society. And that, among
the left, the arguments revolve around the issue of freedom.
He notes that in Britain the Labour Party in government since
1945 had put through great social reforms, "ruining the rich,"
without doing away with public freedoms, while Stalinism did
away with these freedoms when it extended the control of the
state over economic life.
He describes the failure of the Fourth Republic, when
Gaullism was defeated at the polls. The myth of revolution,
embodied in the U.S.S.R., had seduced a great number of
intellectuals as can be seen in the 1952 polemic between Sar-
tre and Francis Jeanson on the one side and Albert Camus on
the other, about the concentration camps in the Soviet Union.
Aron's position, which is very close to Camus's, is extremely
critical of Sartre, who did not deny the existence of the Gulag—
this term was not yet in common currency, until Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn disseminated it some years later—but justified
it because, in his opinion, the U.S.S.R., despite everything,
188 THE CALL OF THE TRIBE
represented the defense of the proletariat in its struggle to the
death against the bourgeoisie. Aron underlines the paradox
that violence was ever more seductive to the intellectual class
at a time when, in terms of French politics, the revolution
was becoming ever distant and fading. And he asks whether
this passion for violence does not have a great deal in common
with the attraction that it always held for the extremist Euro-
pean right, that is, fascism and Nazism.
The most persuasive and brilliant of the topics analyzed
in The Opium of the Intellectuals is "the myth of the proletariat,"
this proletariat that, Marx argued, would have the function of
saving humanity from injustice and exploitation and estab-
lishing a classless society, just and free of contradictions. Aron
shows the messianic, Judeo-Christian origins of this convic-
tion, an act of faith that lacks any scientific base. Why would
the working class be the only class capable of saving human-
ity? For one thing, the conditions of the workers in 1955 are
very dissimilar to those of workers in Marx's early years, in the
middle of the nineteenth century, and, furthermore, the stan-
dard of living and rights for industrial workers in countries
like the United States, Sweden, and Great Britain, although
different, are also vastly superior if one compares them to
those in the least developed and third world countries.
It is also not true that when the workers obtained power in
the U.S.S.R., they became "liberated": they are still slaves, not
now to capitalists, but to political leaders who proclaim them-
selves as representatives of history, who pay them miserable
wages, do not allow them independent unions, and repress any
working-class protest as a political crime. Aron comments
ironically on existentialist and Christian intellectuals, many of
whom had never seen a worker in their lives and lived in the
free and affluent societies of the West, spreading the myth of
RAYMOND ARON (1905-1983) 189
nt and revolutionary proletariat in countries where
ity of workers aspired to less transcendent and more
hings: to having their own home, a car, social secu-
paid holidays, that is, to becoming bourgeois. The
ms of social injustice in present-day society, he ar-
the Jews and other minorities who are victims of ra-
lice, those who live in near slave conditions in African
and the Middle East, and the peasants living in feudal
s on large estates throughout the third world.
Der splendid chapter, titled "Churchmen and the
' studies communism as a secular religion with its or-
and heterodoxies, its sects, its deviations, and its
)n. His interpretation of the "Stalinist show trials" in
; is very relevant. In these trials Kamenev, Bukharin,
, and other comrades of Lenin were forced to declare
es "agents of Hitler and the Gestapo" before being
It is incredible that respectable philosophers like
Ponty in his book Human isme et terreur would vali-
e legal monstrosities—in essence legally sanctioned
—in the name of the "essential truth" of the class
and of the Communist Party as the representative
;uard of the proletariat. We should point out that,
irtre, Merleau-Ponty later changed his opinion and
eak with Sartre precisely because of his persistent de-
VIarxism as the "unsurpassable horizon of our time."
Les Aventures de la dialectique (1955) is a very severe
Df Sartre's essay "Les Communistes et la paix," to
mone de Beauvoir responded with a no less virulent
VIerleau-Ponty et le pseudo-sartrisme" (1955). Aron
implacable denunciation of the fallacy of considering
munist Party—he calls this fallacy "sacred history"—
ts comings and goings, its contradictions and changes
190 THE CALL OF THE TRIBE
of political behavior, its recantations and repressioi
eternal representative of historical truth and social ji
In his chapter "The Meaning of History," he r(
idea of the "churchmen" and the "faithful" that hisi
single meaning and it will disappear with the dm;
when the exploitation of man by man no longer e:
"end of history," he argues, is a religious idea and
more, it is simplistic to believe that the motor of hist
the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the prole
noring the multiplicity of social, cultural, traditic
gious, psychological, family, and personal factors
alongside economic factors, without which it would 1
sible to understand historical events like the Battle
litz or Hitler's attack on the U.S.S.R. in 1941. Only
faith" could lead a philosopher—he is still referring to
Ponty—once the Communist Party takes power,
what he had previously condemned: the lack of elec
press freedom, the trampling of human rights, inch
ture: "the sublime end excuses the revolting means."
Aron criticizes the "Idolatry of History," denyirq
offers the absolute explanation for humanity. One ol
successful aspects of this book is its fusion of phil
and political wisdom, where serene and thoughtful
combined with a polemical and even sometimes pro
tone with respect to both the past and the present.
continue to be a warning against ideological dogm
seeks to legitimate the Marxist myths of the prol
revolution, and of the Communist Party and the
omniscience and omnipotence of the Central Com,
the Secretary General, introduced by Lenin and u
all, by Stalin.
This book and others by him, like Marxismes
RAYMOND ARON (1905-1983) 191
sought to offer a brave and reasoned counterweight to
ologized fervor of the time, showing the relativism and
rths underlying theories that purport to offer definite
>solute answers about society and humankind. They
t, unfortunately, have the impact they deserved, espe-
Lmong young people. This was because these books, like
he wrote that were dictated by current concerns—for
Republique imperiale (The Imperial Republic) and his
Le of the disturbances of the so-called student revolution
y 1968 in France, La Revolution introuvable (The Elusive
ition)—were written simply to dismantle the ideologies
;ue rather than to offer in their place an all-embracing
r, which he did not believe in. In that, as well, he was a
le liberal. In our day and age, when we find healthy crit-
'appraisal replacing the utopian illusions of the fifties
ixties, the pragmatic realism and the reformist and
ideas of Raymond Aron should receive a more sym-
ic hearing.
THE ELUSIVE REVOLUTION
y 1968 in France there was student unrest at the Univer-
' Nanterre, which then spread to the Sorbonne, to the
rung universities in the country, and to colleges and
[s. This is how the "student revolution" began, and it
;(1 similar movements in different parts, which is why
tme so important the world over. Nearly sixty years on,
reaction seems excessive when one considers its real
cance: it led to a certain freedom in behavior, especially
freedom, the disappearance of standards of polite be-
., the multiplication of swear words in communications,
Dt much more. Not only did French society continue as 192 THE CALL OF THE TRIBE
before but in the university sector things became more rigid
and not more democratic, former academic standards plum-
meted, and all the problems have still not been resolved.
In its early days the events of May 1968 had the look of a
libertarian—in any event, anti-Stalinist—revolution in French
society, led by students. Lecturers and professors as well aE
other university employees joined the rebellion, local universi-
ties were occupied, communes were established and barricade
erected, there were almost daily noisy assemblies, which voted
for likable but crazy proposals (the most popular slogans wen
[(power to the imagination" and "it is forbidden to forbid"), one
theaters and cultural centers were taken over. Echoes of th(
mobilization even reached the Cannes Film Festival, provok-
ing an incident in which the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, flat-
tened by a punch to the chin, was one of the few victims of th(
revolt. The efforts of the students to connect with the worker:
and involve them, despite the resistance of the communisi
trade unions, was partially successful because a wave of strike:
paralyzed many factories in different parts of France, forcin
the Communist Party, which was very reticent at the begin-
ning, to declare a general strike. In this curious revolutior
there were no deaths but there were, instead, intense debate
in which Trotskyists, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, Castroists
Guevarists, anarchists, progressive Christians, and all sorts o
groups and groupuscules of the extreme left (with the excep.
tion of what Cohn-Bendit, one of the leaders of May 1968
would call, "la crapule stalinienne") exchanged ideas, plans
and incendiary proclamations without coming to blows. Bu
all this, however, was eclipsed in an unexpected way when, ir
the elections called in the midst of this revolutionary efferves
cence, the Gaullists swept the polls and gained their highes
ever victory, greatly increasing the absolute majority that the,
RAYMOND ARON (1905-1983) 193
y held in parliament. The famous revolution deflated as
magic, confirming once again Raymond Aron's theory
Doth in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, all
h revolutionary crises "are followed, after the phase of
arricades or of lyrical illusions, by an overwhelming re-
)f the party of order."
nd it goes without saying that the "May revolution,"
h was interpreted as the materialization of the sociologi-
aeories of Herbert Marcuse, had the support of almost
ntire intellectual class, led by Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir,
usser, Foucault, and Lacan, with manifestos, speeches,
; to the barricades, and even a symbolic attack by a group
riters on a hotel. The exception was Raymond Aron who,
the first moment, declared himself categorically—and,
he first time in his life, furiously—against what he saw
as a revolution but as a caricature, a comic opera that
d not lead to any change in French society but rather to
lestruction of the university system and of the economic
ress that France was making. He received such strong
ism for this view from Sartre that a group of intellectuals,
ed by Kostas Papaioannou, circulated a manifesto de-
ing him.
he book that he subsequently published, La Revolution
uvable: Re-flexions sur les evenements de mai (1969), con-
; a long interview with Alain Duhamel, a framing essay,
a compilation of all the articles that he wrote in Le Figaro
lay and June 1968. Aron declares his hostility from the
toward what he saw as a chaotic movement that would
to the "Latin-Americanization" of French universities.
;ees the event as being charged with "passion and delir-
mond Aron, La revolucidn estudiantil, op. cit., p. 87.
194 THE CALL OF THE TI
ium," on the verge of being controlled by exi
groupuscules, who looked to use it to revolu
cording to models inspired by different for
Trotskyism, Castroism, Guevarism—some
short or long term, would serve only to "in
ing confusion" and, in the worst case, phu
dictatorship. He thought this final outcome
his analysis, punctuated by quotations illus
cism and frustration that his inspiration Al(
had felt about the 1848 revolution, he point
that in their desire to create "direct demo,
tionary students, despite declaring themsel
more anti-Soviet than anti-capitalist.
In this book he defends himself against
had moved to a "reactionary position" and
out that he had proposed an integral refo
university system, looking to modernize it
unblocking it, freeing it from asphyxiatinE
tablishing a greater control over student ac
the current greatly increased student numb,
young people achieving academic success
training that universities can give them to
cessfully enter the job market. The declar
against consumer society reveals, he argu
and dogmatism because "the consumer s
thing that allows tens of thousands of stud
in universities" (p. 207). He also rejects the
lution is democratic: "Who is going to bel
show of hands in plenary or general asse
will of professors and students?" (p. 210).
majority of the young people in the mc
loving and reformist, but that they are
RAYMOND ARON (1905-1983) 195
ay groups and groupuscules seduced by the exam-
I's China and Castro's Cuba, and these latter groups,
must be resolutely opposed without worrying about
unpopular as a result. It is true that his standpoint
3nd Aron to be roundly criticized in those days and
lut time would also prove him to be right in this in-
t May revolution did not improve one iota the situa-
e French university system, which continues to this
haotic and insoluble crisis.
ugh he was skeptical of great political passions, Aron,
ribed himself as a committed observer, did, however,
progress. For him, although without holding out too
)es in this regard, progress was represented by modern
society, which had completely changed the economic
1 structure that Marx had studied, and which had led
:velop theories about the working class, for example,
ernity had made obsolete. Raymond Aron analyzed
ided this new society in a volume that brought to-
.s lectures at the Sorbonne in 1956 and 1957, and
came one of his most widely read books: Dix-huit
la societe industrielle (Eighteen Lectures on Industrial
)63). In this text and in the lectures that he published
title Essai sur les libertes (An Essay on Freedom, 1965),
Rich of Raymond Aron's political thinking.
ye sum up this thinking in a few sentences? If all
ut building paradise on earth are senseless, it is per-
itimate, by contrast, from what the development of
r through history has taught us, to conclude that men
Len have progressed to the extent that they are less
religious servitude, despotism has been weakened,
;regarious mass has become transformed into a com-
f individuals who have been given certain rights and
196 THE CALL OF THE TRIBE
allowed to take initiatives. The technological and s
development of the West has been the motor force of t
cess of individual emancipation, and industrial, modert
cratic nations have developed as a result. 'The great techn
revolution has served, on the one hand, to accelerate c
ment and, on the other hand, to ameliorate the exce
abuses of the old capitalist system. With all the defe
can be laid at the door of modern industrial societi
have managed to achieve unprecedented levels of prc
justice, and freedom that cannot be matched by other
porary regimes, in particular communist regimes. T
dustrial societies have shown that "there is no incomp
between political freedoms and wealth, between the
nisms of the market and the rise in living standards: c
reverse, the highest living standards have been ach
countries that have political democracy and a relatil
economy?' But this panorama does not justify optim
cause developed, democratic society is under threat t(
main enemy is the state, an entity that is essentially vc
oppressive, and bureaucratic, always on the lookout
slightest opportunity, to grow and destroy everythi
puts the brakes on and limits its power. Its second e
totalitarian states—the U.S.S.R. and China—for wl
mere existence of a democratic society poses a gr
The ability of modern men and women to resist th(
of the state and totalitarian threats will determine
history in the future will either continue its gradual
toward better living standards or else take crab-1
* Raymond Aron, "De quoi disputant les nations," in Polemiq
p. 245.
RAYMOND ARON (1905-1983) 197
obscurantism, intolerance, and poverty that most
still experiences.
not forget that Raymond Aron lived and wrote
Cold War, which witnessed, in France above all, a
Le group of intellectuals and important democratic
ling the neutrality and peace campaigns promoted
jet Union and the communist parties. His position
s blunt and unequivocal: "Dans la guerre politique, ii
ii ne peut pas y avoir de neutres" ("In the war of poli-
is no, and can be no, neutrality"). In his opinion
the U.S.S.R. would have taken over Western Eu-
time ago were it not for the fear that this occupa-
I unleash a nuclear war with the United States. But
not deceive ourselves: the imperialist tendencies of
R. were very apparent, as could be seen in all the
)untries in Central and Eastern Europe, and the
d not lower its guard. This is why Aron defended
tic Alliance and he argued that European union,
dways supported, must never lead to any break with,
ng from, the United States. North American society
'ar from being perfect, as could be seen, for example,
-imination against Blacks, but weighing everything
in the United States there was respect for the right
and the openness of the system allowed for reforms,
totalitarianism of Stalin would have forced free and
Europe into total submission.
anything that we can reproach the admirable Ray-
,r). for? Perhaps there is. That all his thought focused
: and the United States and that, like Albert Camus,
an almost complete lack of interest in the third
Lt is, in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Had he
198 THE CALL OF THE TRIBE
arrived, deep down, at the conviction that for our c
bound up in conflicts and tremendous problems
now no hope? For a thinker who was in so many r,
versal, his lack of curiosity about what was happc
other two-thirds of humanity is surprising.
RAYMOND ARON AND JEAN-PAUL SAF
They were contemporaries, fellow students, one
their early days, and later bitter rivals. And for
blinded by ideological myopia it is interesting to (
cases of Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre as tl
important intellectual figures of modern France.
I was in Paris in 2005, when the centenary o
was celebrated. France celebrated in style the one-h
anniversary of the birth of the author of Being and
There were documentaries, programs, and debate:
intellectual and political legacy on the radio an
special supplements in newspapers and magazines;
of new books on his life and work, and, the jewel
an exhibition, Sartre and His Century, in the Biblic
tionale, a model of its kind. I spent three hours the
still was a lot left to see.
In the exhibition one could follow step by step,
tively, all the aspects of a life that encompassed ti
century, which Bernard-Henri Levy has called, in
fashion, le siècle de Sartre, and whose books, ideas, o
on important issues had an influence in France am
world that is now difficult to imagine. (In Peru in
spent half of my salary on a subscription to Sartre
Temps Modernes and I studied it every month fro
to end.) One of the lessons the spectator could di
RAYMOND ARON (1905-1983) 199
exhibition was to realize how precarious this intellectual dom-
inance of Sartre proved to be, seemingly so extensive fifty years
ago, but now almost nonexistent. It was all there in the glass
exhibition cases: from when, as a boy, at ten years old, he dis-
covered his ugliness through the eyes of his mother, who was
widowed and had remarried, to his decision, when he was (af-
ter Aron) the star student at the Ecole Normale, not to give up
either of his two vocations, literature and philosophy, and to
become "at the same time, Stendhal and Spinoza." Before he
was forty, he had achieved this and, furthermore, something
he had not foreseen, he had become a media figure, who
appeared in gossip magazines and was the object of tourist
attention in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, along with Simone de
Beauvoir, Juliette Greco, and Edith Piaf, as one of the icons of
postwar France.
Posters and photographs documented the premieres of his
plays, the publication of his books, the criticism of these
works, the interviews he gave, the publication of Les Temps
Modernes, and there were the manuscripts of his philosophical
essays and of his short stories and novels that he wrote in
school exercise books or on loose pages in cafés, on a table
apart from but alongside the one where his "morganatic" part-
ner, Simone de Beauvoir, worked. His most famous polemic,
with Albert Camus, on the Soviet concentration camps, was
very well laid out, as were the repercussions of this debate in
intellectual and political circles, inside and outside France.
Also his journeys across half the world, his fractured love af-
fair with the Communists, his anti-colonialist struggle, his
insistence on joining the May 1968 movement, and the ex-
treme and rather embarrassing radicalization of his final years
when he went to visit the German terrorists of the Baader-
Meinhof group in prison, when he sold the Maoist newspaper
200 THE CALL OF THE TF
La Cause du Peuple in the streets, or when,
stood on a barrel and perorated the workers
Renault factory at Billancourt.
The exhibition was splendid and, for son
was very personally involved for a number c
participated in the debates and dedicated ma'
Sartre's books and articles, and devoured al
Temps Modernes and tried to follow the chiai
twists and turns of the author of The Roads
also rather sad. But I don't think that it will
est among young people in rediscovering
bring him any greater respect or admiratioi
on the issue of anti-colonialism, where he all
clear and lucid viewpoint, the exhibition,
hagiographic intent, revealed how clumsy an
almost all the political positions that he clef(
What is the use of such a dazzling intell
return from his tour across the U.S.S.R. in
worst period of the Gulag, he could state,"
that there is a complete freedom of critic
Union." In his polemic with Camus, he clic
than deny the existence of Stalinist concet
real or imagined dissidents: he justified thc
the classless society that was being built. Hi
his old friends like Albert Camus, Raymoi
rice Merleau-Ponty, because they refused to
a "fellow traveller" of the communists at dif
that his booming declaration that "every an
dog" was not a one-off remark but a profou.
It seems unbelievable that someone
years ago, justified, in his essay on Frant
RAYMOND ARON (1905-1983) 201
therapeutic, through which the colonized would regain their
sovereignty and dignity, and who, proclaiming himself a Mao-
ist, bestowed his respectability and prestige onto the genocide
that the People's Republic of China committed during the
Cultural Revolution, could have been considered by so many
(and I declare myself guilty, I was one of them) the moral con-
science of his time.
The celebration of the hundred years of Raymond Aron,
who practically never left the catacombs of academia and the
former journal Commentaire that he founded and edited, was
much more discreet, not to say clandestine. Aron and Sartre
were friends and classmates and there are photos that show
the two "petits copains" arm in arm, playing around. Until the
outbreak of the Second World War they had a similar trajec-
tory. Then, with the Nazi invasion, Aron was one of the first
Frenchmen and -women to travel to London and join the Re-
sistance. He was always a dedicated supporter of reconcilia-
tion between France and Germany and of the construction of
Europe but—and in this he differed from much of the French
right—he never believed that European unity should weaken
Atlanticism, the close collaboration between Europe and the
United States that he always promoted.
Unlike Sartre's work, which has aged on par with his po-
litical opinions—his novels owe their technical originality to
John Dos Passos, and, with the exception of Huis Clos, his
plays would not today pass muster on the stage—Aron's writ-
ings remain fresh and topical. His essays on philosophy, his-
tory, and sociology and his tenacious defense of liberal doctrine,
of Western culture, of democracy, and of the market at a time
when most European intellectuals had succumbed to the siren
song of Marxism, were fully borne out by what happened in
202 THE CALL. OF THE TRIBE
the world following the fall of the Berlin Wall,
symbol of the disappearance of the U.S.S.R., ar
sion of China into an authoritarian capitalist so(
Why then, if his ideas have not survived,
glamour surrounding the unreadable Sartre rema
almost no one is attracted to the figure of the sen
vincing Raymond Aron? The explanation has to
the features that culture has acquired in our day
become theatrical, it has become banal and friv(
drawn into the world of publicity and the gossip
celebrity and gossip magazines. We live in the
the spectacle and the intellectuals and writers wh
popular are almost never popular because of the
their ideas or the beauty of their creations, or, in
just for intellectual, artistic, or literary reasons. 1
lar above all else for their histrionic ability, the
they project their public image, their exhibitionis
ness, their insolence, all that farcical and noisy
public life that passes itself off as rebellion (but
masks a complete conformism), which the med
converting authors, like artists and singers, into
the masses.
In the Bibliotheque Nationale exhibition, t
pect of Sartre's biography that has never been cc
ified. Was he really a member of the Resistanc(
occupation? Yes, he belonged to one of the m
tions of intellectuals that supported the Resist
obvious that his membership was more theoreti
tical because during the occupation he was very
teacher, even replacing a teacher who had been
a school for being Jewish—this episode has beer
virulent discussions—and he wrote and publis
RAYMOND ARON (1905-1983) 203
and premiered his plays with the approval of the German cen-
sors, as Andre Malraux would later point out. Unlike Resis-
tance members like Camus or Malraux who risked their lives
during the war, Sartre does not appear to have risked very
much. Perhaps unconsciously he wanted to blot out this un-
comfortable past with the ever more extreme positions that he
adopted after the liberation. One of the most recurring themes
of his philosophy was bad faith which, for him, conditions
bourgeois life, inducing men and women from that social
class to cheat and hide their true personality behind lying
masks. In his best book, Saint Genet, comedien et martyr, he
analyzed with great acuity the psychological-moral system
through which, according to him, the bourgeois hide from
themselves, constantly retreat into vigorous denial, fleeing
from this murky conscience that always accuses them. Perhaps
this was true in his case. Perhaps this fearsome enemy of dem-
ocrats, this incorrigible anarcho-communist, this incandes-
cent "Mao" was just a desperate bourgeois ever increasing his
poses so that nobody would remember his apathy and pru-
dence in the face of the Nazis when things were hotting up
and commitment was not just a rhetorical conjuring trick but
a life-and-death decision.
Many things have happened in France and the world since
the death of Raymond Aron. Have these events proved his
ideas to be right or wrong? 'The Communist Party, which in
his day was the most important party in the country, has
shrunk in size and has become marginal, which must count as
one of his posthumous victories. Another victory is that the
current French intellectual class is as distant from Marxism as
he always was. What is surprising is that the former commu-
nist voters, like the workers of the "red belt" around Paris, now
vote for the Front National, which has moved from being the
204 THE CALL OF THE TRIBE
ultra-right fringe party of some years back to being
force within the political mainstream. This is someth
Aron and nobody else could have imagined, although
Hayek might have done so, for he always argued that,
their mutual hatred, communists and fascists shared
mon denominator: statism and collectivism. In the r
cent French elections a young man who was fighting
campaign in the political arena, Emmanuel Macron
ated a great deal of enthusiasm, especially among the ,
generation, with center-right ideas that, at first glanc
quite close to those that Raymond Aron espoused all
Will France today rediscover in this solitary democr
liberal twentieth-century intellectual a precursor and
lectual guide to what seems a new and interesting sta
political evolution?
The powerful Soviet Union, which Aron fought ag
his life, has died out, a victim of its own incapacity t
the ambitions of its millions of citizens, and has been
by an authoritarian and imperial regime, of gangster a
cantilist capitalism, which seems a continuation of
authoritarian and overbearing czarist system. China
being communist and became a model of authoritari
talism. However, to say that history has proved R
Aron right would be somewhat premature. Because o
the threat of communism, which he relentlessly oppc
ceased to be a threat for democracies around the worl
a lunatic would take as models for their country, the
of North Korea, Cuba, or Venezuela—democracy has
the contest and will probably never completely do so.
that, in the Western world, the European Union,
Brexit, has remained solid, and much of Latin Am(
been won over to democracy. But it faces new threats
RAYMOND ARON (1905-1983) 205
fanatical and extremist Islamism of al-0_2.eda or ISIS, whose
large-scale terrorism sows insecurity, and with this comes
the risk that, in the name of security, public freedoms will be
eroded in those countries most threatened by terrorism, the
advanced democracies. Furthermore, within the heart of
these open societies, poisons like corruption and populism are
growing to such an extent that, if they are not contained in
time, they can distort and destroy from within everything that
is most positive and liberating in these societies.
On all these problems, including the mass migration from
Africa into Western Europe, which is giving rise to chauvinist
and racist movements that we had thought had died out, we
miss the opinions and analysis of Raymond Aron: his intelli-
gence, his culture, the depth of his thought, the breadth of his
vision would doubtless help us understand these challenges
more clearly and discern the best way to face up to them. That
there is no one today capable of replacing him is the greatest
proof of his extraordinary intellectual and political capabilities
and of how lucky we were to have benefited from all that he
managed to achieve in recent times.
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