The Committed Observer

Aron, Raymond

THE COMMITTED OBSERVER Conversations with Jean Louis Missika and Dominique Walton Raymond Aron/Regnery Gateway/$17.00 . Joseph Shattan I am told that during the 1930s and '60s, analysts of the...

...The root cause of Western Europe's malaise, in Aron's view, is a loss of political will...
...Such a person is not particularly concerned with the possible consequences of his actions...
...I favored Algerian independence...
...On the contrary, "as far as Western Europe is concerned, and France in particular, the question is whether we can remain France or whether we must become a Poland...
...They are worried, anguished by the fact that there is evil in our system (evil exists in all systems...
...They think that kind of question is for the experts, the technocrats...
...I did not favor civil war in France...
...While these precautions seem exaggerated, the problem they were meant to address is a real one Intelligence analysts must be close enough to policymakers to provide them with relevant information, yet not so close as to become advocates, or captives, of a particular point of view...
...Because Aron believed that thinking politically meant accepting an ethic of responsibility, he faulted most French intellectuals of the left, including his old classmate, Jean-Paul Sartre, for their refusal to ask the right questions: They rarely ask, "What would I do if I were in place of the ministers...
...foreordained, that governments and people retain a wide margin for maneuver...
...but it is probably the only one European's deem possible today...
...The topics covered in these interviews are quite varied, and include the French Third Republic, the Popular Front, Leon Blum, Munich, Hitler, World War II, Petain, Vichy France, the Fourth Republic, De Gaulle, Indochina, Algeria, Sartre, the Soviet Union, and the nature of nuclear war...
...they thirst for the solution that would provide the "univer-salizable" society...
...The result was that Aron become the rarest of all political animals, "lespectateur engage," that is, someone at once within and without the political maelstrom...
...and the same ambitions, there will b a confrontation between the Com munist world and the West...
...They are tired, and vaguely yearn for neutrality...
...Yet Aron's belief in the unlikelihood of a major war with the Soviet Union did not lead him to take a sanguine view of Western Europe's future...
...Aron advocated courses in citizenship to focus on the citizen's duties, and to recall that ours is a citizens' society, and not simply a consumers' society...
...Finding the proper balance between advocacy and "ivory towerism" is clearly a difficult task...
...It was precisely Aron's insistence on the need for dispassionate analysis that led French commentators to refer, usually pejoratively, to his "icy intelligence...
...Yet Aron did nc believe that war with the Soviet Unio was inevitable...
...He evidently saw his role as similar to that of a navigator...
...His influence, though not always apparent, was profound...
...When he was only 25 years old, Aron assigned himself the task of becoming a "committed observer" of history...
...Yet Aron was neither a historical determinist nor a Spenglerian pessimist...
...Needless to say, Aron succeeds in parrying these attacks quite nicely, but they do provide an element of drama, and even occasional flashes of comic relief, to an otherwise staid political dialogue...
...If history continues "as usual"-if it remains an arena of harsh, unrelenting competition-then it is not at all certain, in Aron's view, that peace-loving, unheroic Europe can maintain its independence over the long run...
...Such contact, it was feared, might well tempt the analysts into becoming servants of power, rather than truth...
...We know that in March of 1936 the course of history could have been changed...
...Rather, he continued to subscribe to the formula that he firs ? coined in 1948: "Peace is impossible war is improbable...
...Foremost among these dangers, to Aron, is civil war...
...And it was Aron's refusal to tailor the analysis to the needs of the Elyse'e that led President Pompidou to remark, "One can never count on Raymond Aron...
...or, alternately, they attempt to demonstrate that Aron suffered from a lack of genuine commitment, that he was a hopeless bourgeois at heart...
...His main duty is seeing to it that the flame of pure intentions is not squelched, that social injustice does not go unopposed...
...I have done that all my life...
...They would like to have American protection, on the one hand, and good relations with the Soviet Union, on the other...
...It thinks of itself as the wave of the future and sees no purpose in rushing into dangerous military adventures...
...No doubt Aron would have warmly applauded Sidney Hook's proposal, made in the course of his 1984 Jefferson Lecture, to establish a domestic National Endowment for Democracy, in order to "develop programs to study the basic elements of a free society" for every educational level...
...For Aron, as for Weber, such an approach may well suit saints and prophets, but it cannot serve politicians...
...When Aron's interviewers take him to task for the lack of moral passion in Le Tragedie Algerienne, his reply is characteristic: "As far as moral positions are concerned, I left that mission to the self-righteous moralists, because, once and for all, let me make it clear that I am not one of them-W/e schbne Seele,' as Hegel calls them...
...They indeed have opinions on what should be done to fight inflation, or on the subject of German rearmament, but those are essentially opinions based on imperatives or assumptions, not on an analysis of the situation...
...As a result, Aron assigned himself a "modest mission": "I reacted to events, partly with my viewpoints, that were always categorical, and, intellectually, with the desire to make those who* shared my convictions understand that the others, those on the other side of the controversy, were not necessarily traitors...
...As chief editorial writer at Le Figaro from 1947 to 1977, Aron was a kind of ex officio "counselor to princes...
...I threats facing France and the West, h identified the Soviet Union as tha - primary danger...
...The Committed Observer is the record of a series of interviews conducted on French television in 1980 between Aron and two rather leftish, but nonetheless intelligent young men...
...Civic morality," he declared, "puts the survival, the security of the community, above all else...
...That is a date, a fundamental one, when lucidity and a bit of courage would have sufficed to alter the future...
...To that end, he studied economics, sociology, international relations, military affairs, and philosophy...
...The problem with this posture, however, is that politics in general, and foreign policy in particular, "is a game for thieves and gangsters...
...That is part of my philosophy of history...
...Lucidity and courage, however, are virtues which must be deliberately nurtured by society if they are to make a difference at the decisive moment...
...He sought to combine the "dual role of actor and spectator...
...The Christian does rightly and leaves the results to the Lord," is the maxim of one who believes in an "ethic of ultimate ends...
...Europeans have fought too many wars...
...For this reason, Aron called for the rebirth of civic morality throughout the West...
...In 1957, it was again a fear of civil war in France that prompted Aron to take a public stand in favor of an independent Algeria...
...For thirty years, Raymond Aron confronted this problem on a daily basis...
...Only when discussing the Holocaust does the philosopher occasionally stammer...
...Because of his fear of civil war, Aron did not favor French intervention in 1936 on behalf of the Spanish democratic republic...
...Through his editorials and his more scholarly writings, Aron realized his youthful ambition...
...I cannot imagine anyone reading these discussions and not being deeply impressed with the sparkling lucidity of Aron's mind, and the extraordinary range and depth of his knowledge...
...I lived with a single obsession: to avoid civil war...
...During the 1930s, at a time when France existed, in Aron's words, "only in the hatred of the French for each other...
...THE COMMITTED OBSERVER Conversations with Jean Louis Missika and Dominique Walton Raymond Aron/Regnery Gateway/$17.00 . Joseph Shattan I am told that during the 1930s and '60s, analysts of the CIA were strongly discouraged from meeting with Washington policymakers...
...They try to show that Aron's commitment was not, as he himself maintained, to truth and liberty, but rather to the status quo and the right...
...The book he published on this subject, Le Tragedie Algerienne, had a great impact, in part because it was not a moral tract in favor of decolonization, but rather a political analysis of the options available and their likely consequences...
...Aron traced both the impossibilit of peace, and the unlikelihood of wai to the ideological character of th Soviet state: "I continue to believe tha as long as the Soviet Union thinks a it does, as long as it is governed by mei who are prisoners of the same ideolog...
...For Aron, the possibility of a gradual Sovietization of Western Europe was frighteningly real...
...Perhaps what comes across most clearly in the course of these interviews-aside from Aron's judgments on specific issues-is the nature of his approach to political questions in general...
...Unlike the overwhelming majority of such counselors, however, Aron felt that he owed the rulers neither blind loyalty nor unyielding hostility-only the benefit of his independent judgment and political acumen...
...Just as a ship's pilot must know the techniques of navigation in order to steer his ship in the right direction, so Aron determined to master the various intellectual disciplines bearing on international affairs in order to help guide the ship of state...
...Politics as a vocation'-to borrow the title of one of Max Weber's greatest essays-demands an "ethic of responsibility," a concern with the consequences of one's actions, insofar as these can be foreseen...
...When Aron turned to the extern...
...In going over the record of Aron's political life, his interlocutors follow two main lines of attack...
...He believed that history's outcome is not...
...In March 1936, for example, when Hitler ordered the Bundeswehr into the Rhineland in violation, of the Locarno-' Treaty, decisive French action could have stopped him...
...If thinking politically requires an awareness of the consequences of one's actions, it also demands a recognition of the fragility of the political community, and an alertness to the dangers facing it both from within and without...
...But on October 18, 1983, Raymond Aron died in Paris, at the age of 78...
...Like his great mentor, Max Weber, Aron distinguished between an "ethic of responsibility" and an "ethic of ultimate ends...
...this con frontation will not necessarily take the form of a war in the traditional sense of the term because of the existence of nuclear weapons, and because the Soviet Union is not Nazi Germany Communism is an important historical movement...
...At the time of his death he was, quite simply, Europe's foremost political intellectual.ost political intellectual...
...This is not a very heroic posture...

Vol. 18 • February 1985 • No. 2


 
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