Europe's Eggheads

Jr, Arthur Schlesinger

Europe's Eggheads The Opium of the Intellectuals, by Raymond Aron. Doubleday. 324 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. There is no one precisely like Raymond Aron in the United States....

...Aron detests what he calls "the idolization of history" of which Marxism is only the extreme form— "the illusion of the orientation of history in a constant direction, of evolution towards a state of affairs in harmony with an ideal...
...But Aron rightly sees history as far more contingent and indeterminate...
...Aron's regular commentary on current affairs in the Paris daily newspaper Figaro has those qualities of lucidity and penetration which have revived so brilliantly in Lippmann in recent years...
...but he is a conservative who is Keynesian in his economics and who believes that France must face up to the inevitability of Algerian independence...
...He demonstrates their philosophical and logical bankruptcy, but only hints at the sociological and psychological factors predisposing them to a belief in the nonsense they utter...
...Its immediate polemical purpose prevents the author from doing full justice to his subject...
...But it has been a long time since any but the most bemused American intellectuals have accepted these myths...
...Though he makes occasional reference to the role of intellectuals in other countries, Aron is primarily concerned with two important groups of pro-Communist French intellectuals —Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and their existentialist followers...
...In addition, Aron lectures on sociology to his students at the Sorbonne and writes weighty books on German sociology and on the philosophy of history...
...Like The Century of Total War a few years back, The Opium of the Intellectuals is an extended application of his sociological-historical method to the analysis of current affairs...
...the watchword 'Keep Left' means progress, via nationalization and controls, towards eventual equality of incomes...
...He is evidently a man of the right only in the sense that he stands for realism in politics as against the sentimental rationalism of the French left...
...What emerges most powerfully from this work is the argument which Sir Isaiah Berlin and Dr...
...One wishes, for example, that Aron had spent less time in exposing and more in explaining the apparent imbecility of the French intelligentsia...
...Pieter Geyl have made in other contexts—the argument against historical determinism...
...a false philosophy of history breeds only fanaticism...
...Still, the work remains essentially a document in an internal European, or perhaps even French, quarrel...
...and the group of progressive Catholics who write for Esprit...
...For some reason he is conventionally classified as a man of the right...
...so a good deal of Aron's closely-reasoned and somewhat abstract argument may seem to an American audience a trifle supererogatory...
...Aron, who knows America well, is wrong when he writes that Asian students take back home from the universities of Europe "and the United States" a watered-down Marxism...
...A true understanding of the past," he writes, "recalls us to the duty of tolerance...
...If you can imagine Walter Lippmann continuing to write his column while doubling as a professor at a leading university, you would have the same combination of skills...
...I hope that this work is but a preface to a more thorough, specific, and detached diagnosis of the role of the intellectual in modern society—a volume Raymond Aron would be admirably qualified to write...
...For the American reader, however, this present work is likely to be less rewarding than Aron's earlier writings...
...If one believes that history is moving irresistibly in a unique direction, then one has little patience or mercy for those who refuse to abide by this self-evident truth...
...I don't know where the Asian student could go to find such doctrines taught in an American university—a fact which Aron, indeed, would seem ready to recognize in other passages...
...He has little trouble in demonstrating the limitless credulity these intellectuals have shown in succumbing to the Communist myths— the myths of the left, of the proletariat and of the revolution...

Vol. 22 • February 1958 • No. 2


 
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