Politics and History: Selected Essays
Aron, Raymond
Raymond Aron's approach to politics is consistently commonsensical. From early in his career he has warned of the dangers of political messianism and, unlike many of his contemporaries, he...
...That no past attempt to discover ultimate values, political or philosophical, has survived in the marketplace of ideas is the usual and obvious evidence for this position...
...El knows a whit about foreign policy, but both bring to it moral superiority and Wilsonian goody-goodyism...
...Rather, he subscribes to an "atheistic humanism" which considers moral values to be relative to history, because they change through time...
...The results of such myopia became most visible in the Vietnam war, which our analysts were winning on paper as fast as our country was losing in reality...
...All of these essays, spanning more than a dozen years of Aron's career, take their bearings in part from his opposition to Marxism...
...Actually one does not have to look back very far...
...as a committed actor in political life, he must solve it...
...Jimmy and J erry, both priding themselves on being "outsiders," "anti-pols," and masters of the 12-, 14-, and 16-hour day...
...In political life, where action is what ultimately matters, we need such answers...
...PoliticaUy this sort of reasoning is attractive...
...Basing his decisions on realistic choices and an existential moral commitment, he ends up with a perspective of moderate civility--the perspective, in Aristotle's sense of the word, of a "gentleman...
...Both flattering us with their preposterous love songs to the lowly Americano and promising glad, confident tomorrows...
...Raymond Aron's approach to politics is consistently commonsensical...
...Has there ever been another American pol quite like him...
...From early in his career he has warned of the dangers of political messianism and, unlike many of his contemporaries, he has understood the limits of what we can hope to achieve...
...As he puts it: "Man, as we know, is a rational being, but what about men...
...Jerry has asked if "the Chinese get philosophical in an eclectic way...
...servatism constantly fighting to return to the past...
...Aron's fundamental view, which he shares , with many thinkers of our times, is that there is no such thing as a fixed human "nature" or "essence...
...The chapter offers a clear explanation of the shortcomings in American strategic thinking...
...He perseveres in a constant "philosophical dialogue" which, while never certain in its results, is progressive because "day by day" it overcomes the more egregious mistakes and sophistries of our times...
...The Mullah Brown thinks of everything...
...He expresses no interest in religion, our traditional source for understanding these matters...
...Two presidential candidates: careening through America, camPaigning on the purity of their souls and the nitwit piety of their vision, filling the national agenda with issues that would make James Madison blush, and referring all questions to their weirdo staffs of young go-getters...
...Think of it...
...Neither i i ii ii i But on the different level to which this book as a whole makes claim--the "philosophy of history,'--Aron falls victim to his own:ability to give commonsensical answers...
...i i ii ii iii| ilooooolD OIIOQOIIDIII10011DODQOOOeI0000000QQOOg8 aOOIOOOOOIOOOODO D0000000000 D QQOOOQ Qe O 6QI 0901 DOQOQOI I OOQO The American Spectator May 1979...
...And what has either of them ever accomplished with a legislature...
...We cannot simply reason--or have revelations--to determine values in some kind of timelessly true fashion...
...Jimmy is for balanced budgets, and Jerry is too...
...I speak of the brightest young nuclear physicist ever to pull a teat in Plains, Georgia, the foreign policy wizard who has done so much to make hair stand on end in the foreign ministries of the world, the President of the United States of America...
...I urge him to strike out for it...
...By what criteria, then, can we make "good" or "bad" choices ? As a philosopher, Aron is naturally disturbed by this problem...
...Jimmy and Jerry--aside from superficial differences they are indistinguishable and what differences there are can be laid to their points of origin...
...But Aron also has a positive philosophy, and the purpose of this collection of essays is to give his English-speaking audience a coherent introduction to it...
...I say get on with the show...
...Accordingly, Aron offers the reader a definite political attitude which he labels "progressivism...
...Aron, for all his claims to have studied the limits of human knowledge, seems not to realize that this problem even exists...
...The editor of this book calls this vision "wisdom" and describes it as "the only path to whatever secular truth is humanly accessible...
...on the other, he has scant sympathy for a con...
...Jimmy has proudly announced that one of his most exacting tasks upon entering the White House was learning the locations of all the foreign countries and their capitals...
...By the time he is out of office a good number of those foreign countries and their capitals will have disappeared...
...Both heaving great boluses of moral flapdoodle at each other...
...Instead he prefers moderate V/alter Lammi is assistant editor of the Public Interest...
...Where he needs to question the assumptions of "atheistic humanism" he gives us instead a restatement--which could have been paraphrased from Part VI of Descartes' Discourse on Method (written in 1636)--of its most extravagantly hopeful vision: Mankind may eventually be united, Aron suggests reassuringly, on the strength of our ultimate common project, the" mastery of nature...
...Jimmy is against bureaucracy and inefficiency, and so is Jerry...
...in the end we are all dead anyway...
...After allowing his moral choices to be circumscribed by historical context, he assures us that he escapes what he calls "vulgar relativism" because he continues in his effort to understand the world...
...His incoherence about the basis of that moral commitment, however, is unenlightening...
...But if we are trying genuinely to understand the meaning of politics and history, the solutions arrive, if at all, with great difficulty...
...One essay in the book, "The Evolution of Modern Strategic Thought (1945-1968)," is concerned with concrete political analysis and on this level Aron is masterful...
...Yet apart from passing appeals to the authority of Kant and Max Weber, Aron's solution only amounts to metaphysical, or at any rate rhetorical, sleight of hand...
...For me, the path remains hidden...
...BOOK REVIEW Polities and History : SeleCted Essays Raymond Aron / Free Press / $15.95 Walter Lammi change, guided by reason and a strong sense of realism...
...Both are loners, both have made a virtue of vagueness, andboth stand for the environment, the consumer, the little guy...
...Accordingly, he has inveighed for years against the grand historical visions of Marxism...
...The most important matters to us are not intelligible per se...
...Aron points out that, in an effort at "scientific" forecasting, we have tended to think in terms of quantifiable factors at the expense of wider theoretical and historical considerations...
...Now Jerry wants Jimmy's job...
...Consider Jimmy's fabled moralism, his personal spirituality, his claims to braininess...
...Avoiding final answers, Aron avoids fanaticism...
...Jerry is for the poor and the minorities, and so is Jimmy...
...On the one hand, the Aronian progressivist is wary of political idealism ~ la Marxism...
...He is aware that if he does not do so, his commitment has no ultimate basis...
...El Copyright 9 1979 R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) During his tenure in Sacramento there have been prayer breakfasts featuring meditations on "peyote, snakes, and pregnant goats...
Vol. 12 • May 1979 • No. 5
