Liberalism at Its Best
KRNJEVIC-MISKOVIC, DAMJAN DE
Liberalism at Its Best An anthology from the works of Raymond Aron. BY DAMJAN DE KRNJEVIC-MISKOVIC Raymond Aron was at once journalist, sociologist, man of letters, and political thinker. Born in...
...Europe's greatness, Aron concludes, can no longer be expressed through power but through "assisting other peoples to cure themselves of the childhood illnesses of modernity...
...Among his books translated into English are The Century of Total War, Democracy and Totalitarianism, In Defense of Political Reason, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, Opium of the Intellectuals, and War and Industrial Society...
...An excellent new anthology of Raymond Aron has recently appeared...
...For Aron, the only way to maintain and strengthen the bond between citizens and statesmen is to understand that the populace, when given the means with which to make an informed choice, can usually recognize and appreciate the prudence of responsible political men...
...Aron left ample room for political responsibility, philosophic inquiry, and free will...
...He never ceased to ask that crucial question, "What would I do in the statesman's place...
...Damjan de Krnjevic-Miskovic is assistant managing editor of the National Interest...
...During the Second World War, Aron was editor of the London-based French resistance newspaper, La France libre...
...This does not mean the triumph of homogeneity, but rather the culmination in the achievement of Europe's philosophic rationalism...
...Aron understood that for reason to remain reasonable it must limit itself and its influence on political life...
...Though he noted the imperfections of the American regime, Aron greatly admired America's political vigor and its repeated willingness to fight to preserve Western civilization...
...Aron remains a thinker for our time...
...As such, Aron writes, we are at the dawn of the "universal era...
...His academic career took him from the Institut D'E-tudes politiques de Paris to the College de France via the Sorbonne and the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes...
...Moderate nationalism or patriotism, not rooted in the soil but rather in what has become of the soil, is the general theme of the collection's final essay...
...In the service of modern political theory, Aron aimed to restore prudence and thus responsibility to the center of politics—thereby rejecting what he called the "secular religions" of the age of ideology, whose misguided adherents held that scientific or material progress was necessarily accompanied with revolutionary politics and moral progress...
...Therein, Aron lays forth the thesis that the consequence of a nation's entrance into the community of civilization is membership in what can be termed only now, for the first time in human history, "human society...
...Compared with such thinkers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Alexandre Kojeve, Aron saw further and deeper into the nature of the totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century—because he struggled to understand the totalitarian experiment as the totalitarians themselves understood it...
...Judt correctly points out that Aron wrote in 1947 that peace might be impossible, but war was improbable, and that Aron tragically "held out no great hope for the radical transformation of the human condition...
...On occasion, the Republic's ablest men fail to resist the temptation to push aside the moderating insubordination of the ways of the world, ignoring the words of past men of prudence who would caution them that the future is uncertain, that their friends are imperfect, and that their cause is never truly just...
...Every citizen is obliged to die for his country, no one is obliged to lie for it...
...Aron was not a man of the left or the right, but of the prudently grounded middle...
...He was never an unconditional supporter of Gaullist grandeur, and he was certainly not a proponent of Mitterrand's disastrous experiments with socialism...
...While being a critic of what he termed the "idolatry of history," Aron nevertheless took a long and serious look at the effects of history on human nature...
...The keys to proper democratic citizenship are numerous and delicate, and few better guides to their use exist than the Frenchman Raymond Aron...
...Born in 1905, he never entered French politics directly, but before his death in 1983 he had written more than forty books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of newspaper columns...
...Aron was a man of immense learning and practical judgment, profound intellectual honesty and influence...
...In 1930, when he was twenty-five, Aron resolved to "comprehend or understand my epoch as honestly as possible...
...As America prepares once more to draw its sword in the Middle East, let words Aron spoke in 1960 serve as the measure of prudent political action: "Never have men had so many reasons to cease killing one another...
...In the context of the Arab revolt against French rule in Algeria in the late 1950s, for instance, Aron wrote, "It is a denial of the experience of our century to suppose that men will sacrifice their passions to their interests...
...The constant theme in his writing is the struggle between the philosopher and the citizen, between wisdom and moderation...
...Aron used to quote an aphorism by Montesquieu: "To be truthful above all, even about one's country...
...Of course, Aron was primarily a patriot of France, but he was not blind to French defects...
...I do not conclude that the age of universal history will be peaceful...
...But realism is not necessarily tragic simply because it holds that human life cannot be radically transformed through human manipulation...
...He said the events of 1968 were little more than France's "psychodrama...
...Never have they had so many reasons to feel they are joined together in one great enterprise...
...This did not mean that, in his words, "the traditional aspects of history—the rise and fall of empires, rivalry between regimes, and the beneficial exploits of great men" were not "durable," but only that it was impossible fully to understand human nature and thus politics unless one understood that human nature can manifest itself differently over time...
...As Aron says in an earlier essay in the collection, our world is characterized by a heterogeneity of "states that are now for the first time living together...
...Throughout his life, Aron referred to himself above all as a spectateur engage: a committed observer, and two years before his death he called his work "an attempt to understand all the sectors of modern society: economics, social relationships, class relationships, political systems, relations among nations, and ideological arguments...
...We know that man is a reasonable being...
...He never allowed his readers to forget that we live always and thus must act in the present, not in the future perfect...
...The Dawn of Universal History presents Aron's thoughts on the rise of nationalism in Europe through the two world wars, the decline of the European nation-states and the rise of the European project, the related disintegration of the continent's colonial empires, the rise of the postwar bipolar system, and the appeal of nihilistic totalitarianism to the rudderless citizens of the Western democracies...
...But he knew that it would not be easy and that prudent political action might require a return to force...
...to detach myself from the actual without however relegating to myself the role of observer...
...Only then can there be decent and responsible politics...
...Aron's writings are firmly rooted in the history of political philosophy, especially in Aristotle, Montesquieu, and Tocqueville...
...He was a committed Atlanticist who was more concerned with America's decline than its inclinations to empire...
...The American edition of The Dawn of Universal History omits a set of essays included in the French edition entitled "French Problems...
...Aron's continuing relevance is rooted not so much in what he had to say about the events of the twentieth century (although he always wrote lucidly of those events, their causes and their potential consequences), but in how he went about his reasoning...
...In this lies the lesson of the twentieth century's tumults...
...Tony Judt, in his somewhat listless introduction to The Dawn of Universal History, notes that Aron "transcended his era and is of interest to today's reader . . . because of his distinctively tragic vision...
...He followed Tocqueville and Montesquieu in understanding that the unstoppable "process of modernity" was moving man toward greater equality and liberty, that commerce was supplementing glory and honor, and that the individual was becoming ever more supreme over the community...
...Ideology trumps reflected experience, to the detriment of the nation...
...But men...
...As he says in one essay, "American diplomacy succeeded in Europe not only because it contained communism but also because it fostered economic progress and human liberty...
...The halls of power and academe are ripe with idealism but are traversed by too few spokesmen for its rarest form, the "idealism of common sense," as Roger Kimball has called it...
Vol. 8 • December 2002 • No. 13
