Raymond Aron And Liberal Thought In The Twentieth Century [1st Edition] 1108484441, 9781108484442, 110873586X, 9781108735865

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Intellectual politics and the crisis of democracy
2. History and politics
3. Anti-totalitarianism
4. The end of ideology
5. Raymond Aron and the French liberal tradition
6. Raymond Aron and the liberal moment in late twentieth-century French thought
Conclusion
Select bibliography
Index.

Citation preview

RAYMOND ARON AND LIBERAL THOUGHT IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Raymond Aron is widely regarded as the most important figure in the history of twentieth-century French liberalism. Yet his status within the history of liberal thought has been more often proclaimed than explained. Though he is frequently lauded as the inheritor of France’s liberal tradition, Aron’s formative influences were mostly non-French and often radically anti-liberal thinkers. This book explains how, why, and with what consequences he belatedly defined and aligned himself with a French liberal tradition. It also situates Aron within the larger histories of Cold War liberalism and decolonisation, reevaluating his contribution to debates over totalitarianism, the end of ideology, and the Algerian War. By exposing the enduring importance of Aron’s student political engagements for the development of his thought, Iain Stewart challenges the prevailing view of Aron’s early intellectual trajectory as a journey from naïve socialist idealism to mature liberal realism, offering a new critical perspective on one of the twentieth century’s most influential intellectuals.   is Lecturer in Modern European History at University College London and a former fellow of the Institut d’études avancées de Paris. He is coeditor of In Search of the Liberal Moment: Democracy, Anti-totalitarianism and Intellectual Politics in France since  () with Stephen W. Sawyer.

   Edited by David Armitage, Richard Bourke, Jennifer Pitts and John Robertson

The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that were generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the contemporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences, it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their concrete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of philosophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature may be seen to dissolve. The series is published with the support of the Exxon Foundation. A list of books in the series can be found at the end of the volume.

RAYMOND ARON AND LIBERAL THOUGHT IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY IAIN STEWART University College London

University Printing House, Cambridge  , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York,  , USA  Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India  Anson Road, #–/, Singapore  Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Iain Stewart  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published  Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.  ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For my mother, Carol, with love

Contents

Acknowledgements A Note on Translations and References



Introduction 

Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy Philosophy and Politics in the Late Third Republic Aron’s Early Political Development Critiquing the Intellectual Politics of the s Conclusion



       



Antitotalitarianism Élie Halévy and the Origins of Aron’s Theory of Totalitarianism Democratic States and Totalitarian States Secular Religion Emergence of a Cold Warrior The Limitations of Antitotalitarianism Conclusion







History and Politics Dilthey, Heidegger, and the Phenomenology of Self-Knowledge Towards an Historical Sociology Politics and the Historical Condition Conclusion



page ix xiii

     



The End of Ideology Aron at the Margins of Neo-socialism and Neo-liberalism Planning for Postwar Democratic Renewal The End of Ideology and the Congress for Cultural Freedom A Liberal Retreat from Empire? Political Theory at the End of Ideology Conclusion

vii

     

Contents

viii 



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition Deconstructing the ‘French School of Political Sociology’ The Effacement of Célestin Bouglé The Sociological Reception of Montesquieu from Comte to the Durkheimians Aron’s Interpretation of Montesquieu Aron’s Interpretation of Tocqueville Conclusion

Raymond Aron and the Liberal Moment in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought

Antitotalitarianism and the Return of ‘the Political’ Contrepoint, Commentaire, and Anti- Liberalism Anti- Liberal Revivalism in Comparative Perspective Conclusion

  

   

    

Conclusion



Select Bibliography Index

 

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been written without the support and encouragement of the many colleagues, mentors, friends, and family members that it is my pleasure to thank here. First among these is Stuart Jones, my former PhD dissertation supervisor at the University of Manchester. Although this monograph differs substantially from the dissertation on which it is based, it was Stuart who first suggested that I read Aron after I shared with him a few vague ideas concerning the postwar recovery of liberal political thought. His comments and suggestions not only helped me to develop and refine my own ideas but also opened up fruitful new avenues of research that I would not otherwise have pursued. At the University of Manchester Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Bertrand Taithe also gave invaluable support and feedback during the years of my PhD, and I would also like to thank Jeremy Jennings and Kevin Morgan for their comments on the completed dissertation. I have accumulated still more intellectual debts during the long process of turning the dissertation into a monograph. Emile Chabal invited me to contribute a chapter on the ‘French liberal revival’ to his book France since the s. His close reading and comments on that work were extraordinarily valuable not only for that chapter, which is partially reproduced here, but also for my thinking on the subject of twentieth-century French liberalism more broadly. Emile was also kind enough to participate in a journée d’études on ‘Rethinking the French liberal renaissance’ that I coorganised with Stephen W. Sawyer and Anna-Louise Milne at the University of London Institute in Paris in . I would like to thank Gwendal Châton, Serge Audier, Michael Behrent, Daniel SteinmetzJenkins, Jeremy Jennings, Noah Rosenblum, Jean-Fabien Spitz, and Michael Scott Christofferson for taking part in this event, which was a formative experience in terms of my thinking about the wider liberal

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Acknowledgements

moment in late twentieth-century French thought. Collaborating with Steve Sawyer on this project and the book that resulted from it, In Search of the Liberal Moment, has been extremely valuable, and if I have anything interesting to say about late twentieth-century French liberalism beyond Raymond Aron then Steve deserves part of the credit for this. Thanks also to Jacob Hamburger for arranging a review forum on this book in Politics, Religion & Ideology, and to Helena Rosenblatt, James Chappel, Hugo Drochon, and Julian Bourg for taking part – their insightful comments have informed the final chapter and conclusion of this monograph. I am equally grateful to Colin Gordon, Michelle-Irène Brudny, Céline Spector, and Grey Anderson for comments on some of the chapters. I of course remain solely responsible for any factual or interpretative errors the book may contain. Since starting work on this project I have been fortunate enough to present my work at various conferences, seminars, and workshops, and the feedback that I have received at these events has contributed significantly to the development of my ideas. I would like to thank Greg Conti for inviting me to join him on a panel on French liberalism with William Selinger and Lisa Disch at the  American Political Science Association Conference in Philadelphia. I am also grateful to Samuel Moyn for his comment on my paper at that event and for his advice and support more generally. In  I presented a paper on the origins of the ‘end of ideology’ at the Cambridge Centre for Political Thought and am grateful to Or Rosenboim and Waseem Yaqoob for the invitation and to Patrick Baert for his comment on my paper. I would also like to thank Iain McDaniel for the opportunity to participate in a symposium on the works of Tony Judt at the University of Sussex in . In  I presented two papers on this project at the Institute of Historical Research and am grateful to Joanne Paul and Alison Carrol for these opportunities. I completed the manuscript during a fellowship at the Institut d’études avancées de Paris and gained much from discussing the project with colleagues there, including Kei Hiruta, who gave some particularly valuable reading suggestions and comments. I am also grateful to Tommaso Milani for his advice in relation to Hendrik de Man. I began working on this book during a lectureship in Modern European History at Queen Mary University of London between  and . Queen Mary’s School of History provided the perfect institutional base from which to carry out this task and I am particularly grateful to Miri Rubin, Colin Jones, Julian Jackson, Richard Bourke, and Georgios

Acknowledgements

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Varouxakis for their support and advice. I have been equally fortunate in joining the Department of History at University College London in  and would particularly like to thank Margot Finn for her help with my fellowship application to the Institut d’études avancées de Paris. Earlier financial assistance from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Royal Historical Society, Society for the Study of French History, and Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France supported the researching and writing of this book. I would also like to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the final manuscript, Tricia Lawrence for copyediting, and Liz Friend-Smith, Lisa Carter, Atifa Jiwa, and Vinithan Sedumadhaven for their work on the publication. I am especially grateful to Dominique Schnapper for her permission to consult Raymond Aron’s unpublished papers and to the archivists at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Archives nationales in Paris. Some parts of this monograph originate from chapters and articles first published elsewhere and I am grateful to the publishers for their permission to include revised and expanded versions of them here. Chapter  more or less reproduces a section in my article ‘From Pétain to Pinochet: Raymond Aron, Henry Kissinger, and the problem of political realism’, The Tocqueville Review / La revue Tocqueville, : (), –. The discussion of Heidegger in Chapter  originates from ‘Plurality and universality in the political thought of Raymond Aron’ in Joanne Paul et al. (eds.), Governing Diversities: Democracy, Diversity and Human Nature (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, ). A shorter version of Chapter ’s discussion of Aron in relation to early neo-liberalism and neo-socialism was included in ‘The origins of the “end of ideology”: Raymond Aron and Industrial Civilisation’ in José Colen and Elisabeth Dutartre-Michaut (eds.), A Companion to Raymond Aron (London: Palgrave, ). Finally, Chapter  partially reproduces ‘France’s anti- liberal revival’ in Emile Chabal (ed.), France since the s: History, Politics and Memory in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Bloomsbury Academic, ). For all the many intellectual and institutional debts that I have accumulated in the process of researching and writing this book, I am most profoundly indebted to my family for their love and support. It was the example of my inspirational mother, Carol Crompton, that first encouraged my intellectual curiosity and led me to pursue a scholarly vocation. I am very grateful for the help that she, my father Roger Stewart, and my stepfather Neil Crompton have given me over the years that I have worked on this project. Carlie and Graham Campbell have been extraordinarily

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Acknowledgements

supportive, the best in-laws that anyone could hope for. Above all I would like to thank my wife Emily Campbell for everything she has given me since we met fifteen years ago, including most recently the birth of our daughter Claudia. This book has taken a long time to complete, but it could not have been finished at all without Emily’s patience, generosity, and companionship.

A Note on Translations and References

All translations from French are my own unless stated otherwise. Although footnotes generally refer to the original French publications, in the main body of the text I have used the titles of published translations where these exist. I have made an exception to this rule in instances where the title of the published translation significantly changes the meaning of the original. For example, I refer to Hendrik de Man’s book Au-delà du Marxisme as Beyond Marxism instead of using the published English translation, which is The Psychology of Socialism. Where no published English translation exists, I have left titles in French in the main body of the text when I have judged that the meaning will be clear enough to non-French speaking readers without the need for a translation. Otherwise I have provided a translation in brackets after the first mention of the relevant text in each chapter. Here I have translated titles as literally as possible (so Le grand schisme is The Great Schism) except where exact literal translation obscures meaning (so Les Français devant la Constitution becomes The French People and the Constitutional Referendum). Where years of publication are given in the main text, these always refer to the original French and I have retained the French names of organisations, journals, and newspapers. For primary sources, dates of original publication are given in square brackets where first editions have not been used. French conventions of capitalisation have been applied when referencing French sources and English conventions have been applied in references to English language sources. In each chapter initial references to works by Raymond Aron give the surname, full title, year, and place of publication. All subsequent references to these works in each chapter omit Aron’s name and give an abbreviated version of the title.

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Introduction

On  October  the French philosopher, sociologist, and political commentator Raymond Aron died of a heart attack as he was leaving a Parisian courthouse. Among the many tributes to appear in the next day’s newspapers, one stood out. News of the death, accompanied by a large photograph of Aron, dominated the front page of the left-wing daily Libération. ‘France’, the headline announced, ‘perd son prof ’. With its first seven pages entirely devoted to Aron, Libération’s coverage was among the most extensive to appear in the French press. What made this remarkable was that the paper had been founded ten years earlier by a group of Maoists whose formative political experience had been the events of May– June . Back then, when Aron was the bête noir of the student movement, he had been proclaimed unworthy of the title of professor by the most famous of Libération’s founding editors. The paper’s headline on the occasion of Aron’s death has thus been interpreted as a sign of its recent conversion from revolutionary leftism to antitotalitarian liberalism. In fact, the intended irony of this headline lay elsewhere. According to Libération’s editor, Serge July, Aron had indeed been ‘la premier prof de France’, but only in the sense of having been ‘the educator of the ruling classes’. Yet while seeking to maintain a certain ironic distance from the more celebratory coverage of Aron’s life elsewhere in the press, Libération acknowledged that Aron had indeed undergone something of a reputational transformation as part of a wider renewal of liberal thought then 

 



‘La France perd son prof’, Libération,  October . A further six pages were given over to discussing Aron’s life and legacy inside the paper. The headline translates roughly as ‘France loses its teacher’. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Les bastilles de Raymond Aron’ in Sartre, Situations VIII: Autour de  (Paris, ), –. The article originally appeared in Le Nouvel observateur on  June . Jacqueline Rémy, Nous sommes irrésistibles: (auto)critique d’une génération abusive (Paris, ), –; Guy Hocquenghem, Lettre ouverte à ceux qui sont passes du col Mao au Rotary (Paris, ), –. Serge July, ‘Le premier prof de France’, Libération,  October .





Introduction

underway in France. Indeed, many commentators at the time and ever since have seen the widespread admiration of Aron at the end of his life as emblematic of an underlying transformation in France’s political culture. This is because the canonisation of Raymond Aron occurred during an ideological sea-change in Parisian intellectual life that has come to be known as an ‘antitotalitarian moment’ or ‘French liberal revival’. Scholarship on this subject has oscillated between accounts of intellectual betrayal and redemption. For authors such as Perry Anderson, Daniel Lindenberg, and Kristin Ross, this period marks Paris’s transition from a beacon of revolutionary intellectual politics to the ‘capital of European intellectual reaction’. Conversely, historians such as Mark Lilla and Tony Judt have welcomed the French intelligentsia’s supposed embrace of a new ethic of responsibility in these years. This evaluative divide is bridged, however, by an overarching narrative consensus. For historians on both sides of this debate, the s witnessed a collapse in the intellectual credibility of revolutionary politics inspired by Marxist theory and communist practice with the result that, by the middle of the s, liberalism had displaced Marxism as the unsurpassable horizon of most French political and economic thought. Since the mid-s, a new generation of intellectual historians has begun to adopt a more nuanced, less obviously partisan approach to this period, but this has had only a limited impact on scholarship about Aron, which, aside from a few notable exceptions, continues to exhibit a strong promotional and sometimes celebratory  











Robert Maggiori, ‘Raymond Aron: lucide mais hors-jeu’, Libération,  October . Philippe Raynaud, ‘La mort de Raymond Aron’, Esprit,  (December ), –; George Ross, ‘Where have all the Sartres gone? The French intelligentsia born again’ in James F. Hollifield and George Ross (eds.), Searching for a New France (London, ), –, ; Emile Chabal, A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge, ), –. Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the s (New York, ); Sudhir Hazareesingh, How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People (London, ), –; Chabal, A Divided Republic, –; Iain Stewart, ‘France’s anti- liberal revival’ in Emile Chabal (ed.), France Since the s: History, Politics and Memory in an Age of Uncertainty (London, ), –. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London, ), ; Daniel Lindenberg, Le rappel à l’ordre: enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires (Paris, ); Kristin Ross, May ’ and its Afterlives (Chicago, ). Mark Lilla, ‘The other velvet revolution: continental liberalism and its discontents’, Daedalus,  (Spring ),–; Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago, ), . On this ‘new historiographical and generational sensibility’ see Julian Bourg, ‘Introduction’ in Julian Bourg (ed.), After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France (Oxford, ), –, . See e.g. Serge Audier, Raymond Aron: la démocratie conflictuelle (Paris, ); Gwendal Châton, Introduction à Raymond Aron (Paris, ); Christian Malis, Raymond Aron et le débat stratégique français, – (Paris, ). Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, ‘Why did Raymond Aron write that

Introduction



tendency, especially where his liberalism is concerned. A recent edited volume on Aron, which opens with the claim that he is ‘the greatest figure in French liberalism of the twentieth century’ is a case in point. From the perspective of most of this scholarship, France’s late twentieth-century antitotalitarian and liberal turns were to be welcomed as Aron’s vindication against his irresponsible intellectual peers or even celebrated as the crowning achievement of his own life’s work. To be sure, there is substantial evidence to suggest that Aron played an important role in shaping the ideological reorientation of French intellectual life in these years. And the extent of this transformation should not be understated, for there was more to France’s antitotalitarian turn than its anti-communism. During the mid-to-late s, many French intellectuals came to see totalitarianism not as something opposite and external to democracy but rather as a permanent possibility within the project of democratic modernity itself. Late twentieth-century French reflection on the problem of totalitarianism was thus not just a rhetorical strategy aimed at discrediting an apparently resurgent communist party; much of it represented a serious attempt to rethink the theory and practice of modern democracy. Consequently the antitotalitarian moment was accompanied by a rediscovery of ‘the political’ (le politique) across much of the humanities and social sciences, a significant shift given the prior hegemony of various forms and combinations of Marxism and structuralism within the French academy. And it was partly because of this antitotalitarian preoccupation with the political that the s and s witnessed a significant broadening of interest in France’s nineteenth-century liberal tradition of political thought. Whether the intellectual reorientation of











Carl Schmitt was not a Nazi? An alternative genealogy of French liberalism’, Modern Intellectual History,  (November ), –. Nicolas Baverez, ‘Life and works: Raymond Aron, philosopher and freedom fighter’ in José Colen and Élisabeth Dutartre-Michaut (eds.), The Companion to Raymond Aron (New York, ), –, . Italics in original. Judt, Burden of Responsibility, ; Brian C. Anderson, ‘The Aronian Renewal’, First Things,  (March ), –; Daniel J. Mahoney, The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron: A Critical Introduction (Lanham, ), –. This more positive reading of left-wing French antitotalitarianism is offered in e.g. Dick Howard, The Specter of Democracy (New York, ), –, –. For an account that focuses on antitotalitarianism as a response to the Common Programme see Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left. For an account of how ‘the political’ has been used in postwar French intellectual history see Samuel Moyn, ‘Concepts of the political in twentieth-century European thought’ in Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (Oxford, ), –. Stephen W. Sawyer and Iain Stewart, ‘Introduction: new perspectives on France’s liberal moment’ in Stephen W. Sawyer and Iain Stewart (eds.), In Search of the Liberal Moment: Democracy, Antitotalitarianism and Intellectual Politics in France since  (New York, ), –.



Introduction

these decades is viewed as an antitotalitarian moment, a ‘French liberal revival’, or a return of ‘the political’, its history cannot be written without reference to Aron, whose pioneering work on these themes first posed many of the questions that preoccupied French intellectuals in this period, even if they did not always agree with Aron’s answers. That Raymond Aron was a major point of reference within France’s late twentieth-century liberal and antitotalitarian turns is hardly surprising considering that he had been among the earliest European theorists of totalitarianism in the s and France’s preeminent anti-communist intellectual since the late s. As such, he made a significant contribution to the formulation of what historians have since begun to call ‘Cold War liberalism’ prior to becoming a totemic figure in France’s late twentieth–century antitotalitarian turn. Aron is also widely recognised for his role in helping to bring about a broadening of interest in France’s liberal tradition of political thought among French intellectuals in the s and s. For Tony Judt, it is not Aron’s antitotalitarianism but ‘this inheritance from an earlier, lost tradition of French political reasoning’ that ‘distinguishes Aron and establishes his claim upon the attention of posterity’. Aron had begun tentatively to engage with the works of authors like Ernest Renan, Hippolyte Taine, and Benjamin Constant during the Second World War; however, it was only in the mid-s that he began to promote French liberalism more systematically. Because of these efforts, Aron has often been credited with reintroducing the political thought of Alexis de Tocqueville to France, thereby helping to inspire a wider ‘liberal revival’ during the s and s. Indeed, so closely did Aron come to be associated with this expansion of interest in nineteenth-century French liberalism that much of the most influential work in this area was carried out under the auspices of a research centre named after him, the Institut Raymond Aron. It is for these reasons that a recent history of late twentieth-century French political and intellectual life has claimed that ‘French liberalism of the s was built in [Aron’s] shadow.’ Yet it is for the same reasons that Aron’s importance within the intellectual history of liberalism has often been taken for granted. Remarkably, no historical monograph has ever been published  



Judt, Burden of Responsibility, . Among many possible examples, see, e.g., François Furet, ‘Aron, ré-introducteur de Tocqueville’ in Jean-Claude Chamboredon (ed.), Raymond Aron, la philosophie de l’histoire et les sciences sociales (Paris, ), –; Marc Viellard, Contre Tocqueville (Pantin, ), –. Chabal, A Divided Republic, . An account of the Institut Raymond Aron may be found on pages – of the same book, but see also Christophe Prochasson, François Furet. Les chemins de la mélancholie (Paris, ), –.

Introduction



on this topic. It is almost as if Aron’s significance in the history of liberal thought were so obvious as to require no explanation. Yet Raymond Aron’s relationship with liberalism is not as straightforward as it seems. As Pierre Manent has recently observed, ‘Aron’s career cannot be defined by an intention to apply a liberal doctrine’ and ‘liberalism as such, liberalism as a doctrine or even a programme, only rarely provided the theme of his thought.’ The difficulty of situating Aron within a typological definition of liberalism, such as the one offered by the political theorist Michael Freeden, reinforces this point. According to Freeden, [T]he vast majority of those claiming to be liberals may be identified and analysed on the basis of a common conceptual configuration. The core concepts they employ are liberty, individualism, progress, rationality, the general interest, sociability, and limited and responsible power . . . I know of no recent liberal tradition whose design does not display all those core concepts. Remove one and we are looking at a borderline case. Remove two and it is no longer liberalism.

Judged by this standard, Aron’s status as ‘the greatest figure in French liberalism of the twentieth century’ appears much less obvious, since his belief in most of Freeden’s key tenets of liberalism was equivocal at best. His doctoral thesis, a work that Aron regarded as having established the basis upon which all his subsequent political thought rested, contained a far-reaching critique of the progressive rationalism of his seniors in the world of academic philosophy and sociology. He did not have a theory of the general interest, a concept that is of limited value from the perspective of Aron’s epistemology, and the concept of sociability is entirely absent from his work. Nor can Aron be described as an individualist in anything other than basic moral terms. What this comparison is meant to show is that Raymond Aron’s importance in the history of liberal thought should not be taken for granted, that it needs to be explained, not proclaimed, and that this should be a critical exercise and not a laudatory one. It does not mean that Aron cannot meaningfully be situated within one or more liberal traditions. In fact, ‘liberalism’ is particularly ill-suited to universal typological definition because its meaning has rarely stabilised over time or space, and the relationship between its economic and political precepts has often eluded

 

Pierre Manent, ‘Introduction: La politique come science et comme souci’ in Aron, Liberté et égalité: Cours au Collège de France (Paris, ), –, . Michael Freeden, ‘The family of liberalisms: a morphological analysis’ in James Meadowcroft (ed.), The Liberal Political Tradition: Contemporary Reappraisals (Cheltenham, ), –, .



Introduction

consensus. This book is primarily concerned with situating Aron within the interrelated intellectual histories of French political liberalism and Cold War liberalism. A large part of what made the latter brand of liberal thought new was precisely its scepticism about some of the core assumptions of liberalism as defined by Freeden. Although Aron may not fit comfortably into Freeden’s typology, some of his teachers conformed quite closely to it. And while Aron departed from many of the political assumptions of his immediate elders, he came to view the earlier political liberalism of authors such as Montesquieu and Tocqueville as taking on a renewed relevance in the light of the totalitarian threat to democracy during the short twentieth century. Although the history of twentieth-century French liberalism may present itself as a story of crises and revivals, its protagonists were by no means united in their understandings of the liberalism they wished to defend. When the sociologist Célestin Bouglé initiated a debate on ‘The crisis of liberalism’ in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale in , all of the contributors identified the main threat to liberalism with the Catholic church and sought to defend the government’s anticlerical policies on the basis of liberal principles. Yet the same year France’s first liberal political party, Action Libérale Populaire, was established to represent a form of Catholic republicanism opposed to the anticlerical agenda of the governing Radical party. Even further removed from the anticlerical liberalism defended by the circle of intellectuals associated with the Revue de métaphysique et de morale was the vision outlined in Émile Faguet’s book Le libéralisme, published in . Here French republicanism was condemned for its radically anti-liberal tendencies, while Faguet identified the home of authentic liberalism on the anti-republican, clerical and nationalist right. By the interwar period, the terms of this debate were being transformed. If controversy over church–state relations had been in decline since the separation of , the rise of totalitarian political religions, as fascism and communism were coming to be seen in the s by some Catholics and liberals like Aron, signalled both a new, more profound crisis of liberalism     

For a recent critique of such approaches see Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism from Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, ), –. Michael C. Behrent, ‘Justifying capitalism in an age of uncertainty: l’Association pour la liberté économique et le progrès social, –’ in Chabal France since the s, –, . Eric Brandom, ‘Liberalism and rationalism at the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, –’, French Historical Studies,  (October ), –. Kevin Passmore, The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy (Oxford, ), –. Émile Faguet, Le Libéralisme (Paris, ), –.

Introduction



and, ultimately, the possibility of an antitotalitarian reconfiguration of the political field. Yet, initially at least, the effect of the crisis of the s was to repolarise French politics along comparable lines to the last major outbreak of the guerres franco-françaises during the Dreyfus Affair at the turn of the century. When the historian Élie Halévy, one of the editors of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, reminisced about his prewar politics in , he remarked that ‘I was a “liberal” in the sense that I was anticlerical, a democrat, a republican; let us say in a single word that was then heavy with meaning: [I was] a “Dreyfusard”.’ By this point, the same impulse towards republican defence that had mobilised Halévy and his friends during the Dreyfus Affair rallied many of them to the cause of organised intellectual anti-fascism. Though it originated as a spontaneous grass roots initiative, the expansion and formalisation of the anti-fascist coalition was facilitated by the French Communist Party’s abandonment of class warfare and rallying to the defence of democracy, which, crucially, it explained by presenting itself as the inheritor of a patriotic republican tradition. If this made cooperation with communists more palatable to some French liberals, such as Aron’s early mentor, the philosopher Alain (Emile Chartier), the rising political influence of the PCF (French Communist Party) in the mid-s drove others, like Bertrand de Jouvenel or Alfred Fabre-Luce, towards varying degrees of support for fascism. Raymond Aron’s antitotalitarian liberalism originated from a critique of these alternative liberal trajectories. Although he first articulated this critique on the eve of the Second World War, Aron would not explicitly identify his position with a kind of renovated political liberalism until the start of the Cold War, in a speech on the future of Europe given to a group of German students in Munich. Significantly, in January  this piece was published in the first issue of a new journal cofounded by Aron, La Table ronde, one of the rare publications that, under the banner of a defence of intellectual liberty (liberté d’esprit), provided a platform for writers formerly blacklisted by the Conseil national des écrivains because of their wartime writings in support of collaboration with Germany. After   

Élie Halévy, L’ère des tyrannies: études sur le socialisme et la guerre (Paris, ), . Aron, ‘Discours à des étudiants allemands sur l’avenir de l’Europe’, La Table ronde,  (January ), –. Anon, ‘Au lecteur’, La Table ronde,  (January ), –, . Formerly blacklisted authors published in this journal included Jean Giono, Henry de Montherlant, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Marcel Jouhandeau. Although founded as a beacon of intellectual pluralism, by the mid-s La Table ronde had become the exclusive vehicle of a resurgent intellectual far right. On this see Sarah Shurts, Resentment and the Right: French Intellectual Identity Reimagined, – (Newark, ), . According to Robert Colquhoun, Raymond Aron left the editorial board in . See his Raymond Aron: The Philosopher in History, , n. .



Introduction

explaining how, despite the defeat of National Socialism, the war had created the conditions in which Europe was once more exposed to the threat of totalitarianism, Aron addressed the question of the ‘moral reserves’ that ‘regimes of liberty’ could draw upon to ward off this danger. Pointing first towards the spontaneous antitotalitarianism of populations whose recent experience of the police state had fostered scepticism towards ‘secular religions’, Aron then turned to the ‘constructive forces’ necessary to protect against the resurgent totalitarian threat: Let us not use the facile words of liberalism, socialism, or Christianism. The question is to know what living sentiments stir within these old words. I do not believe that the liberal philosophy, whether political or economic, has regained the ascendancy that it had lost. One can deplore this since, undoubtedly, the planned economy leans easily towards totalitarianism even if it does not inevitably result in it. But it is a fact that freedom of enterprise or exchange arouses enthusiasm nowhere . . . On the other hand, I believe there is a profound, elementary liberalism that has again taken root in western Europe: that which is expressed through a desire for personal security, through the respect of the fundamental rights of individuals. There is without doubt, at least apparently, a certain paradox in speaking of this elementary liberalism – which one could also call by its true name: rights of man – when there have never been so many people demeaned and living outside the law, so many gangsters and traffickers, when the concentration camps are filling up again . . . I am not unaware that shattered societies are hardly favourable to the rights of man, that the habits of war teach contempt for precisely the values that we would like to respect anew. All I am saying is that deep down, beyond the scepticism towards the programmes and slogans of those who propose their recipes for salvation, men are relearning the meaning of fundamental values and eternal truths.

These remarks were not prefatory to a discussion of the institutional framework through which the ‘rights of man’ might be enshrined in international law, a subject about which Aron was extremely sceptical. Instead, he was concerned with describing a set of basic principles through which to reconfigure postwar politics by facilitating a new antitotalitarian consensus among liberals, socialists, and Christian democrats. The ‘elementary liberalism’ described by Aron was capacious enough to encompass the ‘living sentiments’ of contemporary socialism, which he identified not in socialists’ residual attachment to Marxism but in their ‘desire to organise the economy without sacrificing the rights of persons’ and ‘conviction that  

  ‘Discours à des étudiants allemands’, –, . Ibid., . Ibid., . On international relations see Raymond Aron, Paix et guerre entre les nations (Paris, ).

Introduction



in immense collective distress a sort of sharing or community is necessary’. And the prominent role of Catholic philosophers such as Jacques Maritain in contemporary debates over human rights signalled the potential appeal of this antitotalitarian liberalism among Christian democrats. Indeed, whereas anticlericalism was fundamental to the liberalism of Aron’s earliest French political and philosophical mentors, he explicitly identified ‘the Christian faith’ as one of the ‘philosophical bases’ of the elementary liberalism that he described in his speech. That Aron’s antitotalitarian liberalism entailed a substantial, though not total, break with liberalism as it was understood by his teachers is apparent in a series of lectures on political philosophy that he gave at the École nationale d’administration in . Drawing on Albert Thibaudet’s classic account of the history of modern French political thought, Les idées politiques de la France, Aron here identified seven ‘spiritual families’ in contemporary French politics: the conservative and social Catholics, the Saint-Simonians, the Jacobins, socialists and communists, and the liberals, ‘if any still exist’. Yet Aron did not consider the extinction or near extinction of political liberalism to have transformational implications for contemporary French political culture because he viewed the weakness of political liberalism as a structural feature of French politics since the

 



Jacques Maritain, Les droits de l’homme et la loi naturelle (New York, ). On this subject more broadly see Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia, ). Aron described the other philosophical basis for his antitotalitarian liberalism as ‘the birth of a virile humanism that I would be tempted to call a pessimistic humanism’. He was referring here to the philosophical vision outlined in his doctoral thesis, the Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire (Paris, ). Aron described this humanism in the following terms, invoking in the process the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre: ‘As for the virile and pessimistic humanism, it can probably be found more in France than elsewhere. Spengler used to say that man is an animal of prey and that he cannot stop being one without demeaning himself. Virile humanism would respond that man is an animal of prey capable, since he is endowed with conscience and liberty, of reaching a moral order. In other words, this humanism no longer has anything in common with humanitarianism, with a naïve confidence in the goodness of man. It is blind to neither the element of violence that human relations entail, nor to the animal instincts of humanity, but nor does it ignore the spiritual destination of the human being, thrown into the world, alone with himself and free to choose his authentic or inauthentic existence, to abandon himself or to choose [s’abandonner ou vouloir]. This humanism undoubtedly remains quite uncertain in its contents and in its ends. On more than one occasion it has leaned dangerously towards totalitarian doctrines, precisely because the doctrine of choice retains . . . a transcendental and thus undetermined character. But in the current climate it is not out of the question for it to offer non-Christians the inspiration necessary for a reconstruction of European society and culture.’ This and Aron’s discussion of the Christian basis of antitotalitarian liberalism can be found in ‘Discours à des étudiants allemands’, –. Aron, Introduction à la philosophie politique: démocratie et révolution (Paris, ), ; Albert Thibaudet, Les idées politiques de la France (Paris, ).



Introduction

nineteenth century. This may not seem like a particularly controversial claim given that, as Emile Chabal has observed, ‘most historians . . . agree that liberalism in France all but disappeared under the Third Republic.’ Yet before the antitotalitarian turn of the mid-s, historians tended to regard the Third Republic as having birthed a golden age of liberalism. While the latter view is plausible if ‘liberalism’ is understood in similar terms to Michael Freeden, or the older generation of intellectuals at the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, Aron rejected it on the basis that, in France, ‘properly democratic or left-wing thought has always had a certain penchant for Jacobinism’. It was not a coincidence that this view would achieve near hegemonic status during France’s antitotalitarian moment. Aron identified two points on which the political and historical sensibilities of French liberalism and Jacobinism were most radically opposed. The first he summarised by contrasting liberalism’s commitment to defend the free expression of its opponents with Saint-Just’s injunction, presented as typical of Jacobinism in general, ‘no liberty for the enemies of liberty’. The second concerned their divergent interpretations of the French Revolution. Fundamental to the Jacobin sensibility was the notion, most famously expressed by Georges Clemenceau, of the French Revolution as a ‘bloc’. At this point, Aron departed from the expositional mode he had adopted so far to insist that ‘The idea that the Revolution is a “bloc” makes no sense historically’. To highlight the absurdity of this claim was not a question of purely historical interest because since the mid-s it was this aspect of the Jacobin historical sensibility that the French Communist Party had repeatedly exploited to legitimate its patriotic republican credentials and promote the cause of left unity. Although the expulsion of communist ministers from the French government in May  marked  

 

Aron, Introduction à la philosophie politique, ; Aron, L’opium des intellectuels (Paris, ), . Chabal, A Divided Republic, . Historians such as Tony Judt and Sunil Khilnani have traced the fundamental anti-liberalism of much of France’s post–Second World War political and social thought to the long-term influence of the Manichean political culture that reemerged towards the end of the nineteenth century. The unusually strong attraction of Marxism and moral indulgence towards both Soviet communism and the Parti communiste français among much of the twentieth-century French intelligentsia are here seen to result on the one hand from an inherent poverty of pluralism and civil rights discourse and, on the other, from a reflexive preference for radical revolutionary political solutions, both linked to the eclipse of liberalism by republicanism under the Third Republic. See Judt, Marxism and the French Left: Studies in Labour and Politics in France, – (Oxford, ), –; Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, – (Oxford, ), , –; Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (London, ), –. Jean-Pierre Machelon, La république contre les libertés? (Paris, ), .  Aron, Introduction à la philosophie politique, . Ibid., , .

Introduction



the failure of this strategy at the level of formal politics, the notion that there could be ‘no enemies on the left’ continued to inform many French intellectuals’ rejection of anti-communism until at least . Later in this course, however, Aron indicated there was more to the relationship between Jacobinism and communism than the legitimation tactics of left unity. The Bolsheviks were in fact authentic descendants of the Jacobins because they belonged to the same tradition of ‘revolutionary optimism’ inaugurated by Robespierre on the basis of a vulgarised Rousseauian understanding of popular sovereignty. As Aron explained, ‘When the . . . communist party says that it incarnates the proletariat, it scandalises democrats, but this would not have surprised the Jacobins, who never said any different. The incarnation of the people or of the proletariat by a party is essentially linked to revolution, or at least to the revolutionary paroxysm.’ On this basis, Aron argued, ‘we could say that one of the possible origins of what we today call totalitarianism is precisely the optimistic revolutionary philosophy. Whatever party has incarnated it, such a philosophy suggests a Manichean vision of the world . . ., the conviction that once one has done away with a certain evil – despotism, prejudices, the Church, capitalism, whatever you want –, the world will be good.’ Here was the point at which the early French liberal critique of Jacobinism could take on a new, antitotalitarian significance. Early French liberals typically approved of the  revolution as the creator of a constitutional monarchy wherein the individual liberty of citizens was to be protected from the arbitrary authority of the monarchy by a set of constitutionally enshrined rights, representative government, and the separation of powers. However, the Revolution’s descent into terror revealed that popular sovereignty could be just as tyrannical as its absolutist monarchical predecessor. Nineteenth-century liberal political thought in France emerged partly from reflection on this issue by individuals, usually from the social ranks of the old citizen-nobility, who had had direct or familial experience of the Terror. Such experiences led thinkers like Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant back to Montesquieu’s theory of the separation of powers to critique the tyrannical potential of popular as well as absolute monarchical sovereignty. These early  

Ibid., –, –. On Montesquieu and early French liberalism see Annelien de Dijn, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society? (Cambridge, ). See, principally, Benjamin Constant, ‘De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes’ [] in Constant, De la liberté chez les modernes (Paris, ), –. Constant’s reflection on this issue was substantially indebted to Germaine de Staël whose reflection on it dates to . On this



Introduction

nineteenth-century liberals initiated the sense of quite profound ambivalence towards France’s revolutionary heritage that would characterise the French liberal tradition as Aron understood it. While liberals would defend the achievements of the early Revolution in establishing equality before the law and representative government against critics on the reactionary conservative right, they were typically wary of the threat to individual liberties posed by unlimited popular sovereignty. Rooted in historical experience and class interest, this concern informed liberals’ preoccupation with the importance of moral and political education in fostering a political culture supportive of a regime wherein individual liberty and popular sovereignty could be made peacefully to coexist. That to this end early French liberalism tended to be at least as preoccupied with cultivating the necessary social attitudes and behaviours – the right moeurs – as it was with constitutional arrangements is one of its main distinguishing features. This in turn points to the distinctively sociological orientation of French liberal political thought in the nineteenth century. Aron explicitly identified himself with this form of liberalism during an acceptance speech delivered after he was awarded the Grand Prix André Arnoux by the Association pour la liberté économique et le progrès social [ALEPS] in : What really characterises the authentic liberal of today, and distinguishes him from the caricatured or anachronistic pseudo-liberal of his adversaries’ imaginations, is a representation of the world, a philosophy. An economic regime is always a human creation: in this respect, the workings of the market are no different than centralised planning. That the market was formerly judged to conform to nature, that it was seen to be the product of laws said to be natural, such views belong only to the history of ideas. The properly scientific content of economists’ teachings is most often wrapped up in, or sometimes concealed by, the perishable ideological





 

see Philippe Raynaud, ‘Libéralisme’ in Philippe Raynaud and Stéphanie Rials (eds.), Dictionnaire de philosophie politique (Paris, ), –, . Aron, Espoir et peur du siècle : essais non partisans (Paris, ), –, –. On this theme in relation to nineteenth-century French liberalism see H.S. Jones, ‘French liberalism and the legacy of the Revolution’ in Carolina Armenteros et al. (eds.), Historicising the French Revolution (Newcastle, ), –. Most French liberals thus opposed universal suffrage for most of the nineteenth century. For a critique of nineteenth-century French liberalism as fundamentally anti-democratic see Mark Hulliung, Citizens and Citoyens: Republicans and Liberals in France and America (London, ), . Lucien Jaume, L’individu effacé ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français (Paris, ), , ; Lucien Jaume, La liberté et la loi: les origines philosophiques du libéralisme (Paris, ), . Larry Siedentop, ‘Two liberal traditions’ [] in Raf Geenens and Helena Rosenblatt (eds.), French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day (Cambridge, ), –.

Introduction



representations, value judgements, and metaphysics characteristic of their epoch. Liberalism has thus often been travestied as a law of nature whereas it flourishes only with the help of political art, an art of the highest order.

Later in his speech, Aron acknowledged that ‘a minimum of economic liberalism has proven to be indispensable for the maintenance of the other liberties’, before reiterating his view that authentic liberalism was not an economic doctrine but a political sensibility: ‘A philosophy of inevitable and regulated conflicts, liberalism prospers only in a favourable climate, thanks to a certain kind of men, to a system of values, to moeurs, as Montesquieu would have said.’ Although this kind of liberalism also risked being confined to the dustbin of history, Aron pronounced his ongoing commitment to its defence in the face of Marxist hegemony in French intellectual life. Nine years later, when Aron gave his final lecture at the Collège de France, this hegemony was collapsing, yet his understanding of the antitotalitarian turn was anything but triumphalist. Without disavowing his own antitotalitarianism, Aron had long been aware of its limited potential for positively legitimating liberal democracy: [T]oday liberalism tends to define itself essentially, and perhaps regrettably, by its opposition to totalitarianism. In the past, liberalism was founded on philosophical doctrines. Today, I am inclined to believe that liberalism (since this doctrine is attributed to me) justifies itself in an essentially negative, defensive or possibly aggressive manner as the alternative to totalitarianism, an alternative justified by historical experience.

Although he saw the antitotalitarian rejection of ideological absolutism as an extension of political liberalism’s original rejection of religious absolutism, Aron now worried that this scepticism had extended to the point where it had become impossible to arrive at ‘either a representation of the good society or a representation of the ideal man’. Instead of announcing liberalism’s ultimate triumph, the antitotalitarian moment heralded a profound moral crisis of liberal democracy, which Aron now defined as ‘a pluralism of liberties and powers . . . accompanied by an authoritarian system in professional or economic life’. This sense of moral crisis, of the decadence of western democracies, was specific to the liberal-conservative variety of antitotalitarian thought promoted by Aron and his circle of admirers at the journal Commentaire in the s. It originated to a   

Aron, ‘Qu’est-ce que le libéralisme ?’, Commentaire,  (Winter ), –, .    Ibid., . Liberté et égalité, . Ibid., . Ibid., , . On this theme see also Aron, Plaidoyer pour l’Europe décadente (Paris, ).



Introduction

large extent in hostile response to the events and legacy of May ’, whereas the antitotalitarianism of intellectuals to the left of the Aronian circle was often conceived as an extension of the libertarian contestation of the late sixties. While intellectuals from a broad spectrum of political backgrounds would contribute to growing interest in nineteenth-century French liberal authors such as Tocqueville during the s and s, their aims in doing do only partially overlapped and were in some instances radically divergent. Consequently, by the end of the twentieth century there was only marginally more consensus over the significance of French liberalism than there had been at the beginning. To argue that Aron played a significant role in the formulation, defence, or renovation of French and Cold War liberalism is not to give a distorted account of his actual priorities, since so much of his own work conformed to the definitions of French and antitotalitarian liberalism that he gave in his occasional remarks on these subjects as discussed above. But Aron’s relevance to the intellectual history of Cold War liberalism becomes particularly clear when judged against the criteria of those historians who have begun to work on this subject since the s. According to Anthony Arblaster, the defining features of ‘Cold War liberalism’ are antitotalitarianism, anti-utopianism articulated as a critique of political or secular religions, ‘end of ideology’ discourse, and the theory of democratic elitism. From this perspective Aron’s importance in the intellectual history of twentieth-century liberalism is clear: one of France’s earliest theorists of totalitarianism and secular religion, subjects discussed at length in Chapter , he was the country’s leading intellectual defender of democratic elitism and, as shown in Chapter , the driving force behind the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s embrace of the ‘end of ideology’ doctrine in . Aron fits equally comfortably into Jan-Werner Mu¨ller’s more recent discussion of Cold War liberalism, which emphasises the foundational importance of epistemological scepticism and value pluralism in its primarily negative political vision. Given, as shown in

 



Anthony Arblaster, The Rise and Fall of Western Liberalism (Oxford, ), –. On Aron, the end of ideology and the Congress for Cultural Freedom see Giles Scott-Smith, ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the end of ideology and the  Milan conference: “defining the parameters of discourse”’, Journal of Contemporary History,  (July ), –. Jan-Werner Mu¨ller, ‘Fear and freedom: on “Cold War liberalism”, European Journal of Political Theory,  (January ), –.

Introduction



Chapter , that Aron’s political thought was philosophically rooted in the works of pluralist historical epistemology that preoccupied him in the s, it makes sense that he is a central figure in Mu¨ller’s account. Yet while it is possible to see Aron as having contributed towards something that we might retrospectively identify as ‘Cold War liberalism’, none of his reflection on the various elements of this compound ideology originated in the context of the Cold War itself. That Aron is not alone among Cold War liberals in this regard helps to explain the absence, which Mu¨ller correctly points out, of a ‘single coherent, theoretical statement of anything called “Cold War liberalism”’. Moreover, in Aron’s case the interwar origins of Cold War liberalism go some way towards explaining the relative bleakness of its outlook. This is an important point. Since the end of the Cold War, the language of antitotalitarianism, for instance, has been mobilised in support of some astonishingly complacent visions of democracy. Yet Aron viewed totalitarianism not simply as an external challenge but as a threat emanating from within the political culture of modern democracy itself. It was originally to mitigate this threat that the economic theory later repackaged as the end of ideology doctrine was first formulated not as a celebration of the postwar ‘golden age of capitalism’ but as a response to capitalism’s moment of ultimate crisis during the Depression. This helps to explain why Aron’s contribution to the end of ideology debate, which originated from his participation in the economic policy debates of the s and s, never succumbed to the extreme complacency that led some of its proponents to describe western democracies as having solved the fundamental political and socioeconomic problems of industrial civilisation. In even his most optimistic postwar work on industrial society, Aron stressed economic growth’s tendency to create new social tensions at the same time that it alleviated old ones. The comparatively bleak outlook of Cold War liberalism leads Mu¨ller to question whether its ‘seemingly dystopian, explicitly fearful nature . . . does not constitute a break with classical . . . nineteenth-century

   

Ibid., . For a discussion of Cold War liberalism as ‘bleak liberalism’ see Amanda Anderson, ‘Character and ideology: the case of Cold War liberalism’, New Literary History,  (Spring ), –. Moyn, ‘Introduction’, –, –. On the golden age of capitalism see Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (London, ), –.



Introduction

liberalism’. One of the things that makes Aron a fascinating case study in this respect is that while in some regards his work appears to confirm the latter hypothesis – hence the difficulty of fitting him into Freeden’s vision of liberalism – in others he obviously contradicts it. Raymond Aron’s contribution to the rediscovery of Tocqueville in France, for instance, did much to create the impression that he was the leading twentieth-century descendant of a nineteenth-century French liberal tradition. Yet it was not until the mid-s, when the defining features of his political thought had been established for almost two decades, that Aron first began to study Tocqueville in any detail. Whether we are concerned with the epistemological basis of his political thought or the ethical foundations of his distinctive view of intellectual ‘responsibility’, Raymond Aron’s formative influences were not French liberal ones. What is more, he arrived at these positions through a trenchant critique of the intellectual ethics and epistemological assumptions of prominent liberals among the generation of his earliest academic teachers and mentors. His main sources of inspiration in this enterprise were mostly non-French and sometimes profoundly antiliberal thinkers like Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, and Hendrik de Man. One way of getting around this problem is to make a distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘pre-liberal’ phases in Raymond Aron’s intellectual development, an approach that has been adopted explicitly or implicitly in much of the existing literature. According to one version of this argument, Aron was a socialist before the Cold War and became a liberal as the iron curtain descended across Europe. The limitations of such an interpretation become apparent, however, when we see that Aron participated in neo-liberal think tanks and conferences in the mid-to-late s, yet claimed as late as  that if only France had a socialist party comparable to its British counterpart he could happily join it. By  

 

Mu¨ller, ‘Fear and Freedom’, , , . Mahoney’s The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron offers no detailed account of any of Aron’s prewar work. His consideration of this work elsewhere treats it as basically flawed because of its relativism, the implication being that Aron did not arrive at his ‘mature’ political thought until after the onset of the Cold War. See here Daniel J. Mahoney, ‘Raymond Aron and the morality of prudence’, Modern Age,  (Summer ), –. Brian C. Anderson does consider Aron’s prewar work, but, like Mahoney suggests that Aron’s political thought had to overcome its earlier relativism to enter its ‘mature’ phase. See his Raymond Aron: The Recovery of the Political (Lanham, ), –. Nicolas Baverez, Raymond Aron: un moraliste au temps des idéologies (Paris, ), , . Aron, ‘Aventures et mésaventures de la dialectique’, Preuves,  (January ), –, .

Introduction



assuming a dichotomy between Aron’s ‘socialist’ and ‘liberal’ phases we overlook the fact that his intellectual formation took place at a time when what it meant to be a ‘liberal’ or a ‘socialist’ was being fundamentally questioned by revisionist intellectuals and politicians on both sides. Once we consider the time that Aron spent on the overlapping peripheries of various heterodox socialist and revisionist liberal think tanks in the s, however, we can begin to make sense of apparent contradictions like the one just alluded to. As we shall see in Chapter , to do this is partly to trace the interwar origins of Aron’s Cold War liberalism and partly to show that there is more to the history of neoliberal thought than the sort of market fundamentalism with which this has come to be associated. One of this book’s central arguments is that a detailed knowledge of Aron’s very earliest political commitments is essential to reaching a full understanding of his intellectual ethic and Cold War liberalism. This runs against the grain of existing scholarship, which tends to take Aron’s autobiographical accounts of his early political and intellectual development at face value. The following recollection of Aron’s undergraduate politics, which is taken from a television interview conducted in December , has been particularly influential: I myself was vaguely socialist. The strongest sentiment among us [leftleaning normaliens in the s] was probably revolt against the war and, because of this, pacifism. I was passionately pacifist, both through revolt against the war and also through revolt against the manner in which a child had experienced the war. I was nine years old at the moment when the war began, thirteen when it ended. Afterwards I said to myself that at no point had I suffered from this war, that at no point had I felt, let’s say, compassion for the misfortunes of peoples. So I had the feeling that the egoism of children is something horrible, and I detested war with a degree of fervour that matched my childhood patriotism.

The sentiments described here are typical of students from Aron’s generation who had been too young to fight in the war and whose subsequent political development was shaped by feelings of guilt arising from this as they entered adulthood. But the passage obscures as much as it reveals:  

Aron, Le spectateur engagé: entretiens avec Jean-Louis Missika et Dominique Wolton (Paris, ), . Robert Wohl, The Generation of  (London, ), –. On the prevalence of socialist and pacifist sentiment within the École normale during the s see Jean-François Sirinelli, Génération intellectuel: khâgneux et normaliens dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris, ), –. The generational specificity under discussion here has been emphasised in the secondary literature by referring variously to a ‘generation of ’, after the year in which many of its most prominent figures were born; a ‘generation of ’, in reference to the outbreak of the war that so fundamentally shaped its development; and a ‘generation of ’, referring to the decade in which it began to



Introduction

Aron was not ‘vaguely socialist’ in the late s and there was more to his pacifist beliefs than the passion with which he held them. Chapter  revisits Aron’s involvement in student socialist and pacifist groups at the École normale in the mid-to-late s and shows that in important respects his later political thought and intellectual ethic were lastingly shaped by these experiences. Most notably, it reveals that Aron’s early political development cannot be summarised as a conversion from youthful idealism to mature realism completed during the three years he spent in Germany between  and . This is because what the student political associations to which Aron belonged as an undergraduate had in common was precisely their explicit commitment to a philosophically idealist form of political ‘realism’ that would help to define Aron’s intellectual ethic for the rest of his career. Aron’s famous rejection of the left-right divide was far from atypical in the non-conformist political circles in which he moved during the late s; however, to maintain such a stance during the extreme political polarisation of the mid-to-late s was unusual. It was in this period that Aron’s view of French politics came to be shaped by a liberal historical sensibility, which distanced him considerably from the antifascist mainstream and left him sympathetic to aspects of the French far right’s critique of republican democracy. Chapter  is devoted to a discussion of Aron’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History, the doctoral thesis that he defended and published in . Because it reveals the interwar origins of Aron’s Cold War liberalism and the German inspiration for his eventual reclamation of a French liberal heritage, understanding Aron’s doctoral thesis is an essential prerequisite to understanding his relationship with the history of liberal thought in France. Yet while Aron considered this book to have provided the basis for all his subsequent political thought, its importance in relation to his liberalism is not fully understood. This is partly because the Introduction has often been viewed primarily as a foundational text in the history of French existentialism and as an at best highly flawed anticipation of his mature thought. Yet while it is true that this book



have a substantial political and philosophical impact. On the ‘generation of ’ see Pascal Ory et Jean-François Sirinelli, Les intellectuels en France de l’affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris, ), –; on the ‘generation of ’ see Wohl, Generation, –; on the generation of  see Michel Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels (Paris, ), – and Michel Winock, Histoire politique de la revue Esprit (Paris, ), –. ‘The whole book clarified the mode of political thought that would henceforth by my own – and which remains so in the autumn of my life.’ Aron, Mémoires:  ans de réflexion politique (Paris, ), .

Introduction



can be read as a landmark text in the anti-positivist reorientation of French philosophy during the s, this should not obscure the substantial philosophical differences between Aron and Sartre in the years before their famous political split at the start of the Cold War. Indeed, these earlier philosophical differences helped pave the way for their later political divergence: while Aron’s Cold War theories of totalitarianism and secular religion drew substantially on the historical epistemology of his doctoral thesis, Sartre conceived of his most ambitious philosophical project, the Critique of Dialectical Reason, as a refutation of the Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Aron himself was less than fully satisfied with his first major work, and his growing preoccupation with moderating its occasional tendency towards extreme relativism would substantially inform his readings of Montesquieu and Tocqueville during the s. Chapters  and  offer new historical interpretations of Aron’s theories of totalitarianism and the ‘end of ideology’ respectively. In Chapter , I trace the development of Aron’s totalitarianism theory, beginning in the mid-s, when he first formulated it through a critical dialogue with authors such as Élie Halévy and Carl Schmitt. This chapter shows that from the eve of the Second World War onwards, Aron saw the critique of totalitarianism as being inseparable from a rethinking of modern democracy. By , however, Aron had become acutely conscious of the limited appeal of antitotalitarianism to a non-communist left where intellectual philocommunism was still common. By this point, he was a leading figure in the anti-communist Congress for Cultural Freedom, which he helped to reorient towards the end of ideology doctrine in . Although this adaptation of anti-communist discourse was effected in response to the immediate historical conjuncture following Stalin’s death, the origins of the end of ideology can be traced partly to a dialogue begun between revisionist socialists and liberals in response to the Depression of the s. While exploring this pre-history, Chapter  shows how the concept of ‘the political’, which would later play an important role in France’s late twentieth-century antitotalitarian moment, was first used as part of efforts to revive non-Marxian socialist thought in France during the late s. The final two chapters of the book offer an historical account of Aron’s relationship with a larger French tradition of liberal political thought and its rediscovery by a broad political spectrum of French intellectuals in the s and s. Chapter  focuses on the book that has done most to associate Aron with a French liberal tradition, Main Currents in Sociological Thought (). It was in this history of sociological thought that Aron first explicitly described himself as a belated descendant of Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and



Introduction

Élie Halévy. But while this claim has often been repeated in the secondary literature, little scholarly attention has been devoted to the question of how and why Aron eventually came to define and align himself with the vision of France’s liberal tradition outlined in this book. Chapter  addresses this question by showing how Aron’s account of the French liberal tradition participated in a wider contemporary debate over the history of sociological thought in France. As sociology was being popularised and institutionalised to an unprecedented degree, competing accounts of the discipline’s past were mobilised to legitimate opposing views on its political and methodological orientation in the present. Aron’s Main Currents in Sociological Thought participated in this debate, but the reading of Montesquieu and Tocqueville offered in the book was also oriented by Aron’s preoccupation with moderating the relativist tendencies of his earlier historical epistemology as set out in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Chapter  considers the question of Aron’s influence in relation to the wider antitotalitarian turn and ‘French liberal revival’ of the s and s. Rather than presenting this intellectual sea change as a collective intellectual conversion to ‘Aronism’, it highlights the political heterogeneity of this turning point in recent French intellectual history by comparing its ‘Aronian’ strand with that formed by the political philosopher Claude Lefort and his disciples. What the Lefortians and Aronians had in common was, firstly, their view that totalitarianism was an irreducibly political phenomenon; secondly, a shared vocabulary, central to which was a new kind of conceptual distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, and, thirdly, a common preoccupation with nineteenth-century liberal authors whose work was deemed essential to understanding the relationship between democracy and totalitarianism due to the primacy it afforded to ‘the political’. This amounted to a shared commitment to using liberalism, variously conceived, to rethink the past, present and future of republican democracy in light of the general problem of totalitarianism. Yet in the wake of May ’ and its highly divisive legacy, a wide range of democratic visions were formulated under the banner of antitotalitarianism, from the ‘démocratie sauvage’ of Claude Lefort to the liberal conservatism of Pierre Manent, who warned that ‘To love democracy well, one must love it moderately.’ Although such figures shared the aim of revisiting authors like Constant or Tocqueville to rethink republican democracy, this common project did not produce a tidy liberal consensus. 

Claude Lefort, ‘Préface’ in Lefort, Éléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie, second edition (Paris, ), –, –; Pierre Manent, Tocqueville et la nature de la démocratie (Paris, ), .

 

Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy

During the events of May–June  Jean-Paul Sartre submitted an article to Le Nouvel observateur in which he suggested that Raymond Aron should be paraded naked through the corridors of the Sorbonne. The editors of this magazine were shocked at the outrageousness of the piece but decided to publish it anyway since it was unthinkable that the great Sartre might be censored. Jean Daniel, Le Nouvel observateur’s editor, later telephoned Aron to apologise but received short shrift. Relating this episode to the writer Claude Roy, Daniel quipped ‘I’ve always preferred to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron.’ After Roy quoted this remark in an article a few weeks later, the notion that it was ‘better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron’ became a bon mot that seemed to sum up the ideological climate of post- Parisian intellectual life. During the antitotalitarian turn of the mid-s, however, that climate began to change. When Sartre and Aron were persuaded to join forces at the head of a high-profile campaign in support of the Vietnamese boat people in , their public reunion was seen as vindication for Aron. Henceforth the phrase coined by Jean Daniel and Claude Roy in  seemed   

 

Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Les bastilles de Raymond Aron’ in Sartre, Situations VIII: Autour de  (Paris, ), –. The article originally appeared in Le Nouvel observateur on  June . Jean Daniel, La blessure (Paris, ), . I am grateful to Julian Jackson for this reference. Claude Roy, ‘Le Père Duval de la révolution’, Le Nouvel observateur,  September . Reminiscing about this episode twenty-four years later, Jean Daniel quoted himself differently than had Roy in . In his memoir Daniel remembers having asked ‘whether it was easier . . . to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron’. See Daniel, La blessure, . Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the s (New York, ). In the words of Pierre Grémion, the reunion of Sartre and Aron within the A Boat For Vietnam campaign ‘finally ended the two men’s debate over the nature of communism in Aron’s favour’. Pierre Grémion, Paris-Prague: La gauche face au renouveau et à la régression tchécoslovaques, – (Paris, ), . For Aron’s account of this see his Mémoires: cinquante ans de réflexion politique (Paris, ), –. Simone de Beauvoir’s take on this episode is at variance with the media commentary at the time. According to her, it was ‘absolutely false’ that this meeting signalled a political reconciliation between Sartre and Aron since ‘Sarte attributed no importance to this meeting





Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy

increasingly out of date. Tony Judt has described the history of French intellectual politics in the s as the erection of ‘a monument to Aronian reason’ upon ‘the funeral pyre of Sartrean radicalism’, and in  then French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin remarked with satisfaction that most French intellectuals still ‘prefer to be right with Aron than wrong with Sartre’. This is not simply a story of French intellectuals’ changing attitudes towards communism. Jean Daniel’s witticism resonated less because of anything it said about the substance of Sartre and Aron’s opinions than because it captured an essential truth about the contrasting styles of intellectual engagement that the two men had come to exemplify. Aron’s admirers routinely point out that, unlike Sartre, he was right about the defining political issues of the twentieth century, yet their claims for Aron’s enduring relevance are based not on his antitotalitarianism but on what might be termed his intellectual ethic of responsibility. Often contrasted with the ‘irresponsibility’ of his peers, this ethic of responsibility is usually said to be rooted in Aron’s superior political judgement. Thus what separates Aron from his contemporaries is variously described as his ‘defence of political reason’, his ‘genuinely political perspective’, ‘thinking politically’ and so on. The underlying philosophical position











with Aron over which journalists have spilt so much ink.’ Simone de Beauvoir, La cérémonie des adieux (Paris, ), . Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (London, ), ; Jean-Pierre Raffarin, ‘Allocution de M. Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Premier Ministre’ in Élisabeth Dutartre (ed.), Raymond Aron et la Démocratie au XXIe Siècle (Paris, ), . On the monumentalisation of Aron see also George Ross, ‘Where have all the Sartres gone? The French intelligentsia born again’ in James F. Hollifield and George Ross (eds.), Searching for a New France (London, ), –, . Brian C. Anderson, Raymond Aron: The Recovery of the Political (Lanham, ), –; Allan Bloom, ‘The last of the liberals’ in Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, – (New York, ), –, –; Nicolas Baverez, ‘Life and works: Raymond Aron, philosopher and freedom fighter’ in José Colen and Élisabeth Dutartre-Michault (eds.), The Companion to Raymond Aron (New York, ), –, , ; Daniel J. Mahoney, The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron: A Critical Introduction (Lanham, ), , , –, ,. Bryan-Paul Frost and Daniel J. Mahoney, ‘Introduction: the enduring relevance of Raymond Aron’ in Bryan-Paul Frost and Daniel J. Mahoney (eds.), Political Reason in the Age of Ideology: Essays in Honour of Raymond Aron (New Brunswick, ), . For example, Tony Judt remarks that ‘This distinctive understanding of the duties of the intellectual set Aron quite apart from his fellow writers, for whom the idea of the public intellectual was inseparable from irresponsible grandstanding’, while Bryan-Paul Frost and Daniel J. Mahoney have written that ‘He cultivated responsibility in an age that valued commitment, however irresponsible or histrionic.’ See Judt, Burden of Responsibility, –; Frost and Mahoney, ‘Introduction’,  (italics in original). See respectively Anderson, Raymond Aron, –; Frost and Mahoney, ‘Introduction’, , ; Aurelian Craiutu, Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes (Philadelphia, ), . When Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson published an expanded English language edition

Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy



here is one that affords primacy or at least autonomy to ‘the political’ in relation to other domains of social life. At the level of praxis, this is generally taken to entail a rejection of ‘moralising’ or ‘ideological’ approaches to politics in favour of a commitment to approaching political problems from a perspective of ‘statesmanlike prudence’. Although scholarship that summarises Aron’s intellectual ethic in these terms is arguably prone to its own kind of political moralising, it does have the merit of presenting Aron’s position in terms that he would have recognised. In December , when asked during a television interview to enlarge upon the claim that most left-wing French intellectuals ‘refuse to think politically’, Aron responded that It means two things. First, they prefer ideology, that is, a rather literary image of a desirable society, rather than to study the functioning of a given economy, of a liberal economy, a parliamentary system, and so forth. And then there is a second refusal, perhaps more basic: the refusal to ask the question someone once asked me: ‘If you were in the minister’s position, what would you do?’

As Daniel J. Mahoney has pointed out, Aron’s first remark here evokes Alexis de Tocqueville’s critiques of the ‘literary politics’ of the French intelligentsia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet, as Mahoney also acknowledges, in this respect Aron’s position was ‘Tocquevillian by affinity and not by inspiration’. Raymond Aron arrived at his intellectual ethic of responsibility during the interwar period at a time when he had yet to read Tocqueville. According to the accounts offered in his memoirs and elsewhere, this political awakening was primarily a product of the three years he spent in Germany between  and . While Aron’s firsthand

 



 

of Aron’s Le spectateur engagé in  they changed its title to Thinking Politically: A Liberal in the Age of Ideology (New Brunswick, ). This is a prominent theme in all commentary on Aron, but see especially Anderson, Raymond Aron. In relation to Aron, the term ‘statemanlike prudence’ was coined by Allan Bloom in his ‘Raymond Aron: the last of the liberals’, . This term also appears regularly in Daniel J. Mahoney’s The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron, ix, xii, , –, , , , , , –, , . Aurelian Craiutu has written of Aron’s commitment to ‘thinking “politically” as opposed to thinking “ideologically”’ and ‘thinking politically in a non-sentimental, objective and nonmoralising way’. See Craiutu, Faces of Moderation, , . Aron, Le spectateur engagé: entretiens avec Jean-Louis Missika et Dominique Wolton (Paris, ), . Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson both quote this passage to elucidate their view of Aron as an authentically political thinker. See Mahoney, The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron, ; Brian C. Anderson, Raymond Aron, . Mahoney, The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron, –. Le spectateur engagé, –; Mémoires, , –.



Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy

observation of the rise of National Socialism stripped him of his pacifism and convinced him of the irrationality of mass politics, his encounter with the work of Max Weber permanently shaped his intellectual ethic and was foundational to Aron’s earliest philosophical projects. He thus considered his ‘real education’ to have taken place in Germany. It was here, he remarked, that ‘I became conscious of the world. In other words, I completed my political education. . . . In , I came back to France an adult.’ Aron’s commentators, many of whom are sympathetic to Leo Strauss’s critique of Max Weber, have often sought to downplay the extent of Weber’s influence on Aron’s political thought. In all other respects, however, their accounts of Aron’s political education hew closely to the one provided by Aron. Aurelian Craiutu’s discussion of Aron in his book Faces of Moderation offers the most recent example of this. ‘For Aron’, Craiutu writes, ‘the three years he lived in Germany between  and  were an eye-opening experience that constituted his real political education.’ Henceforth Aron would be committed to ‘thinking “politically” as opposed to thinking “ideologically”’, or, put differently, to ‘thinking politically in a non-sentimental, objective and non-moralising way’. Although faithful to the account offered in Aron’s memoirs, such depictions of his intellectual development are historically unsatisfactory. This is firstly because they overlook the significance of Aron’s earliest political engagements in shaping his intellectual ethic and secondly because they exaggerate the extent to which Aron’s position was at odds with the wider French intelligentsia at the time when he first began to define it. The resulting description of Aron’s intellectual ethic is not inaccurate insofar as the contents of that ethic are concerned, but it is misleading on the questions of its origins and implications. For instance, when citing Aron’s rejection of the left/right divide as an example of his authentically political thinking Craiutu writes that ‘in this respect, [Aron] followed in the footsteps of Ortega y Gasset’. This seems unlikely, however, given that Aron’s first explicit rejection of the left/right divide appears in an article published in February , at which point Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, the work to which Craiutu refers, had not been translated into  



Ibid., . For Strauss’s critique of Weber see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, ), –. Commentaries on Aron that acknowledge his debt to Weber while distancing him from Weber’s alleged nihilism include Pierre Manent, ‘Raymond Aron éducateur’, Commentaire, – (), –, –; Mahoney, The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron, –; Anderson, Raymond Aron, .   Aurelian Craiutu, Faces of Moderation, –, . Ibid., , . Ibid., .

Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy



French. A refusal to think of politics in terms of left and right was, however, typical of the nonconformist French intellectual milieu to which Aron belonged at the time. That Craiutu is far from alone in overlooking this is perhaps unsurprising since the omission is less important within the disciplinary perspective from which he and most of Aron’s other commentators write, that of the political scientist. Yet even those historians who have written about Aron tend to follow the narrative summarised above. Most historical scholarship on Aron lies not in the field of intellectual history but in that of the history of French intellectuals. Where Aron’s early intellectual itinerary is covered in this literature, its focus tends to be on the friendship between Aron and Sartre, which began at the École normale supérieure in . This may be understandable in light of the fact that these two men later came to embody opposite models of intellectual engagement, but it is of limited use for understanding the origins of Aron’s intellectual ethic because Sartre showed no interest in politics before the Second World War and, unlike Aron, played no part in the debates over the responsibilities of public intellectuals that took place in the s and s. Encouraged by the considerable attention devoted to his petit camarade in Aron’s memoirs, this historiographical fixation on Aron’s relationship with Sartre obscures instead of elucidating the origins of Aron’s intellectual ethic. And although it is of course necessary to take seriously the impact of Aron’s years in Germany, this does not mean that Aron’s self-presentation in his memoirs, which strongly suggests that to reach political maturity he had to abandon the views he had held as an undergraduate, should be accepted at face value. For an examination of those view indicates that they were not only consistent with his ‘mature’ ethic of intellectual responsibility but that they also substantially informed it. This has far reaching implications for understanding Aron’s relationship with French liberalism, but before turning to this issue it is necessary to

 

  

For the first French translation of this book see José Ortega y Gasset, La révolte des masses, trans. Louis Parrot (Paris, ). Judt’s Burden of Responsibility, for instance, ignores Aron’s undergraduate politics. There are two books on Aron and Sartre’s relationship. For an account that focuses primarily on Sartre and Aron as public intellectuals see Jean-François Sirinelli, Deux intellectuels dans le siècle: Sartre et Aron (Paris, ). Etienne Barilier’s Les petits camarades (Paris, ) has more to say on the philosophical relationship between Sartre and Aron. For a critique of this tendency see Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (Paris, ), –. Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life (London, ), . Mémoires, –; Le spectateur engagé, .



Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy

understand the historical context in which Aron’s earliest reflection on the public responsibilities of intellectuals emerged.

Philosophy and Politics in the Late Third Republic Raymond Aron was born on the  March  in Paris. The third son in a family of wealthy, thoroughly assimilated and non-practising Jews, he recalled feeling the first pricks of political consciousness when, aged ten, he discovered his father’s collection of documents relating to the Dreyfus Affair. This was a general political awakening, not a specifically Jewish one: ‘The Dreyfus Affair’, he recalled in his memoirs, ‘did not disturb my sense of being a little Frenchman’. These feelings were reinforced by the fact that the Aron household was then swept up in the wider patriotic fervour induced by the outbreak of the Great War. For the next fifteen years Aron remained ‘hardly aware of my judaism’ and ‘totally serene’ about his status as a French citizen, but the jingoistic quality of his earlier childhood patriotism proved more short-lived. He reassessed his boyhood patriotism in light of his philosophical education at the Lycée Hoche in Versailles and emerged from this experience as a convinced pacifist whose political sympathies leant to the left. After two years preparing for the highly competitive selection exams, in  Aron entered the École normale supérieure where he would study philosophy with such future luminaries as Georges Canguilhem, Daniel Lagache, Paul Nizan, and JeanPaul Sartre until . Like many of his peers, Aron was disappointed with the formal philosophical education that he received as an undergraduate. This was partly due to the limitations of the curriculum, which he remembered with little affection when interviewed on this subject in December : What did we learn under the rubric of ‘philosphy’? Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and the rest. Almost no Marx, except a little in sociology! No postKantians, or hardly any. No Hegel. There was epistemology, discussion of mathematics or physics, but no course on political philosophy. I never 

  

Aron’s relatively elevated upper middle-class background is indicated by the fact that, like Sartre but unlike the majority of their fellow students, he did not apply for a bursary to support his studies at the École normale supérieure. Sirinelli, Sartre et Aron, –, –. Mémoires, . For Aron’s collected writings on the Jewish condition see his Essais sur la condition juive contemporaine (Paris, ). Mémoires, –. See also Aron, ‘Conférence prononcée au Bnai Brith de France’ [] in Essais sur la condition juive, –, –. Mémoires, , .

Philosophy and Politics in the Late Third Republic



heard mention of Tocqueville while I was at the Sorbonne or the École normale!

Aron’s dissatisfaction was also rooted in an increasing sense that the philosophy he was taught at the École normale left him fundamentally unprepared to understand the new world that was emerging in the aftermath of the Great War. French academic philosophy in these years was dominated by Durkheimian sociological positivism and a form of neo-Kantian idealism whose leading exponent was Léon Brunschvicg. What these schools had in common was a kind of optimistic, progressive rationalism that, to many students of Aron’s generation, seemed to be entirely out of touch with reality. The implications of the intergenerational philosophical revolt in which Aron would later participate will be discussed in the following chapter. What must be stressed here is that from the late s onwards, the generation of students to which Aron belonged differed from its teachers not only philosophically but also in terms of the way that it tended to see the political role of philosophers acting as public intellectuals. Philosophers in Brunschvicg’s generation, born within a year or two of the Third Republic, had been among the earliest beneficiaries of its new educational system. By the time they reached maturity, however, the Republic was under renewed threat from the reactionary right, first, in the late s, with the rise of Boulangism, then, from the late s, with the Dreyfus Affair. It was during the latter series of events that many of them, along with other academics, artists, writers and musicians, had first mobilised as ‘intellectuals’ in defence of the universal values of truth and justice that the Republic was supposed to embody. By the late s, however, this universalistic view of the intellectual’s social responsibility was perceived to be under threat. In , the veteran Dreyfusard Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs, in which he described engagement along particular class or national lines as a  



Le spectateur engagé, . At this time, much post-Kantian German philosophy had yet to be translated into French. See Mémoires, . When asked in December  ‘Do you consider that the philosophical training you received prepared you to understand the world?’, Aron replied ‘Not to understand it’. Le spectateur engagé, . For general narrative histories of French intellectuals in the twentieth century see Ory and Sirinelli, Les intellectuels and Winock, Le siècle. For the post-Second World War decades see François Dosse, La saga des intellectuels français, – (Paris, ). See also David Drake, French Intellectuals and Politics from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation (Basingstoke, ); David Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (Basingstoke, ). For an account of intellectual petitions in the same period see Jean-François Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises: manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle (Paris, ). For an account of the Dreyfus Affair’s impact on French political culture from a relatively detached contemporary observer see Albert Thibaudet, La république des professeurs (Paris, ). See here page : ‘The Dreyfus Affair gave rise to a democracy of teachers, of normaliens.’



Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy

betrayal of the intellectual’s public duty to enter the political fray only in the defence of universal, humanist values. Framing its argument partly as a defence of ‘idealism’ against the rising tide of intellectual ‘realism’, this polemic was one of the first extended attempts to theorise the public role of intellectuals in French society. Yet it provoked a particularly hostile response within Aron’s generation, where, ironically, it was soon to catalyse the counter-theorisation and application of the kinds of intellectual engagement that Benda rejected. The most infamous rejoinder to Benda was written by Aron’s close friend Paul Nizan and published in  under the title Les chiens de garde. Because of the rationalist universalism underpinning it, Benda’s argument has been interpreted as a polemical transposition of Léon Brunschvicg’s idealist philosophy into the debate about intellectual engagement. Nizan’s book, which targeted not just Benda, but the entire French philosophical establishment, supports this view. In it he claimed that the decimation of a generation of students on the battlefields of the First World War testified to the moral bankruptcy of their teachers’ philosophical universalism. Whereas Benda had identified the roots of intellectual betrayal in the pernicious influence of German historicism, Nizan, a recent convert to Marxism, argued that philosophers and philosophy could not transcend the times in which they lived. Recognition of this fundamental historicity exposed, for Nizan, the supposed universalism of Brunschvicg’s philosophy for the bourgeois ideology it really was. It also made a mockery of the limited idealist notion of intellectual responsibility, creating an ethical imperative to descend from the ivory tower and engage in political struggle. Benda’s subsequent career did not always conform to the model of intellectual engagement described in La trahison des clercs, while Nizan’s was fatally curtailed during the German invasion of . Their two books nevertheless had a lasting influence on conceptions of intellectual responsibility and irresponsibility throughout the postwar period. Sartre’s epochdefining postwar account of the intellectual’s duty of political engagement, for instance, was an existentialist reworking of the argument made by Nizan in . Raymond Aron, on the other hand, is sometimes seen as      

 Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs (Paris, ), –, . Ibid, –. Martin Cornick, ‘Catalyst for intellectual engagement: the serialisation of Julien Benda’s La trahison des clercs in the Nouvelle revue française’, French Cultural Studies,  (February ), –. Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism that is not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, ), .  Paul Nizan, Les chiens de garde (Paris, [] ), . Ibid., –, –.  Ibid., , , –, , , –, , , , – etc. Ibid., –, –. See, e.g., Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Paris, ).

Aron’s Early Political Development



having come to represent the continuation of Benda’s idealist model of limited intellectual engagement after the Second World War. It is indeed true that, following the onset of the Cold War, Aron positioned himself as the leading critic of France’s left intelligentsia in general and of the political choices of Jean-Paul Sartre in particular. Furthermore, much of Aron’s own Cold War political engagement was presented as a defence of the universal value of cultural freedom. But the intellectual ethic with which Aron came to be associated was rooted neither in the total rejection of the model first defined in Les chiens de garde nor in the uncritical acceptance of that defended in La trahison des clercs. While Aron did not share Nizan’s communist politics and was shocked at the more extreme accusations that he made towards older philosophers like Léon Brunschvicg, he was nevertheless sympathetic towards the view that, in the new world that had emerged from the ruins of the Great War, Benda’s idealist position had become untenable. Indeed, one of Aron’s own earliest articles was a highly critical review of La trahison des clercs in which Aron had rejected Benda’s notion of intellectual betrayal and argued for ‘an attitude of mind that is attached to truth and inspired by generosity, though nonetheless engaged in action’. During the s, Aron would attempt to make good on this claim by defining an alternative intellectual ethic midway between the opposing poles of Benda and Nizan. Yet this element of continuity between some of Aron’s earliest writings and the development of his ‘mature’ politics has consistently been overlooked because scholarship on Aron has generally accepted his biographical writings as offering the last word on his political and intellectual development.

Aron’s Early Political Development Towards the end of his life Raymond Aron was usually dismissive of his political views as an undergraduate, but these were more significant for  

  

See, e.g., Sudhir Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford, ), . Aron’s most important works on this subject can be found in his Polémiques (Paris, ); L’opium des intellectuels (Paris, ); La révolution introuvable (Paris, ); Marxism and the Existentialists (London, ). Mémoires, . Aron, ‘A propos de la trahison des clercs’, Libres propos,  (April ), –, . ‘As far as the articles from before  . . . are concerned, I do not take them seriously.’ This remark from  is quoted in Joël Mouric, Raymond Aron et l’Europe (Rennes, ), . In December  Aron remarked that ‘All the articles that I wrote while I was in Germany are detestable because, first of all, I did not yet know how to observe political reality, and what is more I did not know how to distinguish in a radical manner between the desirable and the possible’. Le spectateur engagé, .



Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy

the subsequent development of his political thought and intellectual ethic than he cared to admit. Most of the scholarship on this issue broadly reproduces the narrative outlined in Aron’s memoirs and elsewhere, according to which his political trajectory in the late s and early s represented a journey from youthful idealism to a form of mature political realism. The essential catalyst for this transition is seen to be the three years that Aron spent working in Germany, first at the University of Cologne (March –September ) and then at the Institut français de Berlin (September –August ). Aron’s biographer has remarked upon ‘the depth and rapidity of the reversal of his values and prejudices’ in these years. But while it would be foolish to deny the importance of his stay in Germany for Aron’s political and intellectual development, it is equally mistaken to view this purely as a moment of rupture. In particular, it is problematic to see this development as constituting a straightforward shift from idealism to realism because many of Aron’s earliest writings are themselves explicitly ‘realist’ in orientation. To understand the significance of this point we must situate Aron’s earliest political thought in the context from which it emerged: the student socialist and pacifist movements of the mid-to-late s. For what the socialist and pacifist groups that Aron joined as a student had in common was precisely their rejection of ‘idealism’ in the name of a new political ‘realism’. The socialist organisation that Aron joined in  was the École normale’s Groupe d’étudiants socialistes rather than the Socialist party (SFIO) proper. This distinction is sometimes dismissed as unimportant, but it matters very much because student socialism on the rue d’Ulm in these years was the seedbed for a heterodox critique of French socialism that saw itself as a ‘realist’ alternative to the perceived ideological dogmatism of the party leadership. In the mid-to-late s the École normale was at the centre of efforts to rethink socialist theory and practice in 

  

This is true of both Aron’s French and British biographers, for instance. See Robert Colqhoun, Raymond Aron: The Philosopher in History (Beverly Hills, ), –; Baverez, Raymond Aron, –. Jean-François Sirinelli offers an account of Aron’s undergraduate years that fills in some of the gaps in Aron’s memoirs but retains the overall sense that Aron had to break with his early politics to arrive at political maturity. See Jean-François Sirinelli, ‘Raymond Aron avant Raymond Aron (–)’, Vingtième siècle,  (April ), –. For Aron’s account of his undergraduate years see Le spectateur engagé,  and Mémoires, –.  Le spectateur engagé, ; Mémoires, , –. Baverez, Raymond Aron, . Baverez, Raymond Aron, –. Stéphane Clouet, De la renovation à l’utopie socialistes: Révolution Constructive, un groupe d’intellectuels socialistes des années  (Nancy, ), ; Jean-François Biard, Le socialisme devant ses choix: la naissance de l’idée de plan (Paris, ), –; Olivier Dard, Le rendez-vous

Aron’s Early Political Development



response to the crisis these had fallen into since the war. Disillusioned with the political and ideological immobilism that he attributed to the party leadership, in  Georges Lefranc established the Groupe d’études des socialistes des Écoles normales supérieures (GESENS). This group conceived of itself as a French version of the Fabian Society, an independent think tank using social scientific research to promote the doctrinal and policy evolution of French socialism. Marcel Déat, an older normalien and one of the Socialist Party’s rising stars, was sympathetic to the GESENS. In  he became the secretary-archivist of the Centre de documentation sociale, the École normale’s specialist social sciences library and an important resource for Lefranc’s study group. At the same time, Déat reestablished the SFIO’s official Groupe d’étudiants socialistes at the École normale. Most members of the GESENS joined this organisation, and after Déat was elected to the National Assembly in  he helped them to cultivate ties with like-minded young socialist deputies like Charles Spinasse and Jules Moch. Regular collaboration through channels such as the party’s Bureau d’Études continued until the expulsion of Déat and his followers from the SFIO in November . At this point, all of the former students and many sympathetic deputies chose to remain within the SFIO, the term ‘neo-socialism’ henceforth designating Déat’s minority faction rather than the broader movement for ideological renewal from which it had emerged. Thus when Raymond Aron joined the École normale’s Groupe d’étudiants socialistes in , he was entering an explicitly heterodox and revisionist tendency with a highly critical attitude towards the party establishment. That Aron shared this political outlook is made clear in his first article, published in December . Here Aron announced his sympathy for the SFIO before denouncing its doctrinal reliance on an outdated ‘socialist catechism’:

   

 

manqué des relèves des années  (Paris, ), –. For a contemporary perspective, see, e.g., Marcel Déat, Perspectives socialistes (Paris, ), –. Georges Lefranc, Le mouvement socialiste sous la Troisième République (Paris, ), –. Christophe Prochasson, Les intellectuels, le socialisme et la guerre, - (Paris, ), –. Marcel Déat, Mémoires politiques (Paris, ), –, . On the importance of the Centre de documentation sociale in the history of French neo-socialism see Jean-François Sirinelli, Génération intellectuel: khâgneux et normaliens dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris, ), –. Dard, Le rendez-vous manqué, . Déat’s neo-socialist faction was expelled from the party in November  at the climax of a longrunning dispute over parliamentary support of and ministerial participation in government. Déat belonged to the participationist side of this debate. See Lefranc, Le mouvement socialiste, –.



Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy [W]ith regard to domestic politics, I would like a sense of realities to displace the cult of outdated formulas. No more battles over words or ideas that are no longer relevant. And I have in mind the party towards which I am sympathetic, the Socialist Party which too often lingers on the sterile cult of brilliant formulas, as if these concepts – class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat, capitalism – which at one point in history were inspired but partial visions of complex and changing realities, corresponded to an eternal truth. No doubt these ideas can retain a mythical value, but I wish they would fade from the minds of the leadership when it comes to policymaking – of course a clear awareness of ideals [is important], but so is an acute vision of current possibilities. And above all no socialist catechism. I hope that the doctrine of material liberation does not degenerate into a doctrine of mental enslavement, whether to revolutionary dogmas or to the ukases of a P[ermanent] A[dministrative] C[ommittee].

These views were typical of the heterodox socialist milieu to which Aron belonged at the time. Although common disillusionment with the party’s old guard did not translate into an oppositional consensus, a few common preoccupations were widely shared among socialist revisionists. First among these was a shared desire for empirically based doctrinal and policy innovation. While revisionist politicians and students often recognised the analytic utility of Marxism, they tended to be highly sceptical of its value as a guide to political action. This partial disillusionment with Marxism helped to inspire a significant renewal of interest in SaintSimonian and other non-Marxian French socialist traditions during the interwar years. A particularly important site in this regard was the Centre de documentation sociale, which housed Charles Fourier’s archive and was the base from which new editions of important Saint-Simonian texts and the complete works of Proudhon were prepared in the interwar period. 







Raymond Aron, ‘Ce que pense la jeunesse universitaire d’Europe’, Revue de Genève,  (December ), –, –. The CAP, or Comité Administratif Permanent, was the SFIO’s governing committee, a notoriously bureaucratic and hidebound organisation. I am indebted to Grey Anderson, David C. Wright, and David Slavin for their assistance in identifying the meaning of this abbreviation. Dard, Le rendez-vous manqué, –; Biard, Le socialisme devant ses choix, –; Clouet, Révolution Constructive, –. The discussion that follows also draws on Jean Touchard, La gauche en France depuis  (Paris, ), –. Christophe Prochasson, Saint-Simon ou l’anti-Marx: figures du Saint-Simonisme français xixe-xxe siècles (Paris, ), –; Lefranc, Le mouvement socialiste, ; Dard, Le rendez-vous manqué, –. For the influence of non-Marxist French socialist traditions on Marcel Déat see Donald M. Baker, ‘Two paths to socialism: Marcel Déat and Marceau Pivert’, Journal of Contemporary History,  (January ), –, . Details of these projects can be found in the papers of Célestin Bouglé at the Archives Nationales. Documents relating to the Centre de documentation sociale are to be found predominantly in boxes AJ/ and AJ/. On Saint-Simon see La doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition, première

Aron’s Early Political Development



More important than this revival of older French socialist traditions, however, was the influence of contemporary heterodox socialism in Belgium. The French revisionist critique of Marxism was primarily inspired by the theoretical writings of the Belgian socialist politician Hendrik de Man, whose most influential book, Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus, was translated into French as Au-delà du Marxisme (Beyond Marxism) in . Writing in terms that prefigure Aron’s strongly worded rejection of a ‘socialist catechism’ later that year, in this book de Man argued that ‘Marxist doctrine . . . has come to play a part analogous to that played by religious rites in a church that has gained temporal power.’ To go beyond Marxism it was necessary ‘to seek behind the motives of economic interest the deeper psychological causes that inspire them’. For de Man, the working class’s relationship with the labour movement was ‘a question of dignity quite as much as a question of interest’ because the movement’s main psychological driving force was ‘the impulse to self-respect’. Marxist orthodoxy, however, had mythologised the proletariat into a ‘generalised abstraction’ that bore little relation to the ‘living individuals’ who constituted it. Socialism had consequently become doctrinally impoverished, clinging to a vision of class struggle that was blind to the fact that ‘the struggle which the workers carry on against the bourgeoisie presupposes that the workers regard bourgeois existence as desirable’. De Man considered that improvements in living standards resulting from rising productivity had fatally discredited Marx’s theory of pauperisation and that ongoing class resentment indicated not that the interests of opposing social classes were permanently irreconcilable but that capitalism produced new wants faster than it could satisfy old ones. In  Raymond Aron published a very positive review of de Man’s book in the journal Libres Propos. As for many other members of the heterodox socialist milieu to which he had belonged as an undergraduate, Beyond Marxism appealed to Aron because he thought the book offered a third way between reformism and revolution. What is more, several of de

   

année,  (ed.), Célestin Bouglé and Élie Halévy (Paris, ); Henri de Saint-Simon, L’oeuvre d’Henri de Saint-Simon. Textes choisis avec une introduction de Célestin Bouglé (Paris, ). De Man’s work was popularised in France by André Philip in his book Henri de Man et la crise doctrinale du socialisme (Paris, ).  Henry de Man, The Psychology of Socialism (London, ), . Ibid., .    Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., –. Aron, ‘Henri de Man: Au delà du marxisme’, Libres Propos,  (January ), –. On the wider revisionist desire to overcome the dichotomy of revolution and reformism, the following remarks from Marcel Déat are broadly representative: ‘We wanted to propose something other than a



Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy

Man’s arguments in this text appear to foreshadow important aspects of Aron’s later political thought, including his account of communism as a secular religion and his contribution to the popularisation and defence of the ‘end of ideology’ argument in the s and ‘s. But it was not just Aron’s peripheral involvement in interwar debates among heterodox socialists that would inform his subsequent political and intellectual development; equally significant in this regard were his earliest pacifist commitments. A second political association to which Aron belonged as an undergraduate was the Groupement universitaire pour la Société des Nations (GUSDN). The founders of this organisation were a group of young members of the Radical party whose relationship to that party was similar to that of the normalien socialists to the SFIO. These young Radicals also explicitly aspired to a form of political ‘realism’, which they similarly defined in opposition to their party leadership’s lingering attachment to the ‘verbalism of the outdated ideological formulas of yesteryear’. In domestic politics this translated into positions such as support for economic planning and constitutional reform to end endemic governmental instability by reinforcing the power of the executive in relation to parliament. In foreign policy, it meant support for Franco-German reconciliation as part of a wider project of European integration and the arbitration of international disputes through the League of Nations. This circle of intellectuals defined themselves – and the larger generation to which they belonged – primarily as ‘realists’, but they also rejected the realist-idealist distinction as a false dichotomy. Realism and idealism were ‘two sides of the same medal’, the former being ‘a logical consequence of



 

gradualist and ineffective reformism, something other than the vague escape [exutoire] of a formless, dateless revolution. A clear, immediate, . . . forward-looking plan of action. Thus cutting through the old quarrels, more inspiring than mass revolution, more realist than piecemeal reformism’. Déat, Perspectives, . The influence of De Man is apparent throughout this text – see, e.g., pages , , . On this group see Christian Birebent, Militants de la paix et de la SDN: les mouvements de soutien à la Société des Nations en France et au Royaume-Uni – (Paris, ), –; Jean-Michel Guieu, Le rameau et le glaive. Les militants français pour la Société des Nations (Paris, ), –. In his memoirs, Aron notes his involvement in an unnamed association linked to the League of Nations and that it was through this group that he first met Bertrand de Jouvenel. Since the group to which de Jouvenel belonged was the Groupement universitaire pour la Société des Nations we can assume that this is the organisation to which Aron refers. On Aron’s relations with this circle see Mémoires, , –. On de Jouvenel and the GUSDN see Olivier Dard, Bertrand de Jouvenel (Paris, ), –. Jean Luchaire, Une génération réaliste (Paris, ), . For an example of Aron’s early ‘realism’ along these lines see his ‘Lettre d’Allemagne: réflexions de politique réaliste. Berlin le  avril ’, Libres Propos,  (May ), –.

Aron’s Early Political Development



an idealism that tends towards action and wants to express itself through action’. The implications of this were most obviously apparent in the pacifism advocated by intellectuals associated with the GUSDN: rooted in a moral revolt against war, its prescriptions focussed less on forms of individual moral resistance such as conscientious objection than on technocratic solutions relating to European integration and international law. As with the student socialists, Aron appears to have been a peripheral figure within the GUSDN. But here too the tone and content of his earliest articles is consistent with his membership of this group. Aron’s writings for the left wing, pacifist journals Libres Propos and Europe eschew pacifist idealism in favour of a ‘realist’ form of pacifism that also echoes that of the GUSDN in its staunch anti-communism. In March , for instance, he published an article in Libres Propos that argued forcefully for a Franco-German customs union as the best practical means of avoiding war. Anticipating the opposition of the PCF, he wrote ‘I hear the communists protest: [this would be an] alliance against Russia! Don’t make me laugh. The haste with which each capitalist country has supported the Five Year Plan with exports and credits is sufficient proof that the “Capitalism” of communist logomachy only exists in propaganda speeches.’ Not only does this sense of the mythical quality of concepts like ‘capitalism’ for the radical left echo the sentiments expressed in his first article, it would also be a recurrent theme of Aron’s work right up until his death in . Elsewhere in the same article he remarked that ‘industrial accords remain the only immediately viable form of internationalism . . . It is therefore necessary for French capitalism and German capitalism to be intimately enough united to profit together from this reorganisation’, before concluding ‘I quite understand that this capitalist pacifism hardly raises much enthusiasm. But do you really believe that intellectuals will stop war? Or conscientious objectors? Or social democrats? Or radicals à la Herriot?’. Such comments are hardly consistent with the prevailing image of the early Aron as a naïve idealist. Although the majority of his articles between  and  exhibit a similar form of ‘realist’ pacifism, following the appointment of Hitler as German chancellor in January  Aron became increasingly critical of pacifism of all kinds. This did not, however, entail as radical a break with his prior convictions as is often thought. Although Aron ceased to promote   

Luchaire, Une génération réaliste, , –. Aron, ‘Lettre d’Allemagne. Berlin, le  mars ’, Libres Propos,  (March ), –, . Ibid., .



Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy

any form of pacifism from  onwards, his ongoing commitment to ‘realism’ continued to bear the mark of his student political activism. In an open letter to the journal Esprit published in February , for instance, Aron set out a vision of political realism whose rejection of the realistidealist dichotomy evokes the ‘realist generation’ of the GUSDN circle: Realist politics is not in my eyes a simple manner of envisaging such and such a problem. It expresses a spiritual will. . . . Since lucidity is the first law of the mind, I am not returning to materialism. But the idea can only claim to be effective if it expresses the necessities of the moment and, without pity for facile beliefs, specifies the route suggested by reality. To accept this politics without illusions is not a betrayal, it is seriously to think through our condition.

The final sentence of this passage alludes to Julien Benda’s La trahison des clercs, a book whose critique was explicitly targeted at the rise of ‘realism’ among French intellectuals since the end of the war. By realism Benda had meant the partisan engagement of intellectuals in support of specific national or class interests, an alleged departure from the universalist humanism that he attributed to his own generation of intellectual Dreyfusards. As we have seen, the open letter to Esprit was not the first time that Aron had made critical reference to Benda’s famous polemic. In an article published in  he had rejected Benda’s idealist model of intellectual engagement in favour of ‘an attitude of mind that is attached to truth and inspired by generosity, though nonetheless engaged in action’. Five years later in his open letter to Esprit Aron remained committed to this vision. Elsewhere in the letter he wrote: I am no longer on the right or the left, neither communist nor nationalist, no more radical than socialist . . . If one wants to think or act in the political domain, above all it is necessary to take the world as it is and not to shut oneself off from concrete – and perhaps effective – reflection with readymade ideologies. Observing things and men, statistics, unemployment figures or the drawing of a border, that is how I would conceive of the study of the Franco-German problem.

Aron’s refusal to view politics through the lens of the left-right divide here raises the question of his relationship with the nebulous phenomenon of

   

Aron, ‘Lettre ouverte d’un jeune Français à l’Allemagne’, Esprit,  (February ), –, . Benda, La trahison, –. Aron, ‘À propos de la trahison des clercs’, Libres Propos,  (April ), –, . ‘Lettre ouverte’, , .

Aron’s Early Political Development



intellectual nonconformism in the late s and early s. Both the GES and the GUSDN contributed to this wider trend among young French intellectuals to challenge the traditional ideological assumptions of established political parties either from their fringes or as independent movements for political renewal. There was considerable ideological diversity within and between nonconformist groups, but they often shared a preoccupation with elite renewal and the expansion of expert influence in government while typically favouring constitutional reform to reinforce executive over legislative power. Above all, what united this otherwise heterogeneous array of splinter groups, think tanks, and journals was their common rejection of the left/right dichotomy. The question of Aron’s relationship with intellectual nonconformism is a sensitive one because some historians regard it as having given birth to French intellectual fascism and collaborationism in the late s and early s. This may help to explain why Aron tended to gloss over the specificity of his early socialist and pacifist engagements when remembering this period towards the end of his life. Several of the men whom Aron admired or befriended through his involvement in the GES and GUSDN, such as the neo-socialist founder of the GES Marcel Déat or the neoradical intellectuals Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce, later embraced fascist and/or collaborationist politics. Aron’s Jewish heritage and abandonment of pacifism in  made him much less susceptible to the appeal of fascism than these men. During the war, he would become a leading figure in the intellectual resistance based in London, from where Aron would publish some of the most powerful critiques of intellectual collaborationism to appear during the Occupation. But while he never succumbed to the temptation of political extremism in the s, Aron was broadly sympathetic towards the critique of French democracy that led some of his acquaintances towards fascism in these years. Although this obviously problematises the notion that Aron was unambiguously a man of 





The phenomenon of ‘non-conformism’ was first discussed in the classic text by Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années : une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris, ). Olivier Dard’s more recent study criticises Loubet del Bayle partly on the grounds that the phenomenon he terms ‘non-conformism’ also existed in the s. Though Dard replaces the label of ‘non-conformism’ with that of ‘les nouvelles relèves’, the former term is retained here because of its wider familiarity and its superior translatability into English. See Dard, Le rendezvous manqué, –. See here Zeev Sternhell’s Ni droite, ni gauche: l’idéologie fasciste en France (Paris, ). For an alternative view see Philippe Burrin, La dérive fasciste: Doriot, Déat, Bergery, - (Paris, ). Aron, L’homme contre les tyrans (New York, ), –.

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Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy

the left before the Cold War, it is an observation that ultimately allows for a fuller understanding of his complicated relationship with French liberalism.

Critiquing the Intellectual Politics of the s While there was more continuity between Aron’s student activism and his subsequent political trajectory than is usually thought, there is no denying that his stay in Germany had a lasting effect. In political terms, the influence of this experience was twofold. First, the establishment of National Socialist rule had made the unthinkable – a war between France and Germany – thinkable. Aron broke definitively with his former pacifism in January , and by the time of his return to France the following August he was advocating a strategy for containing Nazi foreign policy ambitions that would rely on negotiation backed by the threat of military action. For the remainder of the decade the threat posed to France by Nazi Germany dominated all other political considerations for Aron. A second consequence of the years in Germany was that Aron modified his long-standing commitment to political realism by embracing Max Weber’s ‘ethic of responsibility’. This did not amount to a transformation in his conception of political realism: empiricist scepticism towards ‘mythological’ political constructs of all kinds was a lasting, defining characteristic of Aron’s ‘realism’ and its origins predated his German years. What his encounter with the work of Weber did bring to the development of Aron’s intellectual ethic was an acute sense of the irreducibility of politics to morality and ‘the responsibility of everyone, not so much for his intentions as for the consequences of his choices’. By the time of his return from Germany, Aron was convinced that appeasement would only serve to embolden Hitler and make war more likely. Weber’s famous distinction between an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility thus appeared apposite amidst widespread French



 



‘[O]ur task is clear: whatever our personal sentiments, we really must help (and oblige) national socialism (and fascism) to prefer a peaceful solution.’ Aron, ‘La révolution nationale en Allemagne’ [] in Aron, Machiavel et les tyrannies modernes (Paris, ), –, . Le spectateur engagé, . Mémoires, –. In an article for Libres Propos published in  Aron asserted that ‘the political problem is not a moral problem.’ See Aron, ‘Réflexions sur le pacifisme intégral’, Libres Propos,  (February ), –, . Le spectateur engagé, , –. See also Aron, ‘De l’objection de conscience’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (January ), –.

Critiquing the Intellectual Politics of the s



pacifism in the face of a belligerent German neighbour. In this respect, Aron’s attraction to Weber entailed a distancing from one of his most influential early mentors. This was Alain, the Radical philosopher and teacher at the famous Lycée Henri IV who was the figurehead of Libres Propos and one of France’s most prominent and respected pacifists. In the eyes of many philosophers of Aron’s age, Alain stood apart from those intellectuals of the older generation who had cheered on the slaughter of the Great War from their offices because of the unmatched moral authority he had earned by volunteering for front-line service despite his age exemption and pacifist beliefs. Alain’s view of war as the supreme evil to be avoided at all cost exemplified the idealistic ethic of conviction that Weber had critiqued as liable to result in consequences diametrically opposed to the values it defended, and it was on these grounds that Aron repeatedly criticised Alain’s pacifism following his return to France in the summer of . Aron’s break with his former mentor is also significant, however, because Alain was taken to be France’s leading ‘liberal’ philosopher at the time. In his influential book Les idées politiques de la France, published in , Albert Thibaudet remarked that ‘The liberal citizen of today is the citoyen contre les pouvoirs.’ This was an allusion to Alain, whose book Le citoyen contre les pouvoirs (‘the citizen against the powers that be’) was published in . Central to the political philosophy contained in this text was the balance of what Alain termed temporal and spiritual powers. 









Le spectateur engagé, –, –; Max Weber, ‘Politics as a vocation’ [] in Hans Heinrich Gerth and C. Wright Mills (ed.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociolog (London, ), –, esp. –. According to Aron, ‘What impressed us was that Alain had gone to war even though he detested it.’ See Le spectateur engagé, . For more on Alain’s influence on Aron and other students of his age see Sirinelli, Génération, –; Baverez, –. ‘Réflexions sur le pacifisme intégral’, –; Aron, ‘Philosophie de pacifisme’ [] in L’homme contre les tyrans, –, –; Aron, ‘Alain et la politique’ [] in Aron, Études politiques (Paris, ), –, –. See also Aron, Les étapes de la pensée sociologique (Paris, ), –. During his years at the École normale, Aron had been a peripheral member of Alain’s coterie of young admirers – see Sirinelli, Génération, –. Albert Thiabaudet, Les idées politiques de la France (Paris, ), . Raymond Aron also wrote approvingly of Alain’s ‘liberalism’ in Aron, ‘G. Hess Alain (Emile Chartier) in der Reihe der französischen Moralisten’, Libres Propos,  (October ), –. In a lecture course at the École nationale d’administration in , however, Aron later identified Alain with anti-liberal ‘jacobinism’. See Aron, Introduction à la philosophie politique (Paris, ), , . Alain’s liberal status is reaffirmed throughout the secondary literature: see Roy Pierce, Contemporary French Political `Thought (Oxford, ), –; Lucien Jaume, L’individu effacé ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français (Paris, ), , , ; Hazareesingh, Political Traditions, –; Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The History of an Idea (Princeton, ), –. Alain, Le citoyen contre les pouvoirs (Paris, ).



Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy

By temporal power he meant the state and its agents. This temporal power was an inevitable necessity and was to be accepted as such by citizens, but it must never be respected. The spiritual power that was to counterbalance the temporal authority of the state resided in the independent, critical judgement of citizens. Aron’s break with Alain referred as much to this aspect of his mentor’s political philosophy as it did to his pacifism. This culminated in  with the publication of a highly critical article in which Aron blamed Alain for having ‘trained generations of young Frenchmen in sterile hostility to the State’. But Aron had increasingly come to see Alain’s promotion of citizen’s resistance to the authority of politicians inevitably corrupted by power as socially and politically pernicious since his return from Germany in . Whereas Alain advised his reader to ‘never believe what a politician says’, from the mid-s Aron began to criticise intellectuals specifically for failing to consider politics from the viewpoint of the statesman. The posture of ‘statesmanlike prudence’ that Aron began to cultivate in these years would become one of the defining and most admired characteristics of his intellectual ethic. The implications of Aron’s now partially Weberian ethic of responsibility were apparent in his critical attitude towards organised intellectual anti-fascism in the mid-to-late s. On  February , rioting by veterans’ organisations and far right groups outside the National Assembly led to fifteen deaths and the resignation of France’s centre-left government. Interpreted by many on the French left as an abortive fascist coup, the riots led to a groundswell of anti-fascist activism in which intellectuals played a prominent role. The following month a Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes (CVIA) was founded under the leadership of Alain, the socialist ethnographer Paul Rivet and the physicist Paul Langevin, who was close to the French Communist Party. This organisation was a precursor to the Popular Front coalition of radicals, socialists, and communists that would eventually win the general election of May . Although Aron apparently voted for the Popular Front, he had strong reservations about the anti-fascist movement from which it had emerged. The economist Pierre Uri once recalled seeing Aron while participating in one of the mass demonstrations in which the anti-fascist movement was forged.    

Here I paraphrase from Aron’s summary in Introduction à la philosophie politique: démocratie et révolution (Paris, ), . Aron, ‘Prestige et illusions du citoyen contre les pouvoirs’ [] in L’homme contre les tyrans, –. Alain, Le citoyen, ; ‘Réflexions’, –. Bloom, ‘Raymond Aron: the last of the liberals’, .

Critiquing the Intellectual Politics of the s



‘We noticed Raymond on a pavement: “will you join us?”, we cried. His response, without moving from his position as a reserved spectator: “I was a socialist before you were.”’ This anecdote is revealing. With French politics polarising rapidly as it spilled out of the debating chamber and onto the streets, Aron occupied the singular position of being both a staunch anti-fascist and a harsh critic of organised intellectual anti-fascism. His position in this regard was exactly the opposite of Alain, whom Aron had befriended and admired during his years at the École normale. Whereas Alain’s attitude towards fascism was that it should be ignored abroad and combated mercilessly in France, Aron, who claimed not to believe that French democracy was seriously under threat from domestic fascism, held the anti-fascist movement in large part responsible for dividing the country at a time when national unity in the face of the real threat posed by Germany was essential. After the fall of the first Popular Front government in June , Aron wrote a critique of French intellectual anti-fascism that showed how his own intellectual ethic of responsibility had evolved since his earliest criticisms of the French left in the late s: Intellectuals have every right to intervene in political struggles . . . some act, or claim to act, as clercs, only to defend sacred values; others join a party and accept the constraints that this entails. Both of these attitudes appear legitimate to me, provided that they are conscious of themselves; but practically those who make themselves out to be clercs, anti-fascist intellectuals or interpreters of the rights of man conduct themselves as partisans. [This is an] inevitable slide: it is not every day that there is a Dreyfus affair which authorises one to invoke truth against error. So that they can daily express their opinion as such, intellectuals should have a competent grasp of economics, diplomacy, politics . . . Whether the question is of deflation or inflation, Russian alliance or entente cordiale, collective contract or salary levels, justice is less at stake than effectiveness. Yet, in all parties, writers and professors appear today as propaganda delegates. They are asked less to enlighten minds than to inflame hearts. They justify and whip up passions; rarely do they purify them. They are the guarantors of a collective will. The masses who place their trust in them are unaware that such an illustrious physicist, such a celebrated writer, such a renowned ethnologist know no more than the man in the street about the conditions of economic recovery, that they react to events like any other

 

Pierre Uri, ‘Souveniers décousus’, Commentaire  (), –. Thierry Leterre, Alain: le premier intellectuel (Paris, ), .



Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy activist. It is not enough to practice a scientific discipline and to call oneself a positivist to escape from myths.

Here Aron criticises the intellectual anti-fascism of the CVIA and the affiliated Ligue des droits de l’homme in terms reminiscent of some of his first articles. His emphasis on expertise and empiricist critique of French intellectuals’ susceptibility to political mythology is consistent with some of the pieces discussed earlier. But with his remark that ‘justice is less at stake than effectiveness’ we also see Aron beginning to place a Weberian emphasis on the responsibility of intellectuals to reflect upon the likely outcomes of their political engagement, irrespective of the idealistic good intentions underlying it. If before his stay in Germany Aron had criticised the idealism of the French left for being merely out-of-date, here he sees it not simply as outdated but dangerous. Anti-fascist intellectuals such as Victor Basch, the head of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, regarded the Popular Front as having saved French democracy from fascism by disbanding the anti-parliamentary leagues that had rioted on  February . Aron, on the other hand, thought that the fascist threat had been overstated and that the mass anti-fascist demonstrations of – had themselves posed a serious threat to the stability of France’s democratic regime. He would later argue that this, compounded by the massive industrial unrest of , had brought the country to the brink of civil war. Aron’s critique of intellectual anti-fascism appeared at the beginning of an article on the Popular Front’s economic policy that was published in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. Because this was not an obvious journal in which to publish such an article, an editor’s note was added to the start of the piece. This explained that Aron had considered it unlikely that a left-wing political journal would publish his article and had submitted it to the Revue de métaphysique et de morale so as to avoid publishing it in a right-wing journal where it would be exploited for partisan ends. It is indeed not difficult to see why an organ of the authoritarian right might have been receptive to Aron’s piece. After its critiques of intellectual anti-fascism and the alleged incompetence of the Popular Front’s economic policy, the article concluded with a grim prognosis on the future of parliamentary democracy in France. In the wake of the Popular Front, Aron concluded, French democracy was facing a moment of truth: ‘Will France continue to slide down the path that, from demagogy to   

Raymond Aron, ‘Réflexions sur les problèmes économiques français’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (October ), –, –. These issues are discussed at length in Le spectateur engagé, –, –. See editor’s note on page  of ‘Réflexions’.

Critiquing the Intellectual Politics of the s



anarchy, leads to degeneration, or will it succeed, by constitutional means or by a revolution, in restoring a strong authority? Who will have this authority?’ This remark should not be interpreted as an endorsement of authoritarianism, but it does at least suggest that in  Aron considered much of the far right’s critique of French democracy to be valid and that he viewed the prospect of an authoritarian regime as a tolerable last resort in the face of the threat posed by Hitler’s Germany. Such an interpretation is supported by Aron’s admission in his memoirs that during the late s ‘I occasionally found myself thinking, and perhaps saying aloud: if an authoritarian regime is necessary to save France, so be it; let us accept it, while simultaneously detesting it.’ One of the possibilities open to individuals persuaded of the need for an authoritarian solution to French ‘decadence’ in the late s was to join the Parti Populaire Français (PPF). Founded in June  by the former communist Jacques Doriot, the PPF was the closest thing to a mass fascist party that emerged during the interwar crisis of French democracy. Mirroring the strategy of the French Communist Party in the years preceding the formation of the Popular Front, the PPF made strenuous efforts to win intellectuals over to its cause. These efforts were not altogether unsuccessful, and at least two of Aron’s acquaintances from his days in the GUSDN, Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce, joined the party in . In an exchange of letters with Fabre-Luce in , however, Aron explained that ‘Nothing appears more important to me than to reconstruct the unity and strength of France. But I do not believe in the effectiveness of extremist parties. The French people remain mostly attached to the ideals of the left: better to teach men of the left what politics is and to combat the national defeatism of too many conservatives.’ This rejection of the PPF did not, however, mean that Aron rejected Fabre-Luce’s critique of French democracy; in fact, ‘As far as your critique of our existing republic is concerned, I agree with at least  percent’, but, Aron added, ‘I am not interested in joining a political organisation that only contributes to French decadence.’ In other words, ‘I deplore your conclusions as much as I approve of your criticisms.’  

 

 Ibid., . Mémoires, . A recent discussion of the PPF in relation to the intellectual politics of the interwar years is given in Sarah Shurts, Resentment and the Right: French Intellectual Identity Reimagined, – (Newark, ), –. Letter from Aron to Alfred Fabre-Luce,  May , Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF(). Letter from Aron to Alfred Fabre-Luce,  July , Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF()



Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy

Aron’s understanding of ‘decadence’ encompassed a broad range of phenomena, from the low birth rate and economic stagnation to the failure of the political elite successfully to address these issues because of severe governmental instability, weak executive power, and a lack of technical expertise among French politicians. Although not inherently fascistic, the articulation of such complaints in the language of decadence was a prominent feature of right-wing antidemocratic political discourse in the s, and these issues, together with a shared sense of despair at the division of the political community during a time of national and international crisis, can reasonably be surmised to constitute much of the ‘ percent’ on which Aron and Fabre-Luce were apparently in agreement. But whereas intellectuals like de Jouvenel and Fabre-Luce claimed to see the PPF as a vehicle for reestablishing national unity, Aron considered that it ‘only contributes to French decadence’ because the formation of the PPF had exacerbated the dangerous polarisation of French politics. If Aron rejected the PPF on the grounds of its partisan extremism and pro-German leanings, it is unlikely that he might have been tempted in desperation to support a second authoritarian movement then waiting in the wings of French politics, the Parti Social Français. Founded like the PPF in June , the PSF established itself as the French political party with by far the largest membership in the late s; however, its prehistory as one of the far-right leagues that had participated, albeit peripherally, in the civil disturbance of  February  meant that the PSF was open to the same anti-partisan objection that had informed Aron’s rejection of Doriot’s PPF. Excluding these two possibilities leaves one obvious authoritarian option that was conceivably available and capable of securing mass support at this time: a dictatorship led by Philippe Pétain. The Marshal was a case apart. Not only was he a living legend because of his record during the Great War, Pétain was also regarded as a good republican; his popularity thus transcended partisan politics to a degree unmatchable by any other 

 

‘Réflexions’, , –; Aron, ‘États démocratiques et États totalitaires’ [] in Aron, Penser la liberté, penser la démocratie (Paris, ), –. Remedying these symptoms of French decadence would be one of the main preoccupations of Aron’s wartime writings for La France libre, which are discussed at length in Chapter . For Aron’s retrospective reflection on French decadence see Le spectateur engage, –. Kevin Passmore, The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy (Oxford, ), –, . Fabre-Luce discussed the issues mentioned here in a book, presented as ‘a diagnosis of French decadence’, published in June . This book also contains a defence of ‘those who are called fascists’, an implicit reference to the PPF. See Alfred Fabre-Luce, Le secret de la République (Paris, ), , –.

Critiquing the Intellectual Politics of the s



potential dictator. Therefore, if there was a specific authoritarian solution to the crisis of French political life that Aron was prepared to contemplate in – then a Pétainist regime is the most likely option. This point is of course speculative and debatable. For all his criticism of French anti-fascism, Aron apparently still voted for the Popular Front; he objected less to the government’s social reforms than to an economic policy he considered to be incompatible with those reforms and with the demands of national defence. Furthermore, despite his disillusionment, Aron was still describing himself as a ‘socialist’ a year after publishing his critique of the Blum government. But being a socialist was not an insurmountable barrier to accepting a Pétain dictatorship, as the voting of full powers to the Marshal by the majority of French socialist deputies on  July  shows. Indeed, during the Occupation some of Aron’s friends from the heterodox socialist milieu to which he had belonged as a student would go on either to work for the Vichy regime, as was the case with Georges Lefranc, or even to promote the politics of fascist ultra-collaborationism, as was the case with both Marcel Déat and Hendrik de Man. Aron, of course, did not follow this path. On  June , he left France for England, where he would join de Gaulle’s Free French in London. But by that point the fall of France had transformed the terms of political calculation. Once an armistice had been signed on  June, the reasons for which Aron had earlier been open to the possibility of an authoritarian regime no longer pertained. His decision to join de Gaulle in  therefore does not rule out Aron’s reluctant openness towards a government of national safety headed by Pétain in  or . 







In  he had topped a poll run by the newspaper Le Petit Journal to discover who would be the most popular dictator in France, and the same year a pamphlet entitled C’est Pétain qu’il nous faut (‘It’s Pétain that we need’) was published by the journalist Gustave Hervé. See Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, – (Oxford, ), . From April  to March  Édouard Daladier governed with decree powers, thereby establishing what Julian Jackson has called ‘the authoritarian republic’. Thus if Aron was willing to contemplate a Pétainist government of national safety then this was most probably during the period –. Aron would later claim that among interwar French politicians ‘there was one intelligent man: Paul Reynaud, and he was the only one’. An early advocate of currency devaluation, Reynaud was Minister of Finance in the Daladier administration of –. See Le spectateur engagé, ; Jackson, Dark Years, . On  March , Aron opened the defence of his primary thesis with the words ‘Why am I a socialist?’. Quoted in Gaston Fessard, La philosophie historique de Raymond Aron (Paris, ), . What ‘socialism’ meant was of course debatable. At the end of his article on the Popular Front Aron wrote that ‘French socialism should not be humanitarian and benevolent in the image of its leaders, but courageous and hard [rude].’ ‘Réflexions’, . Olivier Wieviorka, Les orphelins de la république: destinées des députés et des sénateurs français, –  (Paris, ), –.



Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy

Conclusion The foregoing historical account of Raymond Aron’s prewar political and intellectual development has a number of implications for our understanding of his relationship with liberalism. At first glance, it appears strongly to call that relationship into question. The socialist and pacifist associations to which Aron belonged in the s participated in the wider nonconformist tendency developing at the margins of French politics in these years. Although nonconformism encompassed a very diverse range of political views, its proponents were united by their common anti-liberalism. This anti-liberalism pointed in several directions. Politically, it rejected the parliamentary democracy of the Third Republic, favouring constitutional reform to reinforce executive authority and elite renewal to bring technical expertise into closer proximity to government. Economically, it rejected laissez-faire liberalism in favour of various forms of state interventionism, typically centred on the idea of the plan. Philosophically, it rejected rationalist individualism. Thus defined, the anti-liberalism of interwar nonconformism was not at all something from which Raymond Aron was exempt, as will be discussed in more detail in Chapter . The association of nonconformism with anti-liberalism is reinforced by the fact that many of its leading lights eventually embraced fascism. As we have seen, this was the case with some of the acquaintances that Aron made through his student socialist and pacifist engagements. But while Aron was sympathetic to many aspects of the far right’s critique of French democracy, he never succumbed to the fascist temptation. His rejection of the intellectual fascism of some of his friends mirrored Aron’s critique of intellectual anti-fascism in that he considered both to have fuelled the Manichean polarisation of political debate in France. For Aron, what made this so irresponsible was that fascist and anti-fascist intellectuals were helping to create a climate of latent civil war in France just as the threat from a belligerent Germany loomed ever larger. But while this critique of intellectual irresponsibility was inspired by the immediate political conjuncture in which it was written, it was also rooted in a historical vision that was identifiably liberal. The liberalism of this historical vision resided in its critical attitude towards the ideological heritage of the French 

See, e.g., Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes, –; Jean Touchard, ‘L’esprit des années : une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française’ in Guy Michaud (ed.), Tendances politiques dans la vie française depuis  (Paris, ), –, . Jackson, Dark Years, ; Nord, France’s New Deal, , .

Conclusion



Revolution. As will be discussed further in Chapter , what made this a pressing issue in the mid-to-late s was the prevalence of neo-Jacobin rhetoric within an anti-fascist movement, which explicitly presented itself as the inheritor of an unfinished anti-reactionary struggle that had begun in . Although Aron considered both fascist and anti-fascist intellectuals to have exacerbated the crisis of French democracy, his critique of intellectual ‘irresponsibility’ was directed primarily at the left. This is true in two respects. Most prosaically, it means that in quantitative terms Aron’s critique of French intellectual politics explicitly targeted the left more often than it did the right. That this was true of his postwar work hardly needs stating here, but the fact it was also true of his prewar writings on this subject indicates we should be wary of overstating his identification with the intellectual left in the s. While this would change during the war, Aron’s critique of collaborationist intellectuals differed from his earlier critique of the anti-fascist left in that it was not rooted in the same liberal historical sensibility that informed his intellectual ethic in the s. Aron criticised writers such as Henry de Montherlant, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, and Alfred Fabre-Luce for their willingness to place themselves in ‘in the service of the enemy’. As such, his polemics against them were inspired primarily by the immediate conjuncture. Insofar as the liberal historical sensibility, which had anchored Aron’s critique of anti-fascism also informed his wartime writings, its effect was to mute his criticism of Pétain’s regime because Aron refused to participate in vituperative antiVichy propaganda, which he considered a threat to national reconciliation. The same historically inflected politics of reconciliation would later inform Aron’s assistance with the post-war rehabilitation of some of those intellectuals who had been seduced by fascism in the s, such as Bertrand de Jouvenel. In these respects, Aron’s liberal historical sensibility was, initially at least, more accommodating towards the authoritarian right than it was towards the anti-fascist left.

  



For a post-war exception to this tendency see Aron, Espoir et peur du siècle: essais non partisans (Paris, ), –. Aron, L’homme contre les tyrans, –. Le spectateur engagé, –; Mémoires, . For Aron’s wartime writings on the Vichy regime see his De l’armistice à l’insurrection nationale (Paris, ). Aron would later describe Vichy as an ‘interlude . . . that belongs more to the history of the Occupation than to that of France’. See Espoir et peur, . But see too the more critical remarks about mythologisations of France’s wartime past in Aron, L’Algérie et la République (Paris, ), , . Dard, Bertrand de Jouvenel, –, –.



Intellectual Politics and the Crisis of Democracy

While the understanding of modern French history that anchored Aron’s critique of intellectual politics in the s may have been identifiably liberal, there is little evidence of its having been informed by studying the works of classical nineteenth-century French liberalism. Indeed, to the extent that he defined his intellectual ethic of responsibility through a critique of Alain’s theory of the citoyen contre les pouvoirs, it could be argued that Aron’s intellectual ethic presupposed a break with French liberal tradition. And it is true that German influences, particularly the work of Max Weber, played an important role in shaping the development of Aron’s views concerning intellectual responsibility and irresponsibility. But this does not mean that Aron’s political education necessitated a break with the naïve idealism of his undergraduate years. In fact, what both the student groups that Aron joined as an undergraduate had in common was precisely their shared aspiration towards a new realism that would takes ideas seriously. Aron did not begin to define this realism for himself until . On the one hand, it was a fundamentally empiricist position, requiring intellectuals to engage in political debate on the basis of a detailed command of hard facts; on the other hand, it recognised that ideals and values act as concrete forces within societies and maintained a space for philosophical reflection on the ends of political action. As the following chapter makes clear, what made this nuanced realism problematic was that as Aron developed the epistemological reflection in which it was to be rooted, he slid towards a radically relativist position that risked fundamentally undermining the possibility of both rational arbitration between competing values and the objective knowledge upon which informed political action was to be based. 

This changed after the Second World War. Aron’s most substantial engagement with the historical sensibility of nineteenth-century French liberalism is in Espoir et Peur, –.

 

History and Politics

The three years that Aron spent living in Germany between  and  were less politically transformational than he sometimes claimed, but there can be little doubt as to the importance of this period for his philosophical development. During Aron’s undergraduate studies the discipline of philosophy in France was for the most part dominated by Durkheimian sociological positivism and a peculiarly French form of neo-Kantian idealism. There were important differences between these two schools, but they converged upon an optimistic and progressive form of humanist rationalism. Thus while idealist philosophers rejected the deterministic tendencies of positivism, they often placed science at the centre of their philosophical reflection; positivists, on the other hand, rejected purely empiricist epistemology, remaining within the broad outlines of the French rationalist tradition. Léon Brunschvicg, the most senior academic philosopher in interwar France, exemplified this partial union of positivism and neo-Kantian idealism. For Brunschvicg, science represented the ultimate manifestation of the human spirit and thus the primary object of all philosophical enquiry. This inherently optimistic philosophy, positing the potentially unlimited development of human rationality and equating scientific and moral progress, was perfectly matched to the secular, humanist educational goals of the Third

   

A third strand of French philosophy, spiritualism, will not be discussed here owing to its peripheral importance to the history under discussion. Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, ), , , ; Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, – (Ithaca, ), . Gutting, French Philosophy, , . See Gutting, French Philosophy, –; Kleinberg, Generation Existential, – and Aron, Mémoires:  ans de réflexion politique (Paris, ), –, . See also page  of Nicolas Baverez, Raymond Aron: un moraliste au temps des idéologies (Paris, ), where Brunschvicg is described as ‘a scientific humanist refusing to succumb to positivist illusions’.





History and Politics

Republic. In the long shadow of the First World War, however, this optimistic, progressive rationalism appeared entirely divorced from historical reality to many students of Aron’s age. When he left the École normale in , Aron recalled feeling ‘almost in despair at having wasted years learning practically nothing’, sentiments shared by his closest friends at the time, Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Nizan. Following the reopening of academic exchanges between France and Germany in , however, young French philosophers including Aron and, later, Sartre, began visiting Germany, absorbing influences that they would subsequently use to implement a thoroughgoing critique of the philosophical tradition in which they had been educated. By the turn of the s a reorientation of French philosophy was under way based on the importation of much of the post-Kantian German thought that the academic curriculum neglected. Operating from the margins of the academic establishment at institutions such as the École pratique des hautes études, and through journals like Recherches philosophiques, this responded directly to the perceived excesses of apolitical and idealistic abstraction characteristic of mainstream French philosophy at the time. In these years, phenomenology was increasingly used to criticise transcendental idealism, while interpretations of Martin Heidegger’s ontology gradually displaced anthropocentric metaphysics. According to Stefanos Geroulanos, the cumulative outcome of this reorientation was the development of a new ‘anti-foundational realism’, which reframed the relation   





Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, ), –. Aron, Le spectateur engagé (Paris, ), ; Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life (London, ), ; Paul Nizan, Les chiens de garde (Paris, [] ), . Exiled philosophers living in Paris such as Bernard Groethuysen, Alexandre Kojève, Eric Weil, and Alexandre Koyré also played a major role in importing post-Kantian German philosophy into France between the wars. Aron summarised the contents of his undergraduate education as follows: ‘What did we learn under the rubric of ‘philospohy’? Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and the rest. Almost no Marx, except a little in sociology! No post-Kantians, or hardly any. No Hegel. There was epistemology, discussion of mathematics or physics, but no course on political philosophy. I never heard mention of Tocqueville while I was at the Sorbonne or the École Normale!’ Le spectateur engagé, . Alexandre Kojève’s famous seminar at the École pratique des hautes études, which Aron attended, is especially significant here. Kojève offered a Heideggerian reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that is frequently credited as a major influence on the reorientation of French philosophy initiated in the s. Despite his profound intellectual admiration for Kojève, Aron disagreed fundamentally with his Hegelian vision of the ‘end of history’, which he critiqued in a presentation at the last of the seminars, held in June . See Gaston Fessard, La philosophie historique de Raymond Aron (Paris, ), . Aron also published several book reviews in Recherches philosophiques in  and  as well as one article: Aron ‘L’idéologie’, Recherches philosophiques,  (–), –. This piece contains some of Aron’s earliest writing on Marxism as a secular religion. See esp. pages –.

History and Politics



of subject and world in a way that opposed Brunschvicg’s idealist subjectivism as well as the materialistic bias of more traditional forms of philosophical realism. Thus anti-foundational realism severely restricted humankind’s access to transcendental absolutes like Reason and human nature, but, although widely conceived as an anti-idealist return to the concrete world, it insisted that humans could only ever achieve a fundamentally imperfect, incomplete understanding of this world. A profound epistemological scepticism resulted from this, rendering the philosophical reorientation of the s simultaneously anti-positivist and anti-idealist, a negative image of established academic philosophy. Raymond Aron’s most significant contribution to this pivotal moment in the history of French philosophy was his Introduction to the Philosophy of History: Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity. This was the doctoral thesis that he defended on  March  and published the same year. Ever since the thesis defence, at which one of Aron’s examiners remarked that he must have been ‘desperate or satanic’ to have written such a book, the Introduction has been interpreted through the lens of intergenerational clash. Contemporary reviewers saw the book as an expression of ‘the pathos of the new generation’ and praised it for providing the conceptual tools with which a new generation of French historians could at last free their discipline from the objectivist illusions of positivism. Eyewitness accounts of the thesis defence similarly describe this event as ‘a clash between two generations’. It is hardly surprising, then, that subsequent scholarship on Aron has often contextualised the Introduction primarily with reference to intergenerational conflict and the wider reorientation of French philosophy underway in the s. Nicolas Baverez has written, for instance, that Aron in these years was ‘the most precocious of the anti-positivist young Turks of French philosophy and the most forceful critic of the mandarins of the interwar years’. There are good reasons for reading the Introduction in these terms, but such a preoccupation with the book’s wider historical significance in    

 

Geroulanos, Atheism, –. Jean Wahl, Vers le concret: études d’histoire de la philosophie contemporaine (Paris, ). Mémoires, –. See respectively Bernard Groethuysen, ‘Une philosophie critique de l’histoire’, Nouvelle revue française,  (October ), –, ; Henri Davenson, ‘Tristesse de l’historien’, Esprit,  (April ), –, –. See also the anonymous review in Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (July ), , where the Introduction is described as exemplary of ‘the way of thinking of the new philosophical generations’. Fessard, Raymond Aron, . Baverez, Raymond Aron, . For a similarly paradigmatic account of the Introduction see François Furet, Le passé d’une illusion: essai sur l’idée communiste au XXième siècle (Paris, ), –.



History and Politics

relation to the reorientation of French philosophy conceived as a moment of intergenerational rupture also carries certain risks. One of these is the risk of exaggerating the extent to which Aron’s political and philosophical development necessitated a radical break with his teachers. It is true that in his  inaugural lecture at the Collège de France Aron remarked that observing the political situation in late Weimar Germany ‘inspired in me a sort of revolt against the education I received at the University’. But in the same lecture Aron also acknowledged the influence of Léon Brunschvicg in helping him to make sense of the German neo-Kantians whose critique of historical reason Aron exposited in his secondary thesis and whose ideas were fundamental to the argument of the Introduction. Indeed, were it not for the urging of Brunschvicg, Aron’s primary thesis would have been another exegetical book and not the original work of philosophy that he eventually wrote. Nor were Aron’s teachers as ignorant of recent developments in German philosophy as is sometimes supposed. In fact, three of the six academics who examined Aron’s doctoral theses had previously published on some of the German philosophers and sociologists discussed in the Introduction and its companion piece, Essai sur la théorie de l’histoire dans l’Allemagne contemporaine. This is perhaps unsurprising given that these men belonged to a generation of professors that had been vilified for Germanising French culture prior to the First World War. Reading the Introduction as a paradigmatic text in the interwar reorientation of French philosophy also entails a risk of overlooking the complexity of its relationship to that phenomenon. There is a particular danger here of distorting the book’s significance for the development of existentialism in France. Given Aron’s close prewar friendship with Sartre, whom Aron famously inspired to take up the study of phenomenology and whose best-known philosophical text, Being and Nothingness was indeed influenced in some places by the Introduction, the temptation to read Aron’s doctoral thesis as a milestone in the intellectual history of French existentialism is understandable. Yet this has sometimes obscured substantial   



 Raymond Aron, De la condition historique du sociologue (Paris, ), . Ibid., . Mémoires, . Maurice Halbwachs, ‘Max Weber: un homme, une œuvre’, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale,  (), –; Léon Brunschvicg, ‘Préface’ in Georges Gurvitch, Les tendances actuelles de la philosophie allemande (Paris, ), –; Célestin Bouglé, Les sciences sociales en Allemagne: les méthodes actuelles (Paris, ). See too the discussion of Georg Simmel in Célestin Bouglé, Leçons de sociologie sur l’évolution des valeurs (Paris, ), , , , , , , . In Agathon, L’esprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne: la crise de la culture classique, la crise du français (Paris, ).

Dilthey, Heidegger, and the Phenomenology of Self-Knowledge



philosophical differences between Aron and Sartre. For while they drew common inspiration from some of the same German sources, such as Heidegger, their radically divergent interpretations of others, most notably Wilhelm Dilthey, would have lasting and fundamentally important implications for the opposing political positions that the two men would take up in the postwar period. Recognising the prewar philosophical roots of Sartre and Aron’s postwar political divergence facilitates a better understanding of the Introduction’s importance in the context of Aron’s own political and philosophical itinerary. According to the account given in his memoirs, it was this book that provided the basis of all Aron’s subsequent political thought. Yet the foundational importance of this text within his oeuvre has often not been fully apparent in secondary discussions of his work. This is partly because Aron’s leading Anglophone expositors subscribe to a Straussian critique of historical relativism that inclines them to be reluctant to see Aron’s doctoral thesis as anything more than a fundamentally flawed anticipation of his ‘mature’ liberalism. But while liberalism is in no obvious sense central to the book’s argument, the Introduction nevertheless provided the philosophical basis for Aron’s antitotalitarianism, while the need that Aron increasingly felt to correct its occasional tendency towards extreme relativism informed his later interest in Montesquieu and Tocqueville. Because it reveals the interwar origins of Aron’s Cold War liberalism and the German inspiration for his eventual reclamation of a French liberal heritage, understanding Aron’s doctoral thesis is an essential pre-requisite to understanding his relationship with the history of liberal thought in France. But since the book itself is primarily a meditation on the relationship between history and politics in general, it is with this question that we must begin.

Dilthey, Heidegger, and the Phenomenology of Self-Knowledge As Aron explained in the opening remarks at his thesis defence, the fundamental problem of the Introduction to the Philosophy of History originated from a period of intense political self-interrogation:

 

‘The whole book clarified the mode of political thought that would henceforth by my own – and which remains so in the autumn of my life.’ Mémoires, . On this see Aron, ‘Discours à des étudiants allemands sur l’avenir de l’Europe’, La Table ronde,  (January ), –, –.



History and Politics Why am I a socialist? What does it mean to have a political position? These were the questions that I asked myself while studying Marxism and political economy. Very quickly, it occurred to me that in this matter desire and knowledge mutually determine and limit each other. But noting that value judgements and judgements of reality are thus linked raised a larger problem anterior to the determination of the political will, that of sociological and historical knowledge [connaissance]. The critique of historical thought and the logic of political thought condition one another.

Having originally set out to ground his socialist beliefs in a philosophy of history via the study of Marx, Aron became unconvinced by Marx’s claim to have demonstrated the historical necessity of socialism. He subsequently continued to seek a grounding for political commitment through philosophical reflection on history, but now his principal point of reference shifted towards the neo-Kantian critique of historical reason initiated by Wilhelm Dilthey in the late nineteenth century. Dilthey’s life’s work constituted an attempt to found the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) on a separate basis to the natural sciences. This entailed a fundamental break with the positivist assumption that methods of causal explanation borrowed from the latter could be applied in the former to provide results of comparable objectivity. Whereas positive science legitimately isolated individual causes and effects in order to explain the relationships between them by reference to causal laws, the application of such a process in the human sciences amounted, for Dilthey, to a mutilation of historical and social reality. Human phenomena were not to be explained via any falsifying process of atomisation, but understood intuitively and integrally as part of the wider wholes to which they belonged. This argument was highly influential within the German academy where it helped to establish the institutional and methodological independence of the Geisteswissenschaften, informing the manifold disciplines contained therein, and being drawn upon by thinkers from across the political spectrum. On the left, in the s, Dilthey’s theory of interpretative understanding [Verstehen] began to inform neo-Marxist critiques of 

  

Quoted Fessard, Raymond Aron, . Fessard’s account of Aron’s thesis defence is based on his own notes from the time and the summary published by the Revue de métaphysique de morale in July . See principally Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences: An Attempt to Lay a Foundation for the Study of Society and History (Detroit, [] ). Ibid., . ‘One must never forget the relation of the partial content . . . to the organism of reality in which life pulsates; on the contrary, knowledge can give exact form to concepts and principles and assign them their appropriate cognitive value only from this standpoint.’ Ibid., . See also –.

Dilthey, Heidegger, and the Phenomenology of Self-Knowledge



the positivistic economic determinism that had characterised the ‘scientific’ Marxism of the Second International. This holistic notion of understanding, it was thought, might save the idea of a dialectical, totalising historical development towards socialism without relying on a unilateral economic determinism that the success of the revolution in Russia and its failure in Germany had so discredited. This was broadly the interpretation of Dilthey that Sartre would later use in his unsuccessful attempt to establish the ultimate truth of human history. Given his political background, Aron too might be expected to have been sympathetic to such arguments, but the relativist reading of Dilthey offered in his secondary doctoral thesis entails an implicit refutation of the totalising claims of the Marxist philosophy of history: The historian captures, or at least believes he captures, the whole of an epoch, an oeuvre, or a development. Yet the intelligibility of historical series, the immanence of the totality in the elements, hardly implies the adequacy of scientific concepts in relation to the real. On the contrary, the plurality of retrospective interpretations and the necessity of cutting [découpage] are inevitable consequences of the fact that the human past is immediately intelligible.

We shall return to the significance of Aron’s remark on ‘the necessity of cutting’ shortly. For now it should be noted that although Aron wrote this passage in exegetical mode, his Introduction to the Philosophy of History would ultimately seek to draw political conclusions from this relativist interpretation of Dilthey’s anti-positivist epistemology. As Aron commented in the opening remarks of his thesis defence, the Introduction, though nominally a work of historical epistemology, ultimately served as a reflection on the philosophical basis of political commitment in general,



 

Two pivotal works in this regard, both originally published in , are Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (London, ), ,  and György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (London, ), . Aron comments on this development in Marxist theory in his article ‘The impact of Marxism in the twentieth century’ in Milorad M. Drachkovitch (ed.), Marxism in the Modern World (Stanford, ), –, . Iain Stewart, ‘Sartre, Aron, and the contested legacy of the anti-positivist turn in French thought, –’, Sartre Studies International,  (December ), –, –. Aron, La philosophie critique de l’histoire: essai sur une théorie allemande de l’histoire (Paris, [] ), . This book, Aron’s secondary doctoral thesis, is an exposition of the neo-Kantian critique of historical reason as practiced by Dilthey, Georg Simmel, Heinrich Rickert, and Max Weber. The Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire represents an original attempt to come to terms with some of the issues arising from this body of work, including the nature of historical relativism, the applicability or otherwise of causal explanation in the human sciences, and the question of value-laden selectivity in defining the objects of research within those sciences. See La philosophie critique de l’histoire, –; Mémoires, .



History and Politics

the logic of which he sought to reveal through the critique of historical reason. From the outset, Aron situates the Introduction within an anti-positivist epistemological tradition by defining its object as human as distinct from natural history before outlining the methodological implications flowing from this distinction. He defines the uniqueness of human history by referring to the presence of historical consciousness both on the part of the historian and as a major constituent part of the object upon which he focuses. Whereas the natural historian might study the unconscious evolution of various animal species, the student of human history faces a humanity conscious of the historical development in which it is caught up and free, within certain as yet unspecified limits, to shape its own fate. Actions performed by human individuals and groups are generally not arbitrary but meaningful because undertaken with reference to more or less freely chosen values and goals. If human action is thus meaningful, causal explanation cannot fully account for it: it possesses an intrinsic intelligibility and cannot be reduced to any causal law because the choice of a course of action could always have been otherwise. Human history is, then, subject primarily, though not exclusively, to interpretative understanding rather than causal explanation. Aron’s definition of understanding is quite broad, amounting to ‘the knowledge [connaissance] that we have of human existence and works insofar as these are intelligible without the elaboration of causal regularities’. This broadness is deliberate: it avoids deciding between competing definitions such as Dilthey’s holistic view, which emphasised the interrelation of parts and whole, and that of Karl Jaspers, whose more individualistic use of the term referred to the identification of intelligible relations between means and ends. This definitional flexibility has significant implications for Aron’s account of the interrelation of sociological and historical knowledge. Aron next undertakes a phenomenological description of the stages of human historical consciousness from self-knowledge to knowledge of others and of collective realities, and, finally, historical knowledge as pursued by the historian. The starting point in this enterprise is deliberately chosen since he regards self-knowledge as ‘the common source both of scientific knowledge [connaissance] and of the moral self-knowledge of man himself’. Thus his description of self-knowledge in the Introduction provides the basis from which his subsequent conclusions regarding the  

  See Fessard, Raymond Aron, . Introduction, –. Ibid., –.    Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., –. Ibid., .

Dilthey, Heidegger, and the Phenomenology of Self-Knowledge



nature of sociohistorical knowledge more broadly are drawn. Aron begins by making a distinction between being and knowing: ‘we do not know [connaissons] ourselves, we are ourselves.’ This immediately establishes a basic limitation: the possibility of retrospectively knowing oneself with perfect clarity is rejected since ‘If . . . a fragment of the past, in its entirety, were transported into our present consciousness, this miracle of the resurrection would render knowledge (connaissance), in the proper sense of the word, useless. We would be once more the same self that we were.’ This example illustrates the fundamental problem that the unity of the object of self-knowledge and the subject pursuing it rules out knowledge of self that is fully objective. Furthermore, such self-knowledge as is accessible is, in fact, only conceivable because its object exists temporally. Here the significance of the reference that Aron made in his earlier critique of Dilthey to ‘the necessity of cutting’ begins to come into view. The temporality of individual human existence renders self-knowledge fleeting and momentary because, once attained, it immediately transforms its object: ‘he that knows [se connaît] himself is no longer what he was before this realisation.’ Knowledge of self is, then, subject to a dual ontological limitation owing to the unity and temporality of its object and subject. Aron’s phenomenology of individual self-knowledge is significantly indebted to Martin Heidegger’s chapter on ‘historicality’ in Being and Time, reworking some of its main arguments from a humanist perspective. The fundamental distinction between being and knowing and the identification of the unity of the subject and object of self-knowledge that results translates into language specific to human being Heidegger’s assertion that ‘Dasein can never be past, not because Dasein is non-transient, but because it essentially can never be present-at-hand.’ Aron’s claim that such knowledge of self that is attainable can only be fleeting and momentary because of the essentially temporal quality of human existence is another such adaptation from Heidegger. Here he reworks, again from a  



   Ibid., . Ibid., . La philosophie critique de l’histoire, . Introduction, . Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (London, [] ), –. Identifying the influence of Heidegger on Aron is subject to similar limitations to those pertaining to the relationship with Carl Schmitt. The Introduction, published in , after Heidegger had joined the Nazi party, contains no explicit references to him. However, we know that Aron read Heidegger in Germany and continued to engage with his thought as an attendee of Alexandre Kojève’s famous lectures at the École pratique des hautes études, which offered a partially Heideggerian reading of Hegel. See Mémoires, , , . The link between Heidegger’s chapter on historicality in Being and Time and Aron’s account of self-knowledge in the Introduction is suggested in passing, but not examined in detail, in Kleinberg, Generation, . Heidegger, Being and Time, .



History and Politics

humanist perspective, Heidegger’s insistence that ‘[Dasein] is not “temporal” because it “stands in history” . . . on the contrary, it exists historically and can so exist only because it is temporal in the very basis of its Being.’ In his account of the French reception of Heidegger, Ethan Kleinberg states that ‘Aron’s understanding of Heidegger’s historicality would play a major role in Sartre’s understanding of the term and serve as the basis of his [Sartre’s] existentialism.’ Although Kleinberg does not specify where in Being and Nothingness this influence is present, one can see, for example, how Sartre’s view that the for-itself and the in-itself can never coincide echoes Aron’s insistence on an unbridgeable gap between being and knowing which, in turn, derives from Aron’s reading of Heidegger. We shall return to the philosophical relationship between Aron and Sartre later. For now, the important point to emphasise concerning the Heideggerian origin of Aron’s description of self-knowledge is that it brings to light the ultimately ontological roots of the historical relativism described in the Introduction. In the final analysis, this relativism is inseparable from the human condition: ‘history is inseparable from the very essence of man.’ After establishing the dual ontological limitation of self-knowledge discussed above, Aron explores its implications on the terrain of epistemology by considering two means by which such knowledge might be sought. The first of these methods is based in the search for motifs – the rational motivations directing human behaviour –; the second in the discovery of mobiles – the subconscious forces shaping our actions. The pursuit of selfknowledge via motifs represents the application of interpretative understanding at the most basic elementary level of individual human existence; the pursuit of self-knowledge via mobiles indicates the application of a method closer to causal explanation at the same elementary level. The exclusive use of one or other of these methods leads, Aron argues, to absurdity: one emphasises the irreducible freedom of action, the other its determination by subconscious forces. ‘Both these doctrines appear to neglect a part of the real. We are at the same time these impulses that the psychoanalyst has revealed to us and this decision to which philosophy appeals.’ The explanation of individual acts by reference to mobiles is, Aron claims, essentially indeterminate because they are the temporal products of a potentially infinite causal regression. On the other hand,   

 Ibid., . Kleinberg, Generation, . Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant (Paris, ), –, .  Ibid., . Ibid., .



Introduction, .

Dilthey, Heidegger, and the Phenomenology of Self-Knowledge



interpreting past behaviour by reference to motifs reveals that one’s view of one’s own past is determined by the perspective of an ever-changing present. Thus, to use Aron’s example, the retrospective significance attributed to youthful religious anxieties will vary depending on whether or not they are followed by a conversion experience in later life. This example illustrates the plurality of retrospective interpretations referred to in Aron’s critique of Dilthey: historical interpretation is unavoidably conditioned by the temporal position from which it departs; thus the truth of such interpretation can never be definitively established so long as history has not come to an end. In the Introduction, Aron repeatedly suggests that individuals who claim the contrary – that the meaning of history, whether of an individual life or of history as a whole, can be established from an absolute point of view – effectively presume to occupy the position of God, an argument he would revive in his later accounts of communism as secular religion. Aron’s ontological account of self-knowledge having ruled out the possibility of attaining pure objectivity, the epistemological analysis that follows appears, then, to extend this basic limitation into a potentially infinite relativism, leaving the self as little more than a formless aggregation of ever-changing ideas and emotional states. However, Aron attempts to moderate this relativism through a consideration of the place of selfknowledge within lived experience. While it may not be possible to relive past thoughts and deeds, we experience the movement from past to present not as a series of disconnected instances, but as a constantly developing whole. At this experiential level our pasts are not radically incoherent; the difficulty intervenes only once we seek to objectify subjective experience. It is at this point that we encounter an unbridgeable gap between experience as lived and as reconstituted in knowledge. This presents an insurmountable obstacle to pure objectivity, but Aron insists that substantial, though partial, self-knowledge remains within our grasp because the various psychological models and classifications through which the objectified self is approached are not arbitrary but reflective, albeit in an imperfect, incomplete manner, of the actual internal structures of the mind.

    

Ibid., –. See Aron’s critical remarks on Dilthey in this regard in Introduction, –, –. Ibid., –, , , , ; Aron, L’opium des intellectuels (Paris, ), –. Again, compare against Heidegger, Being and Time, : ‘Dasein does not exist as the sum of the momentary actualities of Experiences which come along successively and disappear.’  Introduction, –. Ibid., .



History and Politics

This argument for the proximal adequacy of concepts in relation to the real, which Aron later extends from the psychological to the sociological domains, inserts a basic ambiguity into his epistemology. It marks a significant shift of emphasis from the relativist interpretation of Dilthey cited earlier, highlighting now the limits of relativism rather than those of epistemological objectivism. As we shall see shortly, Aron’s fluctuations between radical and tempered forms of historical relativism in the Introduction are indicative of a sort of epistemological agnosticism. It is first necessary, however, to consider the significance within lived experience of the dual ontological limitation of self-knowledge discussed earlier. From this perspective, the momentary and fragmented character of such knowledge indicates not its relativity, but the freedom of the individual to constantly define him or herself through an ever-renewed dialectic of reflection and action. Here the function of self-knowledge is not merely retrospective; it is the means by which individuals judge their pasts in the hope of determining their futures: The self, ensemble of our ways of being, always partially escapes us because it is not yet fixed. It continues to live, it transforms itself. But we are always capable of self-posssession because we are in a position to determine ourself. And, indeed, all realisations of self-awareness [prise de conscience] are effective: the judgement that we pass over our past conduct is part of our self and has a bearing on our future. Self-knowledge does not pursue an ideal of pure contemplation: to know oneself is to define what one wants to be and to endeavour to live up to the idea that one has of oneself.

This passage, which also anticipates Sartre’s existentialism, indicates how Aron’s ontology, while it leads into a skeptical epistemology, does not produce a skepticism that is essentially pessimistic. Relativism at the abstract epistemological level is the expression of freedom at the level of lived experience. Here the inseparability of retrospective reflection and future-facing action becomes apparent, and, by extension, so too does the link between the critique of historical reason and the theory of political commitment, since the pursuit of self-knowledge is inextricably bound to an evaluative understanding of the society in which one lives. To elaborate on this connection in more detail it is necessary to first identify the relationship between individual self-knowledge and the remaining stages of historical consciousness.



Ibid., .



Ibid., .

Towards an Historical Sociology



Towards an Historical Sociology Aron’s analysis of the limits of historical objectivity may have been rooted in a phenomenology of individual self-knowledge, but he was not a methodological individualist in the mould of early Sartrean existentialism or, indeed, of comparable contemporary liberals such as Karl Popper or Friedrich von Hayek. He argues forcefully in the Introduction that the pursuit of self-knowledge presupposes knowledge of others against which to compare and define oneself. This in turn relies on the presence of a shared ‘objective spirit’ constituted by socially conditioned ways of thinking and acting. ‘One fact’, he writes, ‘is for us fundamental: the community created by the precedence of the objective spirit over the individual mind is historically and concretely the first datum.’ Clearly, then, Aron did not reject the sociological perspective. But he disagreed fundamentally with Durkheimian sociological positivism about the way in which the objective spirit, along with its reifications in collective realities like the church or judicial system, ought to be studied. Whereas Durkheim had famously enjoined sociologists to treat social facts as ‘things’, Aron countered that: However transcendant they are . . ., social facts of the institutional kind retain the privilege of psychic events; they are understandable, they are not comparable to natural phenomena that must be reconstructed or assembled according to regularities, but to human works or acts that are open to interpretation in the manner of a literary or philosophical text.

Durkheim’s ‘social facts’ are here presented as products of human consciousness and thus subject primarily to interpretative understanding. The 

 



See Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London, [] ), which shares the Introduction’s rejection of positivist social science, but is also suspicious of the sociological perspective as such. See also Friedrich von Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Indianapolis, [] ). Aron criticised the methodological individualism of Popper and Hayek in his Histoire et dialectique de la violence (Paris, ), , , and in his Leçons sur l’histoire: cours du Collège de France (Paris, ), –. By the time he published the Introduction, Aron had met Hayek at the Colloque Walter Lippmann, which is discussed in Chapter  below. He met Popper at the London School of Economics at the end of the Second World War, but apparently never thereafter – see Popper’s letter to Aron on  June , Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF(). ‘At all levels, self-knowledge comes last, it marks the achievement of knowledge of others.’ Introduction, . See also pages , . The term esprit objectif is borrowed from Dilthey, but applied to mean the ‘ensemble of ideas, beliefs and mores of an epoch or a group’ rather than ‘the things of nature on which the mind (esprit) has left its mark’, which, according to Aron, was Dilthey’s original usage. See Introduction, .  Ibid., . Ibid., .



History and Politics

objective spirit is not conceived as some hypostasised super-entity, but as the historical sedimentation of past human action. From this perspective, any simplified antinomy between individual and society appears false: In and through individuals common representations achieve clarity, in and through them are realised the communities which always precede and surpass them. This does not justify any metaphysic, neither that of national souls, nor that of a collective consciousness, but it does confirm the existence of a reality – social and spiritual, total and multiple – at once transcendant of and internal to men.

It now becomes apparent why Aron had earlier been reluctant to choose between Dilthey’s holistic and Jaspers’ individualistic approaches to interpretative understanding. If social realities are neither pure totalities nor mere aggregations of individual practices, then they should be approached using both holistic and individualistic varieties of understanding, the former to interpret the meanings of institutions and practices in relation to the social whole, the latter to account for the historical development of communities through collective and individual action that expresses but also judges the social milieu in which it is embedded. Such action is regarded as conditioned but not entirely determined by the institutions, values, and practices of the society it is executed in; thus is maintained an important margin of liberty for individuals and groups to shape their historical destinies. The political dimension to this argument is made explicit in Aron’s rejection of socialist and nationalist forms of mythical holism. In emphasising the multiplicity of the objective spirit, there is a latent commitment to social and intellectual pluralism that Aron would make increasingly explicit in his wartime writings. Aron’s discussion of the objective spirit in the Introduction indicates a double break with the anti-historical sociological realism that he attributes to Durkheim. First, by insisting that the pursuit of sociological knowledge involves the application of an historical method, Aron is effectively restricting the scope of Durkheim’s sociological determinism and retaining a space for free individual and collective action. Second, Aron’s historical sociology breaks with Durkheim’s sociological realism by undermining its underlying assumption that ‘the social’ or ‘society’ are amenable to precise

  

Ibid., . On this point see Richard Gowan, ‘Raymond Aron, the history of ideas and the idea of France’, European Journal of Political Theory,  (October ), –, . Introduction, –.

Towards an Historical Sociology



scientific definition. Aron’s claim that social realities cannot be treated in the same way as natural ones, that they are not subject to comprehensive classification and explanation, reflects his view that no pure social reality exists because such reality is in fact sociohistorical, containing elements of determinism and contingency. These elements are so intertwined that it is impossible to isolate and then systematise pure social or historical causes into bodies of laws comparable to the laws of physics. This is not to say, however, that Aron excludes the principle of causality from his historical sociology; it simply means that such causal relations as it is possible to identify through social scientific research can only be described in probabilistic terms. Thus he criticises Durkheim’s claims regarding the determination of suicide rates according to purely social causes not because there is no relation between the effect and the causes identified, but because that relation can only be said to be probable and partial. The same critique is exercised in Aron’s rejection of vulgar Marxist historical determinism in the Introduction: he does not oppose the view that any society’s political structures are shaped by the organisation of economic life; he rejects the assertion of a unilateral causal determination of the former by the latter. Any given causal antecedent might be said to favour a given outcome with a greater or lesser degree of probability, but the principle of necessary causality as it operates in the natural sciences is inapplicable to the study of sociohistorical realties. The Introduction’s probabilistic critique of sociological and historical determinism is substantially indebted to Max Weber. This becomes especially apparent when Aron’s focus shifts away from the irreducible element of contingency permeating the objects of sociohistorical knowledge, and towards the subjective freedom of the social scientist in defining and arranging these objects. In the first instance, sociological causality is probable because of the indeterminism inhering within the object; in the second, probabilistic conclusions are derived from the interpretative freedom of the sociologist. Probabilism in this latter sense is implied in Weber’s definition of sociology as ‘a science concerning itself with the interpretative understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences.’ Aron also adopts this    

Ibid., : ‘One falsifies both the nature of society and that of sociology by imagining the former to be coherent and univocal and the latter to be total and systematic.’  Ibid., . Ibid., –. Ibid., –. For an earlier example of this argument see Aron, ‘Politique et économie dans la doctrine marxiste’ [] in Aron, Études politiques (Paris, ), –. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology (Berkeley, [] ), .



History and Politics

position in the Introduction, where he insists that sociological and historical explanation presuppose understanding. What this means is that relations of causality posited in the human sciences are reliant upon a prior conceptual elaboration through which the objects of explanation are defined and arranged. These conceptual constructs are what Weber referred to as ideal types. The results obtained through causal enquiry in history or sociology may be said to be objectively valid within the confines of the interpretative schema in which they are organised, but such schema, or ideal types, are themselves established via an unavoidably subjective, value-laden process of selection and definition. This provides another angle of attack for Aron’s critique of Durkheim and Marx, both of whom he criticises for failing to acknowledge the nonscientific presuppositions upon which their more or less deterministic accounts of social and historical reality are based. In both instances, a determinism that poses as scientific and objective is actually based upon a metaphysical view of the relationship between individual and society. Marxism, for example, is rooted in a view of man as being defined above all by his labour, his position in society being determined by his place in the system of production, and the social evolution of humankind as being determined by the development of that system of production. Aron, following Weber, argues that these kinds of propositions may contain partial truths, but they are not open to scientific verification, and any science built upon such claims can legitimately claim only to be partial and probable. Before elaborating on the political significance of the Introduction’s historical epistemology, it is first necessary to summarise how the limitations identified in Aron’s phenomenology of self-knowledge translate into the consideration of knowledge of wider sociohistorical realities. The relationship established between the various stages of historical consciousness in the Introduction is a circular one: self-knowledge presupposes knowledge of others and the presence of an objective spirit, but the objective spirit is itself the historical product of collective and individual action containing an irreducible element of indeterminacy. From this

   

Introduction, , . Max Weber, ‘Science as a vocation’ [] in From Max Weber: Essays in Hans Heinrich Gerth and C. Wright Mills (ed.), Sociology (London, ), –, . Introduction, , , –, . See also Aron, ‘Remarques sur l’objectivité des sciences sociales’, Théoria,  (January ), –, . Introduction, –.

Towards an Historical Sociology



circularity it follows that the limitations attached to self-knowledge reappear in different guises at the different levels of historical consciousness. Just as the objectivity of self-knowledge is severely limited by the unity of its object with the subject pursuing it, so wider sociohistorical knowledge is restricted because it forms part of a community’s consciousness of itself. Like self-knowledge, sociohistorical knowledge is inevitably relative to the temporal situation from which it is sought, but it is also subject to a positional relativity. This is because it forms both a part of and a means towards the self-knowledge of every member of a given society: ‘I discover the past of my community partially within myself: when I take an interest in it . . . I endeavor to discover how my community became what it is, how it made me what I am.’ The methodological implications drawn from the analysis of self-knowledge also translate over into the pursuit of sociohistorical knowledge. Just as self-knowledge derives from the identification of motifs and mobiles, so sociohistorical knowledge is built from narrative interpretation of individual and collective acts in terms of the relation of means and ends combined with analysis of the deeper structural forces shaping the field of human action. Sociohistorical knowledge is subject to a plurality of retrospective interpretations comparable to that relating to the understanding of individual motifs. It also faces the problem posed by the potentially infinite extension of causal explanatory regressions. As at the level of self-knowledge, then, Aron’s sociohistorical epistemology tilts towards radical relativism, expressed in its most extreme form when he writes: One fundamental idea, it seems, emerges from the preceding analyses: the dissolution of the object. No historical reality exists ready made before a science that must simply reproduce it accurately. Because it is human, historical reality is ambiguous and inexhaustible. Ambiguous are the plurality of spiritual worlds through which human existence unfolds and the diversity of contexts (ensembles) in which ideas and elementary acts take place. Inexhaustible are the significance of man for man, of the oeuvre for its interpreters, of the past for successive presents.

It is not difficult to see why this passage has contributed to the Introduction’s reputation for promoting a radical form of historical relativism. But when Aron, who later regretted the expression ‘dissolution of the object’,



Ibid., .



Ibid., .



Ibid., .



History and Politics

tried in his memoirs to contest such an interpretation, he was not simply reimagining his thesis in the light of his post- leadership of French political anti-relativism. Elsewhere in the Introduction, as well as in some other texts predating it, one can find justification for his insistence on the book’s essentially rationalist inspiration forty-five years later. The problem here lies with the epistemological agnosticism alluded to earlier: there are points, such as in the above passage and in the previously cited critique of Dilthey, when Aron leans towards a form of relativism that would seriously undermine the moderate political conclusions that he later draws from his epistemology. But the Introduction is also explicit in its aim of transcending relativism and the tension between these opposing inclinations invites the misunderstanding of which Aron would subsequently complain.

Politics and the Historical Condition Aron’s first book offers a useful starting point for approaching the controversial issue of his relativism. Published in , Contemporary German Sociology contains a withering critique of Karl Mannheim’s relativist



Mémoires, . Although Aron never removed the passage from subsequent editions of the book, in  he made several changes to its layout with the intention of moderating the impression of extreme relativism that it sometimes conveyed. In the  edition, Aron had titled the concluding chapter of the second part of section two ‘The Dissolution of the Object’; in  this title was removed – compare Introduction (),  / Introduction (), . The second part of the book’s third section was headed with a quotation from Paul Vidal de la Blache – ‘In fact, everything to do with man is struck by contingency’ – in . This was removed from the  edition – compare Introduction (),  / Introduction (), . In  the conclusion to section four, part one was titled ‘The Relativity of Historical Knowledge’. This was removed from the  edition – compare Introduction (),  / Introduction (), . The appendix to the  edition of the Introduction, introduced and annotated by Sylvie Mesure, includes copies of the  and  tables of contents for comparison. The appearance of these changes in the first post- edition of the Introduction inadvertently confirmed its own arguments concerning the fluidity of textual meaning in changing historical contexts. It is significant that the relativism expressed in the Introduction reacted against the contemporary hegemony of Durkheimian sociological positivism; by  positivism had become something of a gros mot in the human sciences in France, and structuralism, in its various incarnations, had come to dominate. In his polemical analysis of the events of May , Aron is scathing towards structuralist and post-structuralist relativism, which he regards as operating a pernicious influence over students – see Aron, La révolution introuvable: réflexions sur les évènements de Mai (Paris, ), , . This argument subsequently became a central pillar of the wider conservative reaction against the events and their legacy in France and elsewhere – see especially Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, La pensée  (Paris, ). The anti-relativism of some of Aron’s principal French and American admirers, many of whom were drawn towards him as a result of his stance on May , also helps to explain why the importance of the Introduction for his postwar thought has often been understated.

Politics and the Historical Condition



sociology of knowledge. Dismissing Mannheim’s ‘so-called sociology of knowledge’ as variously naïve, absurd and banal, Aron’s critique also hints at a significant disagreement with Max Weber when he writes that: In relation to known facts and logical forms, a judgement on the real is true or false. And if there remains a multiplicity of rival theories, this is uniquely due to the impossibility of absolute verification, not to the existence of multiple truths or equally legitimate ‘perspectives’. It is also due to the fact that value judgements, which are so often mixed with economic and political theories, are perhaps not capable of being true or false.

The first and final sentences of this passage implicitly agree with Weber’s theory of ideal types, but the middle section hints at an important divergence from Weber’s nominalist epistemology. Here, rather than attributing interpretative plurality to the incoherence of the data from which the social scientist selects, Aron ties it to the impossibility of arriving at absolute verification. As we have already seen, in the Introduction’s phenomenology of self-knowledge Aron seeks to moderate relativism by referring to the proximal adequacy of concepts in relation to the real. This assumption carries over into the discussion of sociohistorical knowledge, indicating that Aron did not follow Weber to the extreme position wherein the reality studied by the sociologist is conceived as radically incoherent prior to its conceptual organisation. In fact, he rejects Weber’s nominalism as ‘naïve’, stating that ‘we shall admit from the outset the objectivity of [historical] developments and ensembles, but also their plurality and ambiguity. The historian does not artificially compose totalities out of dispersed and incoherent elements, rather he recomposes totalities that are immanent to the historical world’. The source of this difference between Weber and Aron may be partly traced to the latter’s use of a phenomenological method derived from Edmund Husserl. Husserlian phenomenology, through the role that it attributes to intentionality in all human consciousness, presupposes an immediate connection between consciousness and its objects, asserting that the world as immediately revealed to consciousness is rational,     

The pubished English translation of this book is Raymond Aron, German Sociology, trans. Mary and Thomas Bottomore (Glencoe, ). Aron, La sociologie allemande contemporaine (Paris, [] ), –, , , , . La sociologie allemande, . In the original text the final sentence quoted here appears in a footnote referenced at the end of the preceding sentence. See Weber, ‘Science as a vocation’, , –. Introduction, . See also page : ‘One sees just how inexact is the argument according to which, fragmentary and formless, historical facts are like specks of dust.’



History and Politics

meaningful, and coherent. Thus it has been suggested that Aron used phenomenology to moderate the nominalist implications of the Weberian influence at work within the Introduction. This argument is persuasive, but the difference between Aron and Weber should not be reduced to a question of methodology. Weber’s nominalism was rooted in a presupposition concerning the data from which the sociologist or historian selects: namely its infinite, scattered, and incoherent quality. The ultimate source of Aron’s relativism, on the other hand, does not lie in a presupposition concerning the data of historical and sociological analysis; indeed, Aron repeatedly argued against Weber that sociohistorical realities possessed a partial coherence independent of the organising hand of the social scientist. His relativism ultimately refers back to the partially Heideggerian ontology discussed earlier, to the essential historicity of human existence. This lends it the paradoxical character of being a sometimes quite radical form of relativism that is nonetheless rooted in the universality of humanity’s historical condition, a ‘transcendental relativity’ or ‘transcendental subjectivity’ as Aron calls it. There is a familiar irony to the fact that Aron’s modified Heideggerian ontology ultimately led him towards a kind of minimally humanist existentialism. This characteristic of the Introduction was also hinted at in a review article published by Aron around the time that he finished writing his thesis. In a literature review marking the three-hundredth anniversary of René Descartes’ Discours de la méthode in , he challenged Karl Jaspers’ critique of Descartes’ lingering contemporary



 

 



Reed M. Davis, ‘The phenomenology of Raymond Aron’, European Journal of Political Theory,  (October ), –. See also Reed M. Davis, A Politics of Understanding: The International Thought of Raymond Aron (Louisiana, ), –. In this respect, Weber was a disciple of Heinrich Rickert. See Aron, Les étapes de la pensée sociologique (Paris, ), –. Introduction, , , , –. Thus Aron’s claim during his lectures on industrial society that ‘Twenty years ago in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History, I entirely accepted this [Weber’s] relativist epistemology’ is repeatedly contradicted in the Introduction itself. Aron, Dix-huit leçons sur la société industrielle (Paris, ), . Introduction, , . Jean-Paul Sartre, of course, also reinterpreted Heidegger’s ontology along humanist lines, most explicitly in L’existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris, ). To the extent that this was a wider tendency in the French reception of Heidegger may be partly attributed to the translation of ‘Dasein’ as ‘réalité humaine’ in French editions of his work during the s. See Geroulanos, Atheism, . Although he defended his thesis in March , Aron finished writing it during the Easter of . See Mémoires, .

Politics and the Historical Condition



influence by claiming that Jaspers was ‘too quick to abandon the unity of man and the moral doctrine’. In concluding the article, Aron remarked that: Reading the cartesian literature of the third centenary, one appreciates both the impotence of scientistic rationalism and the dangerous poverty of an anti-rationalism that would ignore the natural sciences, which are the fundamental basis of our civilisation as much as of our thought. Or which would prioritise incommunicable experiences over the power of reason. It should not be impossible to renew rationalism by attaching it to concrete existence and history.

The final sentence of this passage hints towards one of the main preoccupations of the thesis that Aron was finishing around this time: the reconciliation of rational humanism and radical historicism. It was in the the fourth and final section of the book that he would address this issue. Here Aron expanded on the claim made at the start of the book that ‘history is inseparable from the very essence of man’ by identifying three dimensions to this fundamental historicity. First, ‘[man] is in history’: he lives in societies that, continuing through the course of time, accumulate their own histories. Second, ‘Man is historical’: he is shaped by the sociohistorical milieu into which he is born. Third, ‘Man is a (hi)story’ (une histoire): humanity as a whole embodies the unfinished story of a species that has developed from prehistoric cave dwelling towards industrial civilisation. The first dimension of human historicity tells us that human existence is essentially social and, by implication, political; the second suggests that the values towards which political life may be oriented are not universal but particular to each society; the third, however, with its emphasis on the universal history of humanity, moderates the relativism implied by the second. This idea of universal history should not be confused with an optimistic theory of progress. Aron explicitly rejects such notions, arguing that the irrational aspect of human behaviour and the absence of any universally accepted standard by which to define ‘progress’ itself prevent scientific advancement from guaranteeing wider human progress, whether social, moral, or political. But while he dismisses the optimistic fatalism of a 

  

Aron, ‘Troisième centenaire du Discours de la méthode’, Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung,  (), –, . Aron is referring to criticism of Descartes’ contemporary philosophical influence in Karl Jaspers, ‘La pensée de Descartes et la philosophie’, Revue philosophique,  (), –.    ‘Troisième centenaire’, . Introduction, . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . I have translated this as (hi)story because the French word ‘histoire’ connotes both ‘history’ and ‘story’ and this double meaning is important in the context of the phrase quoted. Ibid., –, .



History and Politics

generic liberal faith in rational progress, Aron is also concerned with avoiding an opposite, pessimistic fatalism wherein human historical development would be radically irrational, incoherent, and independent of all human efforts to affect its course. The plurality and incommensurability of values, he argues, reveals not only the impossibility of discovering universal philosophical truths, but also the impossibility for humankind of not philosophising. Taken together with humanity’s universal desire for causal explanation of which the development of science is the expression, this indicates an identity of human reason at the most formal level, a ‘community which calls for the pursuit of truth’: This truth should be above the plurality of activities and values, otherwise it would fall back to the level of particular and contradictory wills. It should be concrete, otherwise, like ethical norms, it would remain at the margin of action. It should be at once theoretical and practical, like the goal to which Marxism aspired. Through the power he has acquired over nature, man would arrive little by little at an equal power over the social order. Thanks to his participation in two collective works, the State which makes a citizen of each individual, and culture, which makes shared knowledge accessible to all, he would realise his vocation: the reconciliation of humanity and nature, of essence and existence.

Before considering the implications of this passage it is worth briefly revisiting the larger question of the relationship between historical epistemology and politics in the Introduction. Aron’s description of historical consciousness operates on four levels: knowledge of self, others, objective spirit and collective realities, and historical knowledge. The separation of these levels is a conceptual abstraction from the concrete reality of lived experience wherein all the stages of historical consciousness are shown to be interdependent. It is by showing that sociohistorical knowledge is integral to self-knowledge that Aron initially indicates a connection between historical epistemology and politics. This connection appears clearest within lived experience where the conceptual separation of past,   



Ibid., . See also page  on the necessity of ‘being capable of lucidity and faith: of believing in a historical will while believing neither in myths nor in crowds’.  Ibid., , , –. Ibid., , . Ibid., . On Aron’s argument regarding the formal identity of reason see Sylvie Mesure, ‘De l’antipositivisme à l’antirelativisme: Raymond Aron et le problème de l’objectivité historique’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –, : ‘Valid for all, the principles of historical reflection are intersubjective, and in this sense they define a moment of universality within historical judgement, which is the transcendental condition of possibility for that judgement’s claim to objectivity. It is in this regard that relativism can be overcome.’ Introduction, .

Politics and the Historical Condition



present, and future is revealed to be an abstraction from the concrete reality of life’s finite continuity. Here historical consciousness at every level merges into a future facing projection of consciousness that is partly political. What this means in practice is that no political commitment is conceivable without an understanding of the past of the society in which it is exercised. To think or act politically is to think or act in terms of the values and goals expressed historically within a given community, even if it is to reject them. This, at the most general level, is the connection established in the Introduction between the critique of historical reason and the logic of political thought and action. But Aron also linked sociohistorical epistemology and political action at the level of praxis. He argued that ‘The man of action uses sociology and history simultaneously’ in the sense that the politician acting in pursuit of a particular goal must develop an awareness of structural constraints together with the margins of freedom for effective action within them. This position expresses what Aron defines later in the Introduction as a ‘politics of understanding’, one of two conceptualisations of political action based in two opposing views of sociohistorical knowledge that are contrasted in the book’s fourth and final section. This politics of understanding is rooted in a fragmented, partial, and uncertain vision of history, and its exemplary exponent is Max Weber. It represents a reformulation of Weber’s ethic of responsibility in that it is based in the constantly renewed calculation of means towards the realisation of chosen ends within historical contexts that change over time without the overall historical development being open to human comprehension. The opposite of this moderate, gradualist, reformist position is defined as a ‘politics of Reason’, based in a total view of human historical evolution and represented in its purest form by Marxism. Although Aron’s preference for the politics of understanding over the politics of Reason in the Introduction is clear, the question of how substantial the philosophical basis for this choice is has divided his commentators. Aron attempts to refute Marxism as a basis for reasonable political action in the Introduction by two principal means: first, an a priori denial of the possibility of any individual or group situated within history knowing its final destination; second, a rejection of the proposed mechanism by which the overall historical evolution is to be discovered. This latter refutation is based in Aron’s arguments that the ultimate basis of historical materialism is metaphysical, not scientific, and that the causality upon which it is based 

Ibid., .



Ibid., –.



History and Politics

can be only partial and probable, not globally deterministic. Thus far Aron’s justification for a politics of understanding is confined to a demonstration of Marxism’s shortcomings as a philosophy of history and an analytical method. According to Daniel J. Mahoney, his positive justification for a politics of understanding is rooted in little more than an ungrounded existential choice. Here, as with the question of his relationship with Weber’s nominalist epistemology examined earlier, a basic ambiguity results from Aron’s concern with balancing rationalism and historicism. Thus while he criticises Weber’s decisionism in his secondary thesis, the following passage from the Introduction appears to validate Mahoney’s criticism, casting Aron very much as a forerunner of Sartrean existentialism: It is neither to surrender to a pathetic mode of philosophy, nor to confuse the anguish of a turbulent epoch with a permanent state of affairs, nor still to sink into nihilism to recall how man determines himself and his mission by measuring himself against nothingness. On the contrary, it is to affirm the power of he who creates himself by judging his milieu and choosing himself. Only in this way does the individual overcome the relativity of history through the absoluteness of the decision, assimilating within his essential self the history that he carries within himself and which becomes his own.

Yet the Introduction also contains, implicitly at least, a slightly more substantive and positive justification for the choice of a politics of understanding. Sylvie Mesure has argued that Aron overcomes the relativism that would otherwise undermine this commitment to a reasonable, moderate politics by elaborating the highly formalised universal ideal of progress quoted earlier. The most that may be claimed on this basis, however, is a kind of victory by default: the politics of understanding at least leaves open the possibility of a minimal rational progress, whereas a Marxist politics of historical Reason, Aron implies, precludes it by its very nature because its claims to absolute historical knowledge are false. Although this analysis takes the form of a comparison of ideal types of political praxis and not as a comparison of regime forms, it does not take a 

 

Daniel J. Mahoney, ‘Raymond Aron and the morality of prudence’, Modern Age,  (Summer ), –. See also page  of Mahoney, The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron: ‘This solution is somewhat of a word game in which resolute decision is dressed up in the garb of absoluteness and the problem is said to disappear. . . . One is left to conclude that the emperor still has no clothes and that this tactic will not do.’  La philosophie critique de l’histoire, . Introduction, –. Mesure, Raymond Aron, –.

Conclusion



giant leap of the imagination to transpose it from the first of these levels of analysis to the second. Viewed from this angle, the Introduction provides philosophical bases for Aron’s antitotalitarianism that are first epistemological and then moral in nature. Put simply, while totalitarian ideologies are wrong in their claims to absolute historical knowledge, totalitarian regimes are inhuman in their imposition of an official truth.

Conclusion ‘[T]he author who explains the theory of his own theory or sets out the epistemology underpinning his research always risks being mistaken; in other words, he risks doing something other than what he believes he is doing.’ This remark, which appears in Aron’s renowned study of Clausewitz, is clearly rooted in personal experience. Yet the ambivalence of Aron’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History originates not from its status as a work of historical epistemology as such, but from the way its author repeatedly switches between opposing positions at every stage of the book’s analysis. From Aron’s discussion of individual self-knowledge through to his treatment of the totality of human history, he pushes towards perspectivist extremes before pulling back to emphasise the limits of historical relativism. Disagreements in the secondary literature over the extent of the Introduction’s relativism are largely a reflection of this basic ambivalence, which Aron himself subsequently recognised. While these scholarly debates may ultimately be of little consequence, however, what is of the utmost historical significance is that Aron and some of his most influential peers came to see the book’s occasional tendency towards extreme relativism as highly problematic. This would have far-reaching implications for the intellectual histories of French liberalism and existentialism. In his war diaries, Jean-Paul Sartre began a critique of Aron’s philosophy of history that would have a significant influence on the development of his existential phenomenology and his later efforts to fuse this with  

 Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz: , L’âge européen (Paris, ), . Mémoires, –. In addition to Jean-Paul Sartre, who is discussed below, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existentialism also developed in part through a critical dialogue with Aron’s Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire. For Merleau-Ponty’s ‘covert dialogue’ with Aron see Kerry H. Whiteside, Merleau-Ponty and the Foundation of an Existential Politics (Princeton, ),–, –. For an earlier exploration of this subject see Kerry H. Whiteside, ‘Perspectivism and historical objectivity: Merleau-Ponty’s covert dialogue with Raymond Aron’, History and Theory,  (May ), –.



History and Politics

Marxism. According to Thomas Flynn, it was Sartre’s critique of Aron’s relativism in these notebooks that led him to formulate his famous ontological distinction between being ‘in itself’ and being ‘for itself’. Yet while this distinction may have provided a way around Aron’s problem of the ‘dissolution of the object’, it offered no means by which absolute knowledge of being in itself could be achieved. It was to address this problem that Sartre later formulated his ‘progressive-regressive method’, essentially a fusion of historical materialism with the theory of interpretative understanding first formulated by Wilhelm Dilthey. Sartre’s theorisation of this approach in his The Problem of Method rested to a large degree on a critique of Aron’s relativist interpretation of Dilthey’s theory of interpretative understanding. What Sartre rejected in Aron was not the fact of interpretative pluralism but the conclusion he drew from this concerning the dissolution of the object. Alluding to this passage from the Introduction, Sartre remarked that ‘human reality will be lost from view if meanings are not considered as synthetic objects, multidimensional, indissoluble.’ For Sartre, the relativist conclusions that Aron drew from Dilthey exposed him as a proponent of exactly the kind of ‘bourgeois’ analytical reason that Sartre had so vehemently rejected since the end of the war. Fundamental to the ‘dialectical reason’ that would supersede this was an interpretation of Dilthey’s theory of understanding diametrically opposed to the one offered by Aron. The Introduction’s critique of Marxism applies not just to vulgar economic determinism, but also to more sophisticated neo-Marxist explorations of consciousness. Aron’s discussion of the limitations of understanding as a means towards knowledge of others, where he repeatedly denies that understanding provides a route towards genuine intersubjectivity, is most significant in this regard, since later attempts to fuse existentialism with Marxism, especially in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, relied partly on a view of understanding as just such a path to intersubjectivity. In the first volume of the Critique Sartre would 

  



The analysis contained in the following two paragraphs summarises research discussed at greater length in Stewart, ‘Sartre, Aron and the contested legacy of the anti-positivist turn in French thought’. Thomas R. Flynn, ‘Sartre and the poetics of history’ in Christina Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Sartre (Cambridge, ), –, . Jean-Paul Sartre, Questions de méthode (Paris, [] ), . Emphasis added. Sartre made the distinction between opposing spirits of analysis and synthesis central to his presentation of Les Temps modernes in its first issue. See Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Présentation’, Les Temps modernes,  (October ), –. Introduction, –, –. For Sartre, the privileged situation wherein this fusion of otherwise atomised consciousnesses was to be realised was the revolutionary crowd. See his Critique de la raison dialectique, tome I: théorie des ensembles pratiques (Paris, ), –, –. On the

Conclusion



describe at length the translucence to a totalising understanding of first individual and then group praxis. In the abandoned second volume, the importance of this totalising understanding assumes even greater prominence as Sartre applies it in an attempt to show that ‘there is one human history with one truth and one intelligibility.’ The historical significance that has been attributed to Sartre’s abandonment of the second volume of the Critique is exceeded only by the historical ambition of the project itself. Surveying the wreckage of French intellectual radicalism in the wake of the antitotalitarian moment of the s, Perry Anderson looked back on Sartre’s failure as ‘a crucial moment in the intellectual history of post-war France’. ‘In that pregnant act of desistance, and the silence that ensued from it’, he remarked, ‘much of the subsequent intellectual fate of the French left was – we can now see – being decided.’ Since Sartre himself privately admitted that the Critique of Dialectical Reason originated from an attempt to refute the epistemological and political arguments of the Introduction to the Philosophy of History, it is tempting to see his defeat as Aron’s victory. Yet although Aron remained steadfast in his view that no philosophy could claim absolute knowledge of the meaning of human history, he was not insensitive to Sartre’s criticism of the Introduction. While he considered his doctoral thesis to have provided the basis for all his subsequent political thought, Aron was also never entirely satisfied with the book. Like Sartre, the source of his dissatisfaction was the Introduction’s occasional tendency towards a form of radical historical relativism; unlike Sartre, whose critique of the Introduction ultimately served a revolutionary aim, Aron became increasingly concerned that the book’s relativism undermined its moderate political conclusions. Although his postwar career largely diverted Aron’s attention from the epistemological questions that preoccupied him during his doctoral research, he would reformulate much of the Introduction’s argument in the second section of Opium of the Intellectuals, his most famous polemic against intellectual philocommunism. For instance, Aron’s account of communism as secular religion in this book was philosophically rooted in the Introduction’s argument that individuals, parties or states that claim

   

Critique’s covert dialogue with Aron’s Introduction see Stewart, ‘Sartre, Aron, and the contested legacy of the anti-positivist turn in French thought’. Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, –, –. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, tome II: l’intelligibilité de l’histoire (Paris, ), .  Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London, ), . Ibid., . Pierre Verstraeten, L’anti-Aron (Paris, ), .



History and Politics

absolute knowledge of the meaning of human history assume a position theoretically accessible only to an omnipotent deity. While adapting another argument from the Introduction for use in Opium of the Intellectuals, however, Aron made a minor but telling change. Where previously he had described how the objects of historical knowledge were liable to dissolve under an infinite variety of interpretations, now he wrote of how ‘the wealth of significations is inscribed on the object.’ Later, when preparing a new edition of the Introduction, Aron would make several presentational changes that revealed a similar concern for mitigating against the extreme relativist tendencies apparent in parts of the book. But Aron’s most significant response to this problem was to transpose some of the main epistemological concerns explored in the Introduction into his later reading of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. In this respect, as will be explored further in Chapter , there is a clear connection between Aron’s intellectual voyage of discovery to Germany before the war and his exploration of France’s liberal tradition after it. As the following two chapters will demonstrate, Aron’s most significant contributions to the formulation of what has come to be known as ‘Cold War liberalism’ were also deeply rooted in his response to liberalism’s moment of profound crisis in the interwar years.  

Introduction, –, , , , ; L’opium, –. As discussed in Note  on page  above.



L’opium, .

 

Antitotalitarianism

The concept of totalitarianism is among the most original and controversial innovations in twentieth-century political thought because of the unusual mixture of analytical and polemical functions it has performed. While providing a new conceptual language to describe and compare regimes for which the classical categories of dictatorship and tyranny seemed increasingly insufficient, the term has also served a denunciatory rhetorical purpose ever since it was coined by an Italian anti-fascist journalist in . Distinguishable in theory, the boundaries between these analytic and polemical functions have been notoriously fuzzy in practice. Consequently the concept’s heuristic value has repeatedly been questioned, and some scholars now regard the notion of totalitarianism primarily as an anti-communist rhetorical device. Given that communist claims to political legitimacy in postwar Europe rested so heavily on the movement’s anti-fascist and pacifist credentials, the theory of totalitarianism’s anti-communist propaganda value is obvious. And its use in support of a series of dubious wars, from Vietnam to the invasion of Iraq in , has done little to persuade sceptics of the concept’s scholarly value. 





The concept of totalitarianism has been called ‘without doubt the signal contribution of the twentieth-century to the history of political thought’ in Jeffrey C. Isaac, ‘Critics of totalitarianism’ in Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge, ), –, . For an interpretation of French antitotalitarianism along these lines see Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the s (New York, ). See also Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London, ); Domenico Losurdo, ‘Towards a critique of the category of totalitarianism’, Historical Materialism,  (), –. Samuel Moyn, ‘Introduction: anti-totalitarianism and after’ in Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future: Selected Essays (New York, ), –. For an example of the application of totalitarianism theory in relation to Islamist terrorism see Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York, ). For an interesting counterpoint to Berman see Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (London, ). For a classic early critique of totalitarianism theory in light of the Vietnam war see Herbert J. Spiro and Benjamin R. Barber, ‘Counter-ideological uses of “totalitarianism”’, Politics and Society,  (March ), –.





Antitotalitarianism

Yet there is more to the intellectual history of totalitarianism than the story of its various ideological encumbrances. During the s and s, for instance, to theorise totalitarianism was not necessarily an antitotalitarian practice. Nor was its intention normally to valorise an idealised, antithetical vision of ‘western democracy’. In fact, arguably the most valuable contribution that theories of totalitarianism have made to the history of western political thought is to have stimulated a wide variety of critical reflection on the problem of modern democracy. The French case is remarkable in this regard. Nowhere during the twentieth century was the language of antitotalitarianism more controversial than in Paris, the ‘capital of European anti-fascism’. There the combined legacies of the Popular Front and the Resistance had so closely associated communism with the cause of anti-fascism that not only was there strong resistance to comparative notions of totalitarianism, but anticommunism as such was often seen as objectively pro-fascist. It is this context that helps to explain why a text as important as Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism () was not published in full French translation until . What made the legacy of French anti-fascism particularly powerful, however, was the fact it was often imagined as the extension of a much longer patriotic tradition of republican left unity. This all helped to ensure that reflection on totalitarianism by French political thinkers such as Aron and Claude Lefort was marginal to the political debates of the Parisian intellectual left for most of the post–Second World War period. Yet it also meant that French reflection on the problem of totalitarianism ultimately extended beyond a critique of Marxism, the Soviet Union, or the French Communist Party to entail a thoroughgoing reappraisal of the theory and history of democracy in France since the Revolution. In the s this previously marginal phenomenon entered the mainstream of French intellectual life during what has come to be known as France’s ‘antitotalitarian moment’. Scholarship on this ideological sea change has sometimes reduced the antitotalitarianism of these years to the politics of opposition to the

   

See here the excellent anthology edited by Enzo Traverso, Le totalitarisme: le XXe siècle en débat (Paris, ), –. Anson Rabinach, ‘Paris, capital of anti-fascism’ in Warren Breckman et al. (eds.), The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory (New York, ), –. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, – (Oxford, ), . The term ‘antitotalitarian moment’ was coined by Michael Scott Christofferson in French Intellectuals against the Left.

Élie Halévy and Origins of Aron’s Theory of Totalitarianism



Common Programme of the French Socialist and Communist parties. Recent research, however, has taken the wider implications of French antitotalitarianism more seriously. This is a welcome development. Yet increasing attention to the turning point of the s risks obscuring the fact that the origins of France’s antitotalitarian moment – if we take this to mean a growing tendency on the part of intellectuals to use totalitarianism theory to rethink modern democracy – substantially predate this decade. The case of Raymond Aron makes this abundantly clear. A major figure in the history of intellectual antitotalitarianism in France and internationally, for Aron, the problem of democracy had been inseparable from that of totalitarianism ever since his earliest writings on the subject in the s. As well as casting new light on France’s late twentieth-century antitotalitarian moment, studying the development of Raymond Aron’s theory of totalitarianism also contributes to a new perspective on the intellectual history of what has come to be known as ‘Cold War liberalism’, highlighting its pre-Cold War and often non- or anti-liberal origins.

Élie Halévy and the Origins of Aron’s Theory of Totalitarianism The historian Élie Halévy has come to occupy a privileged position among Raymond Aron’s twentieth-century French intellectual forbears. Grandson to one of Saint-Simon’s less famous secretaries, his parents were Orléanist liberals whose friends included Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan. In retrospect this familial background – two parts moderate 



 



Ibid. For an early account of French antitotalitarianism that takes its positive theoretical contribution more seriously see Dick Howard, The Specter of Democracy (New York, ), –, –. See, e.g., Moyn, ‘Introduction’; Kevin Duong, ‘Does democracy end in terror? Transformations of antitotalitarianism in postwar France’, Modern Intellectual History,  (August ), –; Stephen W. Sawyer and Iain Stewart (eds.), In Search of the Liberal Moment: Democracy, Antitotalitarianism and Intellectual Politics in France since  (New York, ); Martin Breaugh et al. (eds.), Thinking Radical Democracy: The Return of Politics in Post-War France (Toronto, ), –. Jan-Werner Mu¨ller, ‘Fear and freedom: on “Cold War liberalism”’, European Journal of Political Theory,  (January ), –. See here Nicolas Baverez, ‘Life and works: Raymond Aron, philosopher and freedom fighter’ in José Colen and Élisabeth Dutartre-Michaut (eds.), The Companion to Raymond Aron (New York, ), . Baverez’s emphasis on Halévy as one of Aron’s most important intellectual influences is based on Aron’s own remark to the effect that he and Halévy were both descendants of the same liberal tradition of French political sociology. See Aron, Les étapes de la pensée sociologique (Paris, ), . The significance of Halévy in Aron’s construction of this tradition is discussed in Chapter . Philip Daileader, ‘Élie Halévy (–)’ in Philip Daileader and Philip Whalen (eds.) French Historians, – (Chichester, ), –, ; H.S. Jones, ‘The Era of Tyrannies: Élie



Antitotalitarianism

liberal to one part pre-Marxian socialist – appears to give a fair indication of Halévy’s subsequent career trajectory and political sympathies. Having trained as a philosopher at the École normale, he made his name as a historian of ideas working on the histories of utilitarianism and socialism at the École libre des sciences politiques (Sciences Po), a private elite training school that has been credited with keeping the flame of France’s liberal tradition alive under the Third Republic. Halévy shared this political sensibility in that he believed, to quote Philip Daileader, ‘the question that most needed to be answered during his lifetime was: how might France and Europe be both liberal, enjoying democratic government and the maximum amount of personal liberty, and stable at the same time?’ Like his friend the sociologist Célestin Bouglé, however, Halévy was ‘unambigusoulsy a man of the left’ by sentiment. Although he rejected the Durkheimians’ positivism, he shared their sympathy for the solidarist project of social legislation as a means of attenuating class conflict. With regard to socialism he was an ambivalently sympathetic outsider who contributed to a rediscovery of Saint-Simonianism in the late s. Yet the Great War exacerbated Halévy’s long-standing concerns about socialism’s latent authoritarian tendencies and, by the s, he had come to place this issue at the centre of his reflection on the origins of the contemporary ‘era of tyrannies’. Halévy set out his views on this subject in a short paper entitled ‘The Era of Tyrannies’ at the Société française de philosophie on  November . In this paper he argued that the new tyrannies, by which he meant the contemporary Italian, German, and Soviet regimes, defined an era that had begun with the establishment of a novel form of state organisation during the Great War. This new state had two distinctive



  



Halévy and Friedrich von Hayek on socialism’, European Journal of Political Theory,  (July ), –, . For a recent reappraisal of Halévy’s position in the history of French liberalism see the collection of articles edited by K. Steven Vincent, ‘Forum: Élie Halévy, French liberalism, and the politics of the Third Republic’, Modern Intellectual History,  (April ), –. H.S. Jones, ‘French liberalism and the legacy of the Revolution’ in Carolina Armenteros et al. (eds.), Historicising the French Revolution (Cambridge, ), –. Daileader, ‘Élie Halévy’, . Jones, ‘The Era of Tyrannies’, . Halévy described his early political trajectory in the following terms: ‘I was a “liberal” in the sense that I was anticlerical, a democrat, a republican . . . a “Dreyfusard”.’ Élie Halévy, L’ère des tyrannies: études sur le socialisme et la guerre (Paris, ), . See Célestin Bouglé and Élie Halévy (eds.), Doctrine de Saint-Simon: exposition, première année,  (Paris, ). On the history of Saint-Simonianism in France see Christophe Prochasson, SaintSimon, ou l’anti-Marx (Paris, ).

Élie Halévy and Origins of Aron’s Theory of Totalitarianism



characteristics: first, it exercised an unprecedented degree of control over the economy, relying in doing so on the cooperation of socialist parties and trades unions; second, its control over political debate was comparably extended to suppress the expression of opinions deemed incompatible with the national interest and enable it to conduct what he called ‘the organisation of enthusiasm’. But if the war had provided the immediate occasion for the emergence of this new state formation, Halévy, who approached his subject as a ‘historian philosopher’, located its essential ideational preconditions within the intellectual history of European socialism. What distinguished Halévy as a historian of ideas was the antinomical method whereby he presented the history of political doctrines as developing through the working out of dynamic tensions between their core principles. Having originally used this method in his writings on utilitarianism, in ‘The Era of Tyrannies’ he applied it to the intellectual history of socialism, which Halévy presented as unfolding out of a basic antinomy between the doctrine’s libertarian and organisational elements. Although French socialists had often presented themselves as heirs of the revolution of , Halévy noted that in practice from  onwards socialism’s organisational principle had progressively won out over its liberal one as the ideas of Saint-Simon and Lassalle were coopted into the authoritarian nationalism of leaders like Napoleon III and Bismarck. From  to  this development had been taken to a new level. Thus while extending into peacetime the state formation that emerged during the war, the new tyrannies also marked the culmination of a longer trend whereby ‘on the one hand, integral socialism turns into a form of nationalism. On the other hand, integral nationalism turns into a form of socialism’. Although Halévy had preferred the word ‘tyranny’ to ‘totalitarianism’ in his presentation, probably out of a desire to avoid a term that had become intensely politicised by , much of the debate that followed the paper  

 

 Halévy, L’ère des tyrannies, –, . Ibid., . Stuart Jones, ‘Élie Halévy, La formation du radicalisme philosophique (Paris: Alcan, )’ reviewed on H-Ideas, May , networks.h-net.org/node//reviews//jones-halevy-la-formationdu-radicalisme-philosophique [last accessed  July ]. Halévy, L’ère des tyrannies, . Halévy explained in the discussion that he had wished to address his subject as a ‘historian philosopher’ and to remain ‘above the level of politics’. See Halévy, L’ère des tyrannies, . The issue of whether or not communism was ‘totalitarian’ had become particularly contentious by the time Halévy gave his presentation. Three weeks earlier André Gide had published a highly controversial account of his recent visit to the Soviet Union in which, although avoiding the language of totalitarianism, he compared the USSR unfavourably with Nazi Germany. By this point use of the concept of totalitarianism to make such comparisons had become commonplace among



Antitotalitarianism

was conducted in the language of totalitarianism. During this discussion Raymond Aron expressed reservations about Halévy’s decision to place the Fascist, Nazi, and Soviet regimes within the same category. He conceded that the USSR was a totalitarian regime sharing common features with its German and Italian counterparts, but remarked that these commonalities, while ‘decisive for the liberal who reacts sentimentally against the loss of formal liberties and democratic liberties’, were of only secondary importance from a sociological point of view. Soviet totalitarianism differed sociologically from its fascist counterparts, he argued, because of the contrasting attitudes of communist and fascist regimes towards class struggle. Whereas Italian and German fascism were committed to protecting the interests of capital and the continuation of capitalist class relations, Soviet communism sought to overturn these relations in favour of the proletariat. Alluding to the wave of industrial unrest that had greeted the victory of the Popular Front earlier in the year, Aron argued that ‘The class struggle is today, even and especially in the democratic countries, the decisive problem, much more than liberalism, which is of lesser interest’. The opposing sociological orientations of fascism and communism also carried international implications. While all totalitarian regimes had command economies, only in the Soviet Union was the primary function of economic planning to raise living standards, whereas fascist economies were organised primarily in preparation for war. On this basis Aron concluded that ‘communist and fascist tyranny really represent irreconcilable enemies.’ Halévy died in August  and the following year his paper on the ‘era of tyrannies’ was published posthumously in a book bearing the same title. Aron’s review of this book offered a more detailed critique of Halévy’s arguments and serves as a useful point of entry for understanding the development of Aron’s own theory of totalitarianism on the eve of the Second World War. Although he no longer insisted on the fundamental enmity between fascist and communist regimes, Aron maintained in his review that the differences between Soviet and fascist totalitarianism were as significant as the similarities. Unlike Soviet communism, he argued,

 

Catholic opponents of the Popular Front. See André Gide, Retour de l’URSS (Paris, ), ; James Chappel, ‘The Catholic origins of totalitarianism theory in interwar Europe’, Modern Intellectual History,  (November ), –. Aron’s comments in the discussion that followed Halévy’s paper can be found in Aron, Machiavel et les tyrannies modernes (Paris, ), –. Aron, ‘L’ère des tyrannies d’Élie Halévy’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (April ), –.

Élie Halévy and Origins of Aron’s Theory of Totalitarianism



German and Italian fascism were not committed to social revolution. And while Soviet foreign policy included the practice of an innovative form of intellectual imperialism, it did not share the expansionist territorial ambitions of Italy and Germany. Furthermore, while he rejected the proposition that the ends of communism justified the means by which they were pursued, Aron still considered that the humanitarian values to which the project of Soviet communism laid claim clearly separated it from German and Italian fascism. A second element of Halévy’s theory that Aron criticised in his review was Halévy’s argument concerning the wartime origins of the new tyrannies. Aron rejected this on the grounds that the extension of European states’ economic responsibilities during the war had accelerated a tendency predating the outbreak of hostilities in  and that, with the exception of Russia, the prewar economic order had soon been restored in peacetime. There was thus no direct connection between total warfare and the organisation of totalitarian economies; rather, in Italy as in Germany, the extension of state economic control was more a response to postwar economic and social crises than the application of a preestablished, ideologically inspired blueprint. Nor did Aron accept that either totalitarian propaganda or the suppression of intellectual liberties by such regimes were inspired by wartime censorship and the ‘organisation of enthusiasm’. Such measures, he believed, were qualitatively different when undertaken by totalitarian dictatorships that viewed them as part of a permanent new political order and not as contingent necessities of war. Finally, Aron raised two objections to Halévy’s argument concerning totalitarianism’s long-term ideational origins. First, he claimed that if Halévy had meant that socialism’s internal contradiction was simply an expression of its doctrinal heterogeneity then the point was obvious and of little interest; the real question was whether this contradiction was fundamental to all forms of socialism and, by extension, whether or not the civil and political liberties to which socialists remained committed in theory could survive under a socialist economy in practice. The tentative response given in Aron’s review of The Era of Tyrannies was that while such a regime was theoretically conceivable, its practical realisation seemed highly unlikely in the near future. Second, while Aron agreed with Halévy that socialism contained contradictory libertarian and authoritarian principles, he thought that other modern political ideas displayed analogous tensions of equal or greater consequence, citing here modern democracy’s 

Ibid., –.



Ibid., –.



Ibid., –.



Antitotalitarianism

attempted reconciliation of liberty and equality on the basis of a sovereign general will. The detailed critique of Halévy in his review of The Era of Tyrannies would have a substantial and more or less enduring impact on the development of Aron’s own reflection on totalitarianism. On the question of whether the divergent ends pursued by the Soviet and fascist regimes placed them into separate categories from a moral point of view, Aron’s stance would subsequently vary according to his audience and the immediacy of the perceived threat posed by communism on the domestic or world stage. While his critique of Halévy on the wartime origins of the new tyrannies would feed directly into Aron’s writing on the subject of political and secular religion, the importance of this theme to his theory of totalitarianism would similarly vary during the decades following the Second World War. The question of how civil liberties could be protected in a partially socialised economy, however, would preoccupy Aron throughout the war years and beyond. In contrast to Friedrich von Hayek, whose dire predictions about the totalitarian implications of state economic planning in The Road to Serfdom were partly informed by Halévy’s account of the socialist ideational origins of the ‘new tyrannies’, Aron’s scepticism regarding this aspect of Halévy’s theory ultimately led him to play an important role in the development of what came to be known as ‘end of ideology’ theory in the mid-s. The most substantial and enduring problem arising from Aron’s engagement with Halévy’s work, however, was not the question of totalitarianism’s link with socialism but its ambiguous relationship with democracy.

Democratic States and Totalitarian States Two months after the publication of his review of The Era of Tyrannies Aron gave a presentation on ‘Democratic States and Totalitarian States’ at  



Ibid., –. In December  Aron described Nazism as ‘the most extreme form of totalitarianism’. See his ‘Signification des problèmes français’ in Aron, L’âge des empires et l’avenir de la France (Paris, ), –, . In  he wrote that ‘Compared to Soviet totalitarianism, Hitlerian totalitarianism was only an amateur imitation.’ See Aron, Les guerres en chaîne (Paris, ), . In his –  Sorbonne lectures Aron highlighted the ‘essential difference’ between Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism ‘because of the ideas that animate each enterprise’. See Aron, Démocratie et totalitarisme (Paris, ), . His position hardened in the s, however, and by  Aron could write that ‘Communism is no less odious to me than Nazism was. The argument I employed more than once to differentiate between the messianism of class and that of race hardly impresses me anymore.’ See Aron, Mémoires:  années de réflexion politique (Paris, ), . Jones, ‘Élie Halévy and Friedrich von Hayek on socialism’.

Democratic States and Totalitarian States



the Société française de philosophie. From early on in his paper it was clear that Aron had now moved still further from the stance he had adopted in November . Where previously his sociological understanding of fascist totalitarianism had been broadly Marxist, by  it was primarily informed by the Italian social theorist Vilfredo Pareto and the dissident former Nazi Hermann Rauschning. Although he did not deny the complicity of big business and conservative political elites in the rise to power of fascism in Italy and Germany, Aron now considered that this was of little help for understanding the subsequent development of totalitarian states. To make sense of this more important issue, he argued, it was necessary to recognise that the totalitarian regimes in Germany and Italy were governed by new elites. Notwithstanding the temporary alliances with traditional conservatives that had facilitated their rise to power, these new elites were radically different from the old ones because of their spontaneous appetite for violence and their extreme cynicism. The systematic use of violence to eradicate domestic social conflicts in totalitarian states created an additional impetus towards the adoption of violently expansionist foreign policies by the new elites as a means of uniting the nation and securing their position in power. Since fascist imperialism was thus primarily driven by political considerations, those in neighbouring countries who believed the international crisis could be resolved through economic negotiation had been mistaken. So too had those conservatives who were ready to deal with fascists because of their common anticommunism. Having previously offered an essentialist interpretation of the opposition between fascism and communism, Aron now claimed that

 



Aron, ‘États démocratiques et États totalitaires’ [] in Aron, Penser la liberté, penser la démocratie (Paris, ), –. ‘États démocratiques et États totalitaires’, . Aron was among the earliest French readers of Pareto and his interpretation of the Italian social theorist developed in line with his changing political priorities between the s and s. On this see Stuart L. Campbell, ‘The four Pareto’s of Raymond Aron’, Journal of the History of Ideas,  (April–June ), –. On the wider French reception of Pareto see Giovanni Busino, ‘La destinée de la sociologie Parétienne en France’, L’année sociologique,  (), –. For a detailed account of Aron’s relationship with ‘Machiavellian’ political and social thought more broadly see Serge Audier, Machiavel, conflit et liberté (Paris, ), –. Aron became acquainted with Rauschning in Paris during the late s and regarded his The Revolution of Nihilism as ‘the best book that has been written on the German regime’. See ‘États démocratiques et États totalitaires’, ; Mémoires, –; Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism. A Warning to the West (New York, ).  ‘États démocratiques et États totalitaires’, , –, –, . Ibid., , –.



Antitotalitarianism

the anti-communism of Italian and German fascists had been more of a cynical propaganda device than a deep-seated antagonism. In a reversal of his earlier position on this issue, Aron now argued that it was for the democratic states and not the Soviet Union that the German and Italian regimes reserved their essential hostility. Yet Aron did ‘not at all think that totalitarian regimes as such must be considered as an absolute evil’ and, in the second half of his paper, he argued that there was much that the democracies could learn from their totalitarian neighbours, not least in the area of social and economic policy. While he considered that there were limits beyond which state economic intervention was incompatible with a ‘regime of political liberty’, he was now clearly less pessimistic than Halévy had been about the possibility of such a regime enacting a partial adaptation of totalitarian methods of economic organisation. Nor did he share the fears of many on the contemporary left about arguments for constitutional reform to reinforce the power of the executive. It was wrong, he said, ‘to speak of fascism every time somebody proposes restoring a certain authority or borrowing certain methods from the regimes that we are fighting’. Such measures were necessary to counteract ‘the decline [déchéance] of democratic institutions’. What must continue to distinguish reformed democratic states from their totalitarian counterparts, Aron argued, was that whatever sacrifices were required to make the necessary reforms would have to be freely accepted. Moreover, the fundamental values that such reforms were ultimately designed to protect would be diametrically opposed to those espoused by the totalitarian states. Yet it was not self-evident what these basic democratic values were. Among the more controversial parts of Aron’s presentation was his claim that traditional democratic values had fallen into a state of ‘decadence’ that demanded a fundamental rethinking of ‘progressisme’, ‘abstract moralism’ and ‘the ideas of ’. The first task here would be to ‘distinguish

   

Ibid., , –. Here Aron even raises the possibility of a Nazi-Soviet alliance, adding, however, that such a scenario was unlikely. Ibid., , . Compare Halévy, L’ère des tyrannies, –. This issue is discussed at greater length in Chapter .   ‘États démocratiques et États totalitaires’, . Ibid., . Ibid., , –. Ibid., . For the discussion that followed Aron’s paper see pages –.

Democratic States and Totalitarian States



between what is secondary and what is essential in the idea of democracy’. Aron set out his position on this issue as follows: The notion of popular sovereignty is not an essential idea, because it can just as well lead to despotism as to liberty. [. . .] What is essential to the idea of a democratic regime is firstly legality: [it is] a regime where there are laws and where power is not arbitrary and without limits. I think that democratic regimes are those which have a minimum of respect for persons and do not consider individuals only as means of production or objects of propaganda. A democratic regime is also a regime that controls the authority of its governors through a system of representation. We must not only reconstitute a legitimate authority that is neither magical nor irrational, it is also important that those who possess authority have the minimum necessary competence to administer today’s societies, which are technically very complicated and in which, with the best will in the world, the masses call for measures exactly contrary to their true interests.

Much of this was not new. By arguing for the need to update progressive political values and bemoaning the lack of economic expertise among French politicians and intellectuals, Aron was revisiting issues that he had first touched on as early as . What was different about these remarks, however, was that by emphasising the tyrannical potential of popular sovereignty and stressing the importance of constitutionality and representative democracy in protecting personal liberties from unlimited or arbitrary state power, Aron for the first time appeared to be advancing an identifiably liberal democratic vision. Yet at no point in his presentation did he describe his position in these terms. What is more, although the conclusions that Aron drew from his critique of democracy and totalitarianism were broadly liberal, the contents of that critique and the terms in which it was articulated were drawn from predominantly anti-liberal sources. By critiquing the ‘decadence’ of democratic values and institutions, for instance, Aron was adopting the vocabulary of the antidemocratic right.

  

Ibid., . Aron, ‘Ce que pense la jeunesse universitaire d’Europe’, Revue de Genève,  (December ), –. Kevin Passmore, The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy (Oxford, ), –, .



Antitotalitarianism

Although the first half of his talk had been directed in large part towards French conservatives who deluded themselves about the prophylactic anticommunist value of fascism, Aron was broadly sympathetic towards much of the conservative and radical rights’ critique of French democracy. This is not surprising considering that his own early political formation had taken place in the same overlapping neo-socialist and neo-radical intellectual circles from which a new French far right had eventually begun to emerge during the mid-to-late s. Two of Aron’s acquaintances from his time in the Groupement universitaire pour la Société des Nations, Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce, had joined the fascist Parti Populaire Français in , while the neosocialist Marcel Déat, whom Aron had much admired as a student, would go on to form the ultra-collaborationist Rassemblement national populaire during the Occupation. What separated Aron from such figures was not so much his understanding of the problems facing French democracy as his refusal to believe that extremist political parties offered a credible solution. Aron’s remarks on the need to rearrange the hierarchy of democratic values appeared in the final part of the presentation, where his focus shifted away from the external threat posed to democracies by their totalitarian enemies and towards the totalitarian menace threatening democracy from within. He had previously touched upon this subject in his review of Halévy’s The Era of Tyrannies, where he drew upon Carl Schmitt’s essay on the ‘Further Development of the Total State in Germany’ to discuss the danger of a totalitarian party overturning democracy by legal means. In this article, written on the eve of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January , Schmitt described how under the Weimar Republic political parties had developed into ‘total structures’ which, through a variety of auxiliary organisations such as youth groups and sports clubs, sought to politicise every aspect of their members’ lives. The path to the total state, Schmitt suggested, passed through this prior totalisation of parties. Aron, who was familiar with this article, having come to admire Schmitt’s work during his stay in Germany, referred to it implicitly in his review of The Era of Tyrannies when he wrote that Nazi Germany had

 

 Mémoires, , . ‘États démocratiques et États totalitaires’, –. Carl Schmitt, ‘Further development of the total state in Germany’ [February ] in Carl Schmitt, Four Articles, – (Washington, DC, ), –.

Democratic States and Totalitarian States



replaced the ‘competing totalities’ of Weimar political life with ‘a single totality’. By highlighting the despotic potential of popular sovereignty in his presentation on ‘Democratic States and Totalitarian States’, however, Aron was not only referring to a situation whereby an antidemocratic, ‘total party’ might overturn democracy by electoral means. Such a scenario manifested the deeper underlying antinomy within the modern democratic ideal that Aron had also first alluded to in his review of Halévy’s The Era of Tyrannies. In redirecting the search for totalitarianism’s ideological origins away from Halévy’s focus on socialism and towards the concept of popular sovereignty, Aron arrived at a vision of the relationship between democracy and totalitarianism that echoed Schmitt’s claim, made in the preface to the second edition of The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, that Fascism and Soviet communism were ‘certainly anti-liberal but not necessarily



‘L’ère des tyrannies d’Élie Halévy’, . Although Aron did not refer directly to Schmitt’s article in his review of Halévy, he did so explicitly in the discussion following his talk on ‘Democratic States and Totalitarian States’ two months later. See ‘États démocratiques et États totalitaires’, . Schmitt’s article continued to inform Aron’s understanding of the crisis of Weimar democracy into the post-war period. See, e.g., R. Aron and F. Clairens, Les Français devant la Constitution (Paris, ), : ‘The coherence of the parties and the discipline of their troops turned Weimarian pluralism into a conglomerate of totalities.’ Schmitt entered into correspondence with Aron in December , when he wrote to convey his admiration for Aron’s Les guerres en chaîne, which had recently been translated into German. In his response, dated  January , Aron, alluding to Schmitt’s previous membership of the National Socialist Party, remarked that ‘Whatever might have been my reactions to some of the positions that you took in the past, as seen from outside, I have always greatly admired [Carl Schmitt] the jurist and philosopher and have been for many years one of your attentive readers.’ See Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF(). See also Penser la guerre, Clausewitz: l’âge européen (Paris, ), . Here Aron refers to having read Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political while living in Berlin between  and . Although he was a critical reader of Schmitt, a sense of the importance he attributed to the German’s work is apparent from the instrumental role Aron played in bringing Schmitt’s writings to the attention of French readers, arranging for the first French translations of The Concept of the Political and Theory of the Partisan to be published together in his Liberté de l’esprit collection with Calmann-Lévy in . Aron’s engagement with Schmitt in some of his postwar writings and correspondence is discussed by Jan-Werner Mu¨ller in his A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven, ), –. Aron’s correspondence with Schmitt is also discussed in Piet Tommissen, ‘Raymond Aron face à Carl Schmitt’, Schmittiana,  (), –. On the postwar French reception of Schmitt’s concept of the political, including by Aron, see Samuel Moyn, ‘Concepts of the political in twentieth-century European thought’ in Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (Oxford, ), –. On Aron’s alleged role in laundering Schmitt’s political reputation see Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, ‘Why did Raymond Aron write that Carl Schmitt was not a Nazi? An alternative genealogy of French liberalism’, Modern Intellectual History,  (November ), –.



Antitotalitarianism

anti-democratic’. In a manuscript for a book on ‘modern Machiavellianism’ that he was preparing around the same time as his paper on ‘Democratic States and Totalitarian States’ Aron asserted that ‘totalitarianism’, far from being the opposite of democracy, ‘consists in taking seriously, of pushing to its furthest extreme the interpretation of the general will by a man or a party’. Arguing that the basis of National Socialism’s claim to political legitimacy was ‘originally and essentially democratic’, Aron wrote that If by democratic we mean primarily that sovereignty emanates from the people, nothing prevents us from calling totalitarian regimes democratic since it all depends on the way the education and consultation of the people is conceived. If by democratic we mean the effective exercise by the people of its sovereignty, or at least contact as close and frequent as possible between those who govern and the people, the totalitarian regimes are hardly democratic. If democracy defines itself by a system of liberties granted and assured to the governed, then totalitarianism opposes itself primarily to liberalism and not to democracy.

Yet for all that Aron and Schmitt shared a similar understanding of the relationship between totalitarianism and democracy, they held different views of democracy’s relationship with liberalism. Whereas in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy Schmitt emphasised the ultimate incompatibility of liberalism and democracy, much of Aron’s career from  until his death in  would be dedicated to arguing the opposite. ‘Democratic States and Totalitarian States’ marks the point at which this issue became one of the central concerns of his political thought. What enabled Aron to make this case was partly his relegation of popular sovereignty to a position of secondary importance within the scale of democratic values. Although Schmitt would probably have viewed this as an act of conceptual obfuscation, Aron’s willingness to sacrifice the primacy of popular sovereignty to the demands of personal liberty reflected his basic agreement with Schmitt concerning the incompatibility of liberalism and a conception of democracy based exclusively on the principle of popular sovereignty. What also allowed Aron to draw an opposite conclusion from this common premise was that he did not share Schmitt’s apparent sense of the ultimately determinative power of conceptual antinomies. For Aron, the existence of such antinomies at a conceptual level need not be definitively resolved at the level of political practice because these   

Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Massachusetts, []), . Aron, ‘Essais sur le Machiavélisme moderne’ in Machiavel et les tyrannies modernes, –, . Ibid., .

Democratic States and Totalitarian States



conceptual and practical domains were mediated by political cultures through which different ways of understanding concepts like popular sovereignty filtered into attitudes, behaviours, and institutions that were more or less favourable to the long-term survival of a democratic regime. One area where this was particularly apparent during the s was in the debate over constitutional reform, when proposals to tackle endemic governmental instability by effectively enabling prime ministers to dissolve the National Assembly were widely opposed for violating the principle of popular sovereignty. After the passing of the Enabling Act in Germany and the anti-parliamentary riots of  February , left-wing opponents of such measures typically associated calls for a reinforcement of executive power with crypto-fascism or neo-Boulangism, imagining their resistance as the continuation of a tradition of republican defence dating back to the French Revolution. Aron, who was sympathetic to the cause of constitutional reform, had little patience for such views. He considered normative concepts like popular sovereignty to be open to a range of legitimate interpretations and institutional manifestations, and abhorred the tendency of the French left to equate calls for a reinforcement of executive power with fascism. Yet the merging of anti-fascism with traditional ideas and practices of republican defence was a very powerful mobilising force on the French left, forming a common political culture that united radicals, socialists, and communists in a Popular Front coalition that won the  general election on a platform of defending the democratic republic against fascism. Looking back on the Popular Front in ‘Democratic States and Totalitarian States’, however, Aron argued that its anti-fascist premise was mistaken, its economic policies ‘insane’, and its political culture illustrative of ‘the decadence of traditional values’ in French politics. Rather than saving French democracy, the Popular Front had seriously undermined it. These arguments outraged one of Aron’s listeners in particular. During the discussion Victor Basch, a former member of the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes, launched an impassioned defence of the whole anti-fascist movement and accused Aron of minimising the internal fascist threat to French democracy. There was an element of truth to this 

  

Nicolas Roussellier, ‘André Tardieu et la crise du constitutionalisme libéral, –’, Vingtième Siècle,  (January–March ), –, , , –. André Tardieu, L’heure de la décision (Paris, ), . François Monnet, Refaire la République: André Tardieu, une dérive réactionnaire (–) (Paris, ), –. ‘États démocratiques et États totalitaires’, . For Basch’s reaction and Aron’s response see Ibid., –.



Antitotalitarianism

accusation, since Aron was more frank about the scale of the danger posed by French fascism in private than he was in public. On  October , he had written to the Jesuit theologian and philosopher Gaston Fessard that ‘It is clear today that if France does not manage to overcome its divisions and get back on its feet, in ten years it will no longer exist, whether there is war or not, due to Hitlerisation from without or within.’ That this was much further than Aron was later prepared to go in his paper may be partly explicable by a change in political context. By June  the general elections scheduled for  were widely expected to be postponed; it was therefore unlikely that France’s new far-right parties would have the opportunity to test their electoral strength at a national level in the foreseeable future. But the relative moderation of Aron’s public remarks also reflected his view that the Manichean rhetoric and mass demonstrations of the anti-fascist movement had exacerbated rather than alleviated the crisis of French democracy. Responding to Victor Basch’s objections, he remarked that ‘The perpetual insults of ‘fascist’ and ‘antifascist’ that have been so generously exchanged over the last few years risk pushing France towards a change of regime.’ Far-right parties like the PPF were thus not solely responsible for the political polarisation that fed into the decadence of French democracy; this was to a large extent a result of the ‘unlimited demagogy’ of France’s anti-fascist left. While he later claimed to have voted for the Popular Front in , Aron never participated in the anti-fascist movement from which it had emerged following the riots of  February . His initial support for the Blum administration had turned into disappointment when the government instituted a forty-hour week and held off from devaluing the franc until the end of September . In June  Aron had published an article that was highly critical of the anti-fascist movement and the Blum  

 

Letter from Aron to Gaston Fessard,  October , Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF. The general election scheduled for  was postponed for two years on  July ; however, according to The Glasgow Herald ‘there had been much talk of postponing the elections’ before this. See ‘French Elections to be Postponed’, The Glasgow Herald,  July . This consideration may also have informed Aron’s claim in April  that ‘France is not immediately threatened by a rightwing “tyranny”’ since by this point Germany had broken the terms of the Munich Agreement in Czechoslovakia and demanded the return of the Free City of Danzig to Germany, prompting the French and British governments to issue a guarantee of Polish independence on March . The imminence of war and the likely implications of this for the French electoral cycle were therefore apparent by April  when Aron’s review was published. For the quotation see ‘L’ère des tyrannies d’Élie Halévy’, .  ‘États démocratiques et États totalitaires’, . Ibid., . Aron, Le spectateur engagé (Paris, ), –.

Democratic States and Totalitarian States



government’s economic policy in Halévy’s Revue de métaphysique et de morale. His paper at the Société française de philosophie revived this critique and linked the alleged decadence of French democracy partly to the Popular Front’s social and economic reforms. Aron’s remark that ‘It is ridiculous to oppose regimes founded on work with regimes founded on leisure. It is grotesque to believe that we can resist canons with butter or effort by rest’, for instance, was an allusion to the Popular Front’s introduction of paid holidays and a reduced working week. But Aron’s critique of the first Blum government in  extended beyond the technicalities of its social and economic policies to encompass the whole political culture that had bound the Popular Front alliance together. Fundamental to the creation of that culture had been the French Communist Party’s abandonment of the rhetoric of class warfare in favour of a neo-Jacobin form of patriotic republicanism after the signing of the Franco-Soviet pact in May . As the party leader, Maurice Thorez, put it in a book published the following year: The Communists – ‘these Jacobins of the proletarian revolution’ – claim the heritage of the revolutionary energy of the Jacobins of  and the Communards of . They claim the heritage of the sansculottes of the Year II and of the soldiers of Valmy; and they summon the middle classes, as their ancestors did, against the White reaction, against aristocrats like Colonel de la Rocque, President of the Croix de Feu and descendant of the Coblentz émigrés.

Presenting the struggle to save democracy from fascism as a continuation of France’s revolutionary tradition helped the PCF to expand its United Front with the socialists to form a new Popular Front alliance including the Radical Party. A crucial moment in the implementation of this new line was the party’s organisation of a joint demonstration on  July  at which communists joined with radicals and socialists to march   



Aron, ‘Réflexions sur les problèmes économiques français’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (October ), –. ‘États démocratiques et États totalitaires’, , . Maurice Thorez, France Today and the People’s Front (London, ), . The Croix de Feu was a veterans’ association that participated in the protests, though not the riots, against the democratic republic on  February . On the contemporary French left it was widely regarded as a fascist organisation. Historians disagree on this question. On the Croix de Feu see Sean Kennedy, Reconciling France against Democracy: The Croix de Feu and the Parti Social Français, – (Montreal, ). For a recent discussion of the debate on French fascism see Kevin Passmore, ‘L’historiographie du fascisme en France’, French Historical Studies,  (August ), –. Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, – (Cambridge, ), –.



Antitotalitarianism

under the tricolore and sing the Marseillaise. But if the PCF’s neoJacobinism proved highly effective at uniting the Popular Front around a shared revolutionary heritage, by rhetorically excluding much of the French right from the national community it also contributed to the Manichean political polarisation that informed Aron’s understanding of the ‘decadence’ of French democracy. Although he did not specify how the alleged decadence of traditional democratic values had come about, Aron’s arguments for rethinking those values in the face of the totalitarian menace amounted to a tacit indictment of the value system around which the Popular Front coalition of socialists, radicals, and communists had united. One of the main arguments of his paper was that ‘Totalitarian regimes are genuinely revolutionary, whereas the democracies are essentially conservative.’ This was directed partly against the increasing sympathy of conservatives towards fascism as a barrier against communism. But the notion that it would be necessary to recognise the authentically revolutionary character of fascist totalitarianism and the necessarily conservative orientation of democratic states if democracy was seriously to be defended against fascism also challenged some of the French anti-fascist movement’s most basic truths. Victor Basch’s appalled response to Aron’s paper made this clear. During the discussion, he dismissed Aron’s understanding of the terms revolutionary and conservative as an ‘amusing’ aberrance. Whereas Aron regarded the fact that the contemporary meanings ascribed to such words were still determined by their nineteenth-century usage as symptomatic of the decadence of French political culture, Basch interpreted Aron’s literal rather than conventional use of these terms as a deliberate act of provocation. In a way he was right to do so, since the democratic values that Aron claimed to be most concerned with protecting from the totalitarian menace were not originally conservative but liberal ones. Not only had Aron recognised them as such in his manuscript on modern Machiavellianism, but during the discussion that followed his paper he remarked that ‘we are . . . conservatives since we are liberals.’ Why, then, did Aron choose to avoid identifying his position as a liberal one in the main text of his paper? By describing the international crisis in terms of democratic conservatism against revolutionary totalitarianism Aron identified an antitotalitarian position that stood in the sharpest possible contrast to the anti-fascist  

Hence Aron’s remark that ‘up to now the anti-fascist movements have aggravated the political and moral faults of the democracies.’ ‘États démocratiques et États totalitaires’, .   Ibid., . Ibid., –. Ibid., .

Democratic States and Totalitarian States



mainstream, which he considered to be dangerously partisan. Aron’s antitotalitarian alternative was potentially a much broader church because it could appeal to those parts of conservative opinion that the neo-Jacobin political culture of French anti-fascism excluded. This was particularly true in relation to political Catholicism. Part of what made totalitarian regimes revolutionary on Aron’s telling was that they consciously rejected ‘not only the perishable political values of the nineteenth century, but the supreme values of the western tradition – respect for the person, for the spirit [l’esprit]’. What was at stake in the struggle against totalitarianism was not just liberalism or democracy but the Christian civilisation from which they had emerged. Although, as he himself recognised, Aron’s democratic vision was broadly liberal, the terms in which he presented it in ‘Democratic States and Totalitarian States’ deliberately bypassed the language of liberalism to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. This is probably why, for instance, throughout the paper and the discussion that followed Aron mostly eschewed the language of liberal individualism and instead defended democracy as a regime that respected the autonomy and dignity of persons. To promote democratic conservatism in these terms was to do so in the language not of liberalism but of Catholic personalism. Thus it is perhaps unsurprising that, while ‘Democratic States and Totalitarian States’ provoked a very negative reaction from Victor Basch, it drew a much more positive one from the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who expressed his ‘entire agreement’ with Aron’s paper. Raymond Aron’s presentation at the Société française de philosophie in June  marked the culmination of his prewar writing on the relationship between totalitarianism, liberalism, and democracy. After witnessing the rise of National Socialism in Germany, he had begun seriously to reflect on this issue in the light of Élie Halévy’s work on the new ‘era of  

 

Ibid., . Aron’s reticence about ‘liberalism’ in the most important of his early critiques of totalitarianism highlights a limitation of the ‘word history’ approach when applied to the intellectual history of liberalism in the twentieth century. Notable in this regard is the absence of Aron from a work that strongly emphasises the importance of France in its ‘word history of liberalism’: Helena Rosenblatt’s, The Lost History of Liberalism from Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, ), . Emphasis in original. ‘États démocratiques et États totalitaires’, , , , , . Ibid., –. The dialogue between Aron and Maritain that began at the Société française de philosophie would continue during the war, when Aron published under the pseudonym of René Avord. See Jacques Maritain, ‘The End of Machiavellianism’, The Review of Politics,  (January ), –; René Avord, ‘Jacques Maritain et la querelle du machiavélisme’, La France libre,  (July ), –.



Antitotalitarianism

tyrannies’. And if in  he had expressed scepticism about Halévy’s ‘sentimental’ liberal perspective, by  Aron had moved much closer to the late historian’s position. The fundamental hostility of fascist and communist regimes towards democratic ones, he now believed, exceeded their more superficial antipathy towards each other. Yet Aron had reached this position through a critical engagement with authors, such as Vilfredo Pareto, Hermann Rauschning, and Carl Schmitt, whose attitudes towards liberalism and democracy ranged from indifference to profound hostility. And despite privately recognising the liberal orientation of his vision of a renewed democracy, Aron eschewed the language of liberalism and instead promoted it in public as a form of democratic conservatism. This functioned to distance Aron’s antitotalitarianism from the anti-fascist mainstream, thereby opening up a more broadly inclusive platform from which to defend democracy against its external enemies and reduce the appeal of fascism to French conservatives. Although not an overtly anti-communist position, Aron’s prewar antitotalitarianism would require no substantial modification to be redeployed in the context of the Cold War. Indeed, in its opening towards political Catholicism in particular, Aron’s paper on ‘Democratic States and Totalitarian States’ anticipated the sort of ideological ‘reshuffling’ that would later produce what has come to be known as ‘Cold War liberalism’. As we have seen, in Aron’s case the formative influences on this position were not primarily liberal ones. While the work of Élie Halévy provided an important source of inspiration, the continuing divergences between his and Halévy’s accounts of the origins of totalitarianism would ultimately prove more consequential for Aron’s political thought than his new willingness to place fascist and communist regimes within the same category. This became most immediately apparent when Aron, in a further departure from Halévy’s account of the ‘new tyrannies’, began to develop an interpretation of totalitarianism as secular religion.

Secular Religion Raymond Aron’s most original contribution to the theory of totalitarianism is often thought to be the concept of ‘secular religion’, a term he is credited with having coined in an article for the journal La France libre in



On the influence of personalist political thought on the ideological ‘reshuffling’ that helped to produce Cold War liberalism see Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia, ), , , . On Cold War liberalism more broadly see Mu¨ller, ‘Fear and Freedom’.

Secular Religion



July . Yet this claim is unfounded. The terms ‘political’ and ‘secular religion’ had been used in discussions of totalitarianism since the early s, including in France. Examining how Aron’s use of this language during the late s and s built on previous deployments of religious metaphor in the study of totalitarianism significantly revises our understanding of both the origins and orientation of his writing on this subject. Aron’s work in this area is sometimes held to stand apart from that of authors like Eric Voegelin because Aron supposedly approached the subject from an Enlightenment perspective that was implicitly critical of religion. Because of this, Aron’s account of secular religion has been seen to rest on an underdeveloped understanding of religion. But while this latter criticism is well founded, the notion that Aron approached the question of political and secular religion from an anti-religious, Enlightenment perspective is at best a half truth. Insofar as Aron directed his theory of secular religion towards a critique of Marxist eschatology, it is likely that his work drew partly upon the precedent set by the Belgian neo-socialist Hendrik de Man. But most of the theoretical predecessors whose work informed Aron’s accounts of political and secular religion were conservatives and some of these, particularly once he turned his attention from fascism to communism at the end of the war, were Catholics. 









Aron’s first article on secular religion is ‘L’avenir des religions séculières’, [] in Aron, L’âge des empires et l’avenir de la France (Paris, ), –. For claims of Aron’s originality in this regard see Brian C. Anderson, Raymond Aron: The Recovery of the Political (Lanham, ),  n. ; Daniel J. Mahoney, The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron: A Critical Introduction (Lanham, ), . For examples see Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (Princeton, ), –. By his own admission, Eric Voegelin’s use of the term ‘political religion’ followed rather than founded a trend within the literature on totalitarianism. See Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections (Columbia, ), . The use of religious metaphor more broadly in discussions of fascism and communism was well established by the s. In October , for instance, the literary critic Albert Thibaudet wrote that ‘in Europe communism and fascism have acquired an expansive strength that can only be compared to that of religions, or rather that of religious orders henceforth inclined to superimpose wars of religion onto political wars.’ Albert Thibaudet, ‘Réflexions’, Nouvelle revue française,  (December ), –, –. Hans Maier, ‘Concepts for the comparison of dictatorships: ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘political religions’ in Hans Maier (ed.), Totalitarianism and Political Religions: Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships, vol. I (Abingdon, ), –, . In volume III of the same collection see Hans Otto Seitschek, ‘The interpretation of totalitarianism as religion’, –, . See also Harald Seubert’s contribution to the concluding discussion transcribed on page  of volume II. For this criticism of Aron see previous reference; however, Aron is not the only theorist of political religion open to this criticism. For a compelling broader critique of the concepts of political and secular religion from the perspective of a historian of religions see Stanley Stowers, ‘The concepts of ‘religion’, ‘political religion’ and the study of Nazism’, Journal of Contemporary History,  (January ), –. See e.g. Henry de Man, The Psychology of Socialism (London, ), –, –. For the influence of de Man on the young Aron see pages – above.



Antitotalitarianism

By recognising this it is possible to reach a fuller understanding of how the significance of this concept in Aron’s work changed over time, performing a variety of sometimes overlapping heuristic and polemical functions in rapidly evolving political contexts. Raymond Aron first described National Socialism as a ‘temporal religion’ during a presentation at the Centre de documentation sociale in . It would, however, be at least three years before he began to apply this language to the Soviet Union. In the unfinished manuscript for his Essais sur le Machiavélisme moderne, written between the spring of  and the fall of France in , Aron for the first time referred to all three totalitarian regimes as ‘elementary and fanatical religions’. Another early example of Aron’s use of religious metaphor can be found in an article for Recherches Philosophiques published in , where he referred to the determinism of vulgar Marxism ‘transform[ing] a philosophy into a dogma, a legitimate faith into a fanaticism’. These isolated remarks were by no means organised into a unified theory, but the various contexts in which Aron deployed religious metaphor before the war highlight what would be an ongoing eclecticism in his use of the terms political and, later, secular religion. To describe Nazism, Fascism, Soviet communism, or Marxism in religious terms was of course never to approach them from a position of value neutrality, but after the onset of the Cold War this eclecticism increasingly reflected the fact that Aron’s use of religious metaphor served polemical ends. Much of Aron’ earliest writing on this subject focuses on political religion as an innovative propaganda technique deployed by the cynical new elites of totalitarian states to sustain the permanent mobilisation of ‘the masses’ behind the regime. This neo-Machiavellian view of political religions was partly inspired by Rauschning and Pareto, whose work Aron studied for the first time in the three years before the fall of France. But    



Aron, ‘Une révolution antiprolétarienne’ [] in Machiavel et les tyrannies modernes, , , . ‘Essais sur le Machiavélisme moderne’, . Aron, ‘L’idéologie’, Recherches philosophiques,  (–), –, –. Criticism of this eclecticism and of Aron’s underdeveloped conceptualisation of religion is a recurrent theme in coverage of Aron in Maier (ed.), Totalitarianism and Political Religions. See in particular, from volume III of this collection, Harald Seubert, ‘Recalling the ‘engaged observer’ in changed times: on Raymond Aron as a theoretician of totalitarianism and the global nuclear situation’, –. On Rauschning see note  on page  above. Aron was personally acquainted with Rauschning in the late s. See Mémoires, –. For Aron’s prewar writing on Pareto see the above cited works ‘L’idéologie’ and ‘Essais sur le Machiavélisme moderne’. Aron acknowledged Pareto as a predecessor in the theorisation of secular religion in his ‘Remarques sur la gnose léniniste’ [] in Machiavel et

Secular Religion



Aron’s understanding of political religion was not purely instrumental; as early as  he described the German population’s response to their new regime as a ‘collective faith’ that was itself ‘religious in nature’. By  Aron was beginning to apply religious metaphor in his discussion of Marxism, and in the review of Halévy’s L’ère des tyrannies published in April , his use of the plural ‘political religions’ confirmed that he now extended the term beyond National Socialism to cover communism as well: Let us recall the Weimar Republic during its final years (and to a certain extent our own country today) [and] observe the violence of the partisan quarrels. These divisions, in our epoch of political religions, are not just about opportunities or interests; they result from profoundly contradictory wills animated by rival metaphysics or, better, dogmas. It is futile to speak of tolerance. Men demand that their actions and sacrifices be justified with reference to an absolute value. The divided nation is condemned to impotence. Each unique doctrine, crudely adapted to the needs of the masses, attempts to recreate the essential community through a combination of force and faith.

Here the notion of political religion is not applied to an existing totalitarian regime; instead it is used in relation to the ideological aspect of the interwar crisis of democracy in the Weimar Republic, a situation which Aron considers to have some parallels with contemporary France. As noted earlier, Aron’s interpretation of the crisis of Weimar democracy in this article was partly informed by Carl Schmitt’s ‘Further Development of the Total State in Germany’. Although he did not think Schmitt’s observations about the organisational development of ‘total parties’ in Weimar Germany applied to the contemporary Third Republic, it would appear from this passage that Aron considered the ideological aspect of Schmitt’s analysis to correspond more closely to the current French political climate, which he would later describe as one of ‘cold civil war’. For the establishment of auxiliary organisations was but one part of Schmitt’s theory of total parties; what also made such parties ‘total’ was that they were ‘closed worlds’ not just in organisational terms

  

les tyrannies modernes, –, . For a good account of the development of Aron’s interpretation of Pareto see Campbell, ‘The four Pareto’s of Raymond Aron’. On the French reception of Pareto more broadly see Busino, ‘La destinée de la sociologie Parétienne en France’.  ‘Une révolution antiprolétarienne’, . ‘L’ère des tyrannies d’Élie Halévy’, . ‘États démocratiques et États totalitaires’, . On the idea that the riots of February  had triggered a ‘cold civil war’ in France see Aron, Mémoires, .



Antitotalitarianism

but also ideologically, with each espousing radically irreconcilable worldviews and aiming ultimately to destroy one another. This aspect of Schmitt’s account of the origins of the total state drew upon his earlier writing on the fundamental political distinction between friend and enemy in The Concept of the Political, a book which Aron had first read during his time in Berlin between  and . In this respect Schmitt’s influence on Aron’s thinking about totalitarianism is probably also apparent in the first of Aron’s wartime articles to discuss the question of political religion at any length. In an article for La France libre published in July , Aron described how National Socialism had successfully channelled a preexisting revolt against the disorienting and isolating effect of bureaucratic rationalisation on interpersonal relations. The mythic community that Nazism promised to reestablish, however, was cemented through the identification of a common enemy: To these men resolved to act, struggle and march together an enemy is identified as the principle of all evil upon which to pour out the reserves of hatred and resentment that are always available in the unfortunate masses, a prophet is presented in whom to invest the limitless confidence and fervour harboured in the hearts of men, and a small number of simple social principles are proposed that respond to the immediate demands and profound aspirations of societies [collectivités] – the primacy of the general interest, work and justice for all, etc. Thus is born a political religion.

By emphasising the way in which National Socialism channelled deepseated emotional trends that had emerged over a period of several decades Aron moved away from Halévy’s view of the ‘organisation of enthusiasm’ as a function of war mobilisation, arguing instead for the gradual emergence of politics as a surrogate for impulses that had previously been channelled through religion: In our epoch, political beliefs sometimes serve as substitutes for properly religious beliefs, or, put differently, religious sentiments that are unused when faith has disappeared are kept alive in and transfigure political convictions. Scientific knowledge of the world advances, the rational organisation of society is perfected, but the ordinary man often understands social mechanisms less the more technically subtle they are, and the misfortunes that strike him – economic crisis, unemployment, war – remain just as mysterious to him as cosmic phenomena. Thus political religions, with their sacred books, with their devil and their saints, their interpretations of  

 Schmitt, ‘Further development of the total state’, –. Penser la guerre, . Aron, ‘Bureaucratie et fanatisme’, [] in L’homme contre les tyrans, –, .

Secular Religion



history and their prophecies, are only paradoxical in appearance: they express revolt against a destiny that is not understood, they gather passions that have no object.

Aron’s first full article dedicated to what he now termed ‘secular religions’ was published in July . With the liberation of France already underway, he turned his attention away from the historical origins of secular religions and focused on their future. It was not by chance that this change in terminology and orientation coincided with a new focus on secular religions of the political left. In this article, Aron highlighted a number of similarities between left and right-wing secular religions. Both used similar mass propaganda techniques, although the socialist tradition had historically viewed propaganda as a form of education, whereas fascist propaganda was conceived purely as indoctrination. Another likeness, which recalled the analysis of Aron’s  article on ‘Bureaucracy and Fanaticism’, was that both types of secular religion offered their believers membership of a fraternal community defined in Manichean terms through irreducible opposition to an enemy. And both forms of secular religion were doctrines of collective, temporal salvation attached to totalising philosophies of history. In this respect the emergence of secular religions had marked the definitive crossing of the moral threshold that the Christian separation of celestial and terrestrial existence had served to maintain. Through the relocation of a replacement kingdom of heaven onto the horizon of human history and the promise of collective terrestrial salvation, secular religions had exploded the moral separation of means and ends, justifying any and all means by the unassailable justification of the final goal. This new eschatological dimension to Aron’s theory reflected his emerging preoccupation with secular religions of the left and would become increasingly prominent as his focus shifted from fascism to communism after the war. It was not original. The argument featured prominently, for instance, in Hendrik de Man’s work on the social psychology of Marxism, which Aron had reviewed enthusiastically in 

 

Ibid., –. Contrary to the view of Philippe Burrin, this passage indicates that Aron did not conceive of political religion in purely functionalist terms. Like Eric Voegelin, Aron also appears to ‘regard the religious as an anthropological constant’, although, as we have seen, it is true that this is an under-theorised aspect of his writing on the subject compared to Voegelin. See Philippe Burrin, ‘Political religion: the relevance of a concept’, History and Memory,  (Fall ), –, –. That Aron’s notion of secular religion originated partly from a critique of Halévy is made clear in Les guerres en chaîne, –.   ‘L’avenir des religions séculières’, –. Ibid., . Ibid., –.  Ibid., –. See in particular Aron, L’opium des intellectuels (Paris, ), , , –.



Antitotalitarianism

. Aron would probably also have been familiar with Jacques Maritain’s Integral Humanism, which contains a section dedicated to arguing along similar lines that communism is an ‘atheist religion’. Maritain’s interpretation had taken on an added political significance after the anti-fascism of the French Communist Party reached its point of maximum capaciousness on  April , when Maurice Thorez appealed for the support of Catholic voters in a speech on Radio Paris. Because communism was an atheist religion, Maritain now argued, Catholics, and, indeed, other non-communists attracted to the Popular Front, could not count of the PCF to maintain tolerance of ideological rivals in the long term. In ‘The Future of the Secular Religions’ () Aron would similarly use communism’s alleged religiosity to suggest that its apparent commitment to democratic methods should not be taken at face value. The iron discipline of communists through a succession of brazen political volte faces since the s indicated a degree of devotion to the cause that was, he argued, religious in its intensity. Aron did not claim that the PCF had immediate antidemocratic ambitions and was careful to acknowledge the contribution of French communists to the Resistance. But by emphasising the continuing religiosity of communist political commitment he tacitly indicated that the PCF could not necessarily be relied upon to act in the interests of French democracy in the long run. The decisive consideration to take into account here was ‘the possibility [hypothèse] of an outside intervention’. In other words, everything would depend on the Soviet Union’s foreign policy. Aron restated this argument more explicitly in two articles published in December . Noting that the PCF had so far exercised the kind of restraint necessary for its integration into French democracy, he expressed cautious optimism that this state of affairs would persist; however, he also suggested that the   

 

See de Man, Psychology of Socialism, –, –. For Aron’s review of the French translation of this book see Aron, ‘Henri de Man: Au-delà du marxisme’, Libres Propos,  (January ), –. See Jacques Maritain, Humanisme intégral: problèmes temporels et spirituels d’une nouvelle Chrétienté (Paris, ), –. Ibid., . This book was originally based on lectures given in August ; however, the argument under discussion here was part of a chapter added later. Maritain’s reference to a communist appeal for joint action with Catholics dates this to after Maurice Thorez’s speech of  April . Other changes to the original lectures are discussed in James Chappel, ‘Slaying the Leviathan: Catholicism and the Rebirth of European Conservatism, -’ (Columia University PhD diss., ), –. ‘L’avenir des religions séculières’, –. Ibid., . See Aron, ‘Révolution et rénovation’ [December ] in L’âge des empires, –, ; Aron, ‘Signification des problèmes français’ [December ] in L’âge des empires, –, –.

Emergence of a Cold Warrior



PCF’s continued adherence to a secular religion meant that its long-term commitment to democratic methods could not be taken for granted.

Emergence of a Cold Warrior Aron’s veiled references to the PCF in his article on the future of secular religions indicate that even before the war was over he believed communism to pose a significant threat to the reestablishment of French democracy. It would therefore be a mistake to consider Aron’s anti-communism as purely a product of the Cold War. In fact, it probably dates as far back as his involvement in the student socialist movement at the École normale in the late s. Normalien socialism in these years was aligned with the most anti-communist section of the SFIO, the wing of the party that was least inclined towards nostalgia for a united Left. Although the absence of primary source material makes it impossible to verify Aron’s attitude towards communism in these years, what is clear is that by  he was being openly disdainful towards the PCF. Subsequently, Aron’s support for the Popular Front was at best lukewarm, and while he shared the reluctance of many on the intellectual left to criticise the French Communist Party or the Soviet Union after , this reticence sprang less from idealistic illusions about communism than from an eminently realist calculation concerning the balance of power in a continent threatened by Nazi Germany. Allied victory in  transformed the international situation at the same time that the predominance of communists in the internal resistance opened the way for a powerful return of the PCF to the domestic political scene following the banning of the party in September . What changed as a result of the Cold War, then, was not so much Aron’s basic attitude towards the French Communist Party or the Soviet Union as his willingness to make the transition from attitudinal to activist anti-communism. Once he had done so, Aron soon became not only  

 

The two articles are ‘Révolution et rénovation’ and ‘Signification des problèmes français’ in L’âge des empires, –, , –, –. See, e.g., Jean-François Biard, Le socialisme devant ses choix: La naissance de l’idée de plan (Paris, ), –; Stéphane Clouet, De la rénovation à l’utopie socialistes: Révolution Constructive, un groupe d’intellectuels socialistes des années  (Nancy, ), –; Olivier Dard, Le rendez-vous manqué des relèves des années  (Paris, ), –; Christophe Prochasson, Les intellectuels, le socialisme et la guerre, – (Paris, ), –; Jean-François Sirinelli, Génération intellectuel: khâgneux et normaliens dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris, ), –; Jean Touchard, La gauche en France depuis  (Paris, ). Aron, ‘Lettre d’Allemagne. Berlin, le  mars ’, Libres Propos,  (March ), –, . Le spectateur engagé, .



Antitotalitarianism

France’s preeminent anti-communist intellectual but also a leading figure within a burgeoning transnational community of intellectual cold warriors. The evolution of Aron’s position may be traced through some of his journalistic writings in the immediate period following the Second World War. During the spring and summer of  he published a series of articles on the emergent postwar international order in the weekly current affairs magazine Point de vue. While some of these pieces refer in passing to Soviet violations of the commitment to democratic principles made in Yalta the previous February, they contain an overriding sense of the basic validity of Soviet ambitions for a sphere of influence in eastern Europe. As Aron put it in an article dated  April, whereas Versailles had enshrined the principle of national self-determination, interwar experience had shown that ‘a just order is not necessarily a stable order. It is not so much equity as equilibrium that maintains the peace.’ Although resigned to the extension of Soviet influence into postwar eastern Europe, Aron emphasised the need for this to be balanced by an equivalent American influence in the west, remarking that ‘it is essential, for the maintenance of peace, that the American people do not succumb to the temptation of isolationism, that they wholeheartedly accept the role imposed upon them by their grandeur.’ But it was not just American public opinion that concerned Aron. His articles in Point de vue stressed the need for the French people to recognise and accept their country’s diminished international stature and the ascendance of the United States. ‘Peaceful nations’, he argued as the war in Europe drew to a close, ‘far from worrying about this ascendance, wish the United States this time wholeheartedly to accept their responsibilities. . . . The greatest threat to Europe and France would be a new retreat of the United States into isolationism.’ Of much greater concern to Aron than the expansion of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe was the rising power of the PCF in France. The communists’ postwar claim to political legitimacy was immediately rooted in the party’s somewhat belated but ultimately outsized contribution to the internal resistance since the summer of . It was effectively reinforced by the PCF’s reclamation of the neo-Jacobin brand of republican patriotism that it had first adopted to great effect during the era of the    

Another account of these articles can be found in Or Rosenboim, ‘Amica America: Raymond Aron’s views on Franco-American relations in ’, The Tocqueville Review,  (), –. Aron, ‘En quête d’espérance’, Point de vue,  May , ; Aron, ‘Appelons les choses par leur nom’, Point de vue,  June , . Italics in original. Aron, ‘Paix sans illusion’, Point de vue,  April , . Italics in the original. Aron, ‘Nouvelle carte du monde’, Point de vue,  May , .

Emergence of a Cold Warrior



Popular Front. Consequently the legitimacy of postwar communist claims to political power was widely recognised even beyond the rapidly expanding confines of the party’s membership. In addition to the social and economic influence that it exercised through its control of France’s largest trades union confederation, the PCF, styling itself ‘the party of French intelligence’, also achieved an unprecedented degree of cultural influence after the war, not least through its influence within the Comité national des écrivains (CNE), which enacted a purge of literary collaborators during the wider épuration sauvage underway in the final months of the war. It was the leading role assumed by communists in these purges that initially prompted Aron to begin publishing explicitly anti-communist views in . In an article for the October edition of Les Temps modernes Aron likened French communists’ involvement in the épuration sauvage to the methods then being used to facilitate the spreading of communist influence in Eastern Europe. In another piece written before the October  legislative election, he challenged the PCF’s patriotic credentials by contrasting its loyalty to Moscow with the French Socialist Party’s commitment to the personal liberties that were indispensable not only to France’s national political tradition but also to its place within the larger ‘Western family’. After the communists won  percent of the vote to become the largest party in the Constituent Assembly Aron further hardened his stance. In The French People and the Constitutional Referendum, published in November , he implied that in the long run no common interest 



 

According to Aron, an old Radical politician remarked to him during the October  election that ‘Jacques Duclos is the only one speaking the language of republicanism.’ Aron, ‘La scène politique: II – Le parti communiste français’, Combat,  April . Between  and  the PCF’s membership grew from , to ,. By  the party had about , members. For these figures see Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia, Histoire politique des intellectuels en France, . Tome I (Paris, ), ; David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals (London, ), . On the PCF’s anti-fascist neo-Jacobinism see also Daniel R. Brower, The New Jacobins: The French Communist Party and the Popular Front (Ithaca, ), –, –, –. This claim was made by Georges Cogniot at the tenth congress of the PCF in . Quoted in Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli, Les intellectuels en France de l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris, ), . On the CNE during and immediately after the Second World War see Gisèle Sapiro, The French Writers’ War, – (Durham, ), –. The épuration sauvage, or ‘wild purge’, refers to the spontaneous reprisals against real and imagined collaborators which took place during and immediately after the Liberation. The épuration légale that replaced it lasted from  to . On both purges see chapter  of Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, – (Oxford, ). Aron, ‘Les désillusions de la liberté’, Les Temps modernes,  (October ), –, . Aron, ‘La chance du socialisme’, Les Temps modernes,  (November ), –, , , –, .



Antitotalitarianism

was possible between the PCF and its non-communist counterparts since the former was a revolutionary party ultimately committed to the establishment of a totalitarian state. Here Aron revived and modified the dichotomy of democratic conservatism and revolutionary totalitarianism that he had originally formulated on the eve of the war. Whereas in  he had defined democracy primarily as ‘a regime where there are laws and where power is not arbitrary and without limits’, now Aron identified ‘pluralism’ as its defining characteristic. This term had only recently come into use in French political and social theory, having first been adopted by intellectuals associated with the journal Esprit during the s. Thus by using the language of ‘pluralism’ Aron was once more articulating a defence of democratic regimes partly in terms borrowed from Catholic social theory. Yet his vision of how the principle of pluralism could be put into practice differed substantially from that of the interwar personalists. While they had tended to denigrate party politics and typically associated pluralism with the existence of a wide range of extraparliamentary intermediary bodies, Aron associated it exclusively with the multiparty system. This was what differentiated democratic ‘pluralism’ from totalitarian ‘monism’. Since the turn of the century, however, there had emerged a fundamental contradiction within democratic pluralism that



 



Les Français devant la Constitution, –. Although presented as an abstract discussion of political ‘pluralism and monism’ and the coexistence of ‘revolutionary’ and ‘conservative’ parties within a pluralist democracy, it is clear, given this book’s focus on contemporary French politics, that the revolutionary party and ‘monist’ regime being referred to are the PCF and the USSR. ‘États démocratiques et États totalitaries’, . This distinct French tradition of pluralist social thought has, until recently, received little attention from historians. No mention of it is made, for instance, in David Runciman’s, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge, ), or in Rupert Breitling’s ‘The concept of pluralism’ in Stanislaw Ehrlich and Graham Wootton (eds.), Three Faces of Pluralism: Political, Ethnic, Religious (Farnborough, ), –. My argument here draws on H.S. Jones, ‘Catholic intellectuals and the invention of pluralism in France’. I am grateful to Stuart Jones for providing me with a copy of this as yet unpublished paper. The Catholic origins of the concept of pluralism are also discussed in Chappel, ‘Slaying the Leviathan’, –, –, –. James Chappel identifies personalism with a distinct strand of ‘civil society Catholicism’ in which democracy was considered to be much less important than pluralism, conceived as ‘creating the sort of society in which Catholic Action could flourish’. See Chappel, ‘Slaying the Leviathan’, –, . The traditional hostility of personalist thought towards party politics is evoked in Denis de Rougement, ‘D’une critique stérile’, Esprit,  (May ), –, . This article appears in a special issue of Esprit entitled ‘Le régime des partis: bilan-avenir’. According to John Hellman, Aron had been invited to contribute to this issue of Esprit. I have been unable to find Aron’s response to this invitation, but it was evidently declined since no article by him appears in this issue. See John Hellman, The Communitarian Third Way: Alexandre Marc and Ordre Nouveau, – (London, ), .

Emergence of a Cold Warrior



had ‘destroyed the old justifications for democracy’. This was the profoundly uneasy coexistence of ‘conservative’ and ‘revolutionary’ parties within pluralist democracies. As in ‘Democratic States and Totalitarian States’ before the war, Aron’s understanding of democratic conservatism in The French People and the Constitutional Referendum was very broad, encompassing all those parties whose aims were limited to reforms within the framework of extant democratic institutions. ‘Revolutionary parties’, by contrast, ultimately rejected those institutions and the entire social order on which they are based, ‘offer [ing] hope to the masses’ with their optimistic philosophies of history and, ‘in extreme cases, [. . .] providing the equivalent of, or better a substitute for, transcendent faith’. The challenge posed by revolutionary parties meant that democratic regimes could no longer justify themselves as instantiating the ‘quasi-metaphysical’ principle of popular sovereignty, since ‘totalitarian parties’ offered seductive rival claims to embody the will of the people. And any notion of a general interest accessible through rational debate was no longer credible, since ‘there is no general interest common to those who accept and those who reject the existing order.’ Aron’s claim that communist and non-communist interests were ultimately irreconcilable thus originated less in response to anything the PCF had done since the end of the war than in his understanding of the kind of organisation it was: a totalitarian party faithful to a secular religion. Although the question of influence is impossible to settle definitively in this instance, his argument that ‘revolutionary’, ‘totalitarian’, or ‘total’ parties had destroyed the traditional bases of democratic political legitimacy repeated claims originally made in Carl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, which Aron had read before the war. But while Schmitt’s work would later inform the decision to ban the Communist Party in the Federal Republic of Germany, Aron never drew the equivalent conclusion from his analysis of democratic pluralism and totalitarian monism. This did, however, underpin his recurrent criticism over the next two years of the PCF’s inclusion in a tripartite coalition with the Socialist Party and the Christian democratic MRP.   



  Les Français devant la Constitution, . Ibid., . Ibid., . Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, , , –. Joseph J. Bendersky, Carl Schmitt, Theorist for the Reich (Princeton, ), –. Aron explained his opposition to the notion of banning of the PCF in Le grand schisme (Paris, ), . See also Aron, Introduction à la philosophie politique: démocratie et révolution (Paris, ), –; Aron, Démocratie et totalitarisme (Paris, ), . See, e.g., Aron, ‘Comment sortir du tripartisme’, Combat,  June ; ‘Le mal et ses symptômes’, Combat,  September ; ‘Aménagement du tripartisme’, Combat,  October , etc.



Antitotalitarianism

Given the book’s focus on contemporary French politics, the only conceivable referents for Aron’s remarks on ‘monism’ and ‘revolutionary parties’ in The French People and the Constitutional Referendum was the PCF. Yet his argument was presented in purely abstract terms, avoiding any explicit criticism of the French Communist Party or the Soviet Union. Although he had become increasingly direct in his criticism of the PCF during the autumn of , it was not until April  that Aron would explicitly identify himself as an anti-communist for the first time: If anticommunism consists of underestimating the virtues of party members, of disregarding the hopes placed in the communists by a majority of the working class, of forgetting the necessity for social reforms upon which the workers’ parties rightly insist, I am not an anticommunist. But if, to avoid the accusation of anticommunism, one must approve of all these methods of action, resign oneself to a totalitarian regime, believe that Stalin is always right . . . then I will accept the accusation and demand the rights of free thought.

This self-identification as an anti-communist was a profoundly countercultural move in the context of the postwar Parisian intellectual left. Within a few months it had ended Aron’s association with Les Temps modernes, paving the way for his emergence as arguably the twentiethcentury’s most influential critic of intellectual philocommunism. Yet Aron’s turn from attitudinal to activist anti-communism did not result in his ‘complete isolation’. In June  he became a columnist at France’s leading centre-right newspaper Le Figaro. The same year Calmann-Lévy appointed him as founding director of a new book series called Liberté de l’esprit. Two years later André Malraux and Claude Mauriac would borrow this title for a Gaullist intellectual journal in which Aron’s work would be frequently published and referenced. By this point  



 

‘La scène politique’. On French intellectual philocommunism after the Second World War and Aron’s countercultural position in this regard see respectively Tony Judt’s, Past Imperfect and, by the same author, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (London, ), –. On Aron’s break with Les Temps modernes see Robert Colquhoun, Raymond Aron: The Philosopher in History, – (Beverly Hills, ), –. For Aron’s subsequent polemics with his former colleagues see most famously L’opium des intellectuels. Other collections of such works by Aron include Polémiques (Paris, ) and Marxism and the Existentialists (London, ). Nicolas Baverez, Raymond Aron: un moraliste au temps des idéologies (Paris, ), . The title of Baverez’s chapter on the intellectual Cold War is ‘Seul Contre Tous’ (Alone Against Everyone). Gwendal Châton regards Liberté de l’esprit as founding a tradition of liberal antitotalitarian journals in France that was continued by Preuves (–), Contrepoint (–) and Commentaire (–ongoing). See Gwendal Châton, ‘Taking anti-totalitarianism seriously: the emergence of

The Limitations of Antitotalitarianism



Aron, who had joined de Gaulle’s Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF) in , had an audience far larger than had been available to him prior to his anti-communist turn.

The Limitations of Antitotalitarianism Aron’s conversion to militant anti-communism complete, in  he published The Great Schism, an analysis of the Cold War and its implications for politics in France. Aimed at a general audience, the book offered a more extensive treatment of some of the themes from his postwar journalism while also addressing the new political situation that had emerged with the expulsion of communist ministers from government in May  and the formation of the RPF in April the same year. As far as domestic French politics were concerned, Aron’s priorities in this book were to attack the French Communist Party as the agent of a hostile foreign state, to promote France’s integration into the Atlantic community, and to defend the RPF against accusations, widespread on the left at the time, of fascism. Here religious metaphor and the language of totalitarianism were deployed polemically in a bid to deflect the fascist analogy away from the RPF and towards the Soviet Union and the PCF, emphasise the fundamental values shared by the French and American political traditions, and challenge the patriotic, republican image of the French Communist Party by highlighting its loyalty to a foreign state. Summarising the international implications of the new Cold War with the phrase ‘peace impossible, war improbable’, Aron argued that if the American monopoly on nuclear weapons made another war in Europe unlikely in the foreseeable future, no real peace was possible because the Soviet Union would use any means short of open warfare to destabilise European democracies. Thus in the likely absence of war a ‘bellicose peace’ would reign over western Europe.



 

the Aronian circle in the s’ in Sawyer and Stewart (eds.), In Search of the Liberal Moment, –, –. Aron’s audience would continue to expand with the rise of television. According to Tamara Chaplin, Aron was ‘the lone intellectual on French TV speaking to political issues during the early Fifth Republic’. It was therefore Aron who more or less singlehandedly ‘introduced TV audiences to intellectuals as political actors’. Although he was largely absent from television during the mid-s, a period when he was considered an anti-Gaullist, after the events of May–June  Aron returned to French television screens. In  he was the only French philosopher regularly invited to discuss politics on television. See Tamara Chaplin, Turning on the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (Chicago, ), , , . Le grand schisme, –, , –, –, –, –, , . Aron would later describe the Soviet Union as ‘a foreign church’in Les guerres en chaîne, . Le grand schisme, .



Antitotalitarianism

To support this claim Aron pointed not only to the wave of industrial unrest that had swept the country in late  but also to communism’s cultural influence. Progressive intellectuals were, he argued, a priority target for communist propaganda designed to exploit their instinctive pacifism, anti-fascism, and propensity for verbal revolutionary posturing. Thus the ‘bellicose peace’ was in fact a propaganda war that demanded an innovative and resolute response. As Aron remarked in The Century of Total War, his second book on the new Cold War, Even during the supposed peace, the Soviet Union effectively uses all the techniques of propaganda, sabotage and infiltration . . . We must wage this war that Stalinist aggression imposes on us, and military means are only one of the weapons in this polymorphic combat. Western militaries have not sufficiently rid themselves of traditional ideas; they continue to ask themselves if there will be war while it rages every day. The battle against propaganda and infiltration must be fought tirelessly. . .

International efforts towards a coordinated counter-propaganda offensive were in fact already well underway by the time The Century of Total War was published in . The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was founded at a conference in Berlin on – June  and its headquarters established in Paris. Covertly funded by the CIA, it provided a platform for anti-communist intellectuals from around the world through a variety of conferences, festivals, book series and journals such as Preuves,  

 Ibid., , , –. Les guerres en chaîne, . For a history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom that focuses primarily on its links to the CIA see Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London, ). Aron denies knowing about the CIA funding in Mémoires, –. He also denied knowledge of this privately on  August  in a letter to McGeorge Bundy, who on  July had written to Aron that he was ‘astonished to learn [. . .] that the Executive Committee [of the CCF] itself was unaware of what had been café gossip in New York for years.’ Bundy would have been even more astonished had he known that, in a letter to Aron dated  December , Waldemar Gurian had informed him that Étienne Gilson was spreading the rumour that Aron was a paid agent of the American government and that unnamed independent witnesses had corroborated this. This does not prove that the rumour was true, but it does make Aron’s lack of curiosity about the source of the CCF’s funding all the more remarkable. Aron’s denials are directly contradicted by Saunders on the basis of an interview with John Hunt, a CIA agent who worked for the CCF. If Aron was aware of the CIA funding, as was almost certainly the case, his agreement to participate in the CCF would have been consistent with his published views on the vital importance of psychological warfare as cited above and in Aron, Paix et guerre entre les nations (Paris, ), esp. –. See also Ibid., , , , , –, , . For Aron’s correspondence with Bundy and Gurian see respectively Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF(), NAF(). Saunders’ evidence for CIA editorial interventions in CCF publications is much flimsier, relying primarily on the refusal by Encounter of a single article written by Dwight Macdonald which was later published in another CCF journal, Tempo Presente. See Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, , –.

The Limitations of Antitotalitarianism



Encounter, Der Monat, and Tempo Presente. The CCF was initially set up as a response to a series of international peace conferences covertly organised in the late s by the Cominform. The aim of these initiatives had not been to convert participants to communism but to influence western public opinion favourably towards the USSR by associating communism with the cause of world peace. Recruiting non-communist intellectuals into this international peace movement was a key part of that strategy. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was similarly oriented towards the noncommunist intellectual left, while its status as a front organisation mirrored Soviet cultural diplomatic practice that had been pioneered in the s and revived in the late s. Antitotalitarian discourse was central to its efforts to undermine the pacifist and anti-fascist credentials upon which postwar communist claims to political legitimacy were substantially based. Since the late s Raymond Aron had used religious metaphor and the language of totalitarianism in ways that would soon characterise the wider anti-communist discourse of the CCF. But despite the increasingly polemical aspect of Aron’s work during the early Cold War, polemical demands never entirely displaced heuristic ones in his writing on totalitarianism and secular religion. As with his analysis of domestic French politics, Aron’s assessment of the international threat posed by communism was more conceptually than empirically determined. It was, for instance, because he took seriously the notion of communism as secular religion that Aron considered the Soviet Union’s imperial aspirations to be potentially limitless. This was the basis for his argument, in a speech written for the CCF’s founding conference, that western European neutrality in the struggle between the United States and USSR would increase rather than decrease the likelihood of war. Likening the neutralist sentiment then widespread among the non-communist intellectual left to the appeasement of the s, Aron argued that the scope of Stalin’s expansionist ambitions was more than a match for those of Hitler, concluding that ‘It is by its weakness and not by its strength that [the West] risks, like the democracies faced by Hitler, precipitating catastrophe.’ 





Pierre Grémion, Intelligence de l’anticommunisme: Le Congrès pour la liberté de la culture à Paris, - (Paris, ), –. These conferences were the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace, held in Wrocław on  August ; the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace held in New York on – March , and the World Peace Congress held in Paris on – April . The pacifist Amsterdam-Pleyel Movement of the early s, for instance, is an obvious precursor to the Soviet peace offensive of the late s. On this see Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, –: From Red Square to the Left Bank (London, ). Aron, ‘Neutralité ou engagement?’[] in Polémiques, –, –.



Antitotalitarianism

The centrality of ideology conceived as secular religion to Aron’s theory of totalitarianism was confirmed in a chapter on totalitarianism in The Century of Total War. Here Aron rejected the notion that Soviet totalitarianism could be explained in economic terms or that the USSR’s foreign policy followed the logic of traditional power politics. Totalitarian regimes did not operate according to conventional rationalities. Was it rational, he asked, to pursue the forced collectivisation of agriculture, despite the famine and the millions of deaths it provoked, when other means of increasing agricultural production were available? How rational was the Terror of –, which wiped out much of the country’s military and industrial elite at a time when the state was threatened from without by Nazi Germany? The rationality at work in both these instances related not to the immediate interests of the regime but to ‘the ultimate goal fixed by the doctrine’. What Stalinism and National Socialism had in common, then, was that both were driven by ‘quasi-religious’ ideologies in which ‘An absolute good, at the end of history, justifies everything.’ In other words, ‘The goal of one and the other is situated at infinity [. . .] once governments nourish unlimited ambitions, they set in motion an infernal machine, that of permanent revolution.’ Aron remarked in his memoirs that the analysis of totalitarian rationality in The Century of Total War was ‘perhaps inspired by’ Hannah Arendt. This was probably true. All of the points mentioned above had been made using identical illustrative examples by Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism earlier that year. Aron’s originality was to have articulated Arendt’s ideas partly in terms of secular religion, an ironic adaptation considering Arendt ‘believed that describing National Socialism or Bolshevism as religions, secular or otherwise, was a travesty when it was not a heresy’. Aron was nevertheless not wholly convinced by The Origins of  





 Les guerres en chaîne, . Ibid., , . Aron also claims here that Arendt read and was impressed by this chapter. See Mémoires, . I have seen no textual evidence to support this claim. Arendt respected Aron for the part he played in assisting her and other Jewish intellectuals to leave Germany in  when he worked at the French Institute in Berlin; however, based on her correspondence she does not appear to have held his postwar work in high regard. See Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers Correspondence, –, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner (London, ), –; Within Four Walls. The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blu¨cher, ed. Lotte Kohler (London, ), , . See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, []), –, –, , , –, , –. Arendt is not referenced in the text or footnotes to Les guerres en chaîne. Arendt set out her views on political religion theory in a response to Eric Voegelin’s review of The Origins of Totalitarianism published in The Review of Politics,  (), –. Peter Baehr, Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences (Stanford, ), . Since a full French translation of The Origins of Totalitarianism was not published as a single book until

The Limitations of Antitotalitarianism



Totalitarianism when he reviewed it for the journal Critique in . While acknowledging that it was undeniably ‘an important book’, he also made a number of criticisms. One of these focused on its argument about the long-term social origins of totalitarianism, which Arendt traced to the late nineteenth-century transformation of cohesive classes, formed of mutual social solidarities, into undifferentiated masses of atomised individuals. Although he did not dispute this process or its significance for the emergence of totalitarianism, Aron refused to follow Arendt in linking it to the fin de siècle development of capitalism and instead situated its earliest point of origin in the experience of the Great War. He also rejected Arendt’s view of Soviet totalitarianism as an exclusively Stalinist phenomenon. Here he argued that the telescoping of bourgeois and socialist revolutions in  had made it necessary to describe as the ‘construction of socialism’ policies that bore no obvious resemblance to such a goal. Thus it was Lenin who ‘created the indispensable conditions for this permanent substitution of ideology for reality that Mme Arendt rightly sees as one of the characteristic traits of Stalinism’. Still more fundamental than this abandonment of Marxist orthodoxy, however, was the nature of the Bolshevik party itself. ‘The first, non-sufficient condition of a totalitarian regime’, Aron argued, ‘is the taking of power by a party that assures itself of a monopoly of politics. This condition was realised during and thanks to Lenin’s leadership.’ The importance of the totalitarian party was not a new theme in Aron’s reflection on the origins of totalitarianism; he had first touched on this issue before the war, drawing upon Carl Schmitt’s ‘Further development of



  

, it was through Aron’s Les guerres en chaîne that many French readers first encountered some of its arguments. The third section of Arendt’s book was published in  as Le système totalitaire (Paris, ); the first appeared a year later as Sur l’antisémitisme (Paris, ) before the publication of the second section as L’impérialisme (Paris, ). The first integral French edition is Hannah Arendt, Les origines du totalitarisme (Paris, ). Aron, ‘L’essence du totalitarisme’ [] in Machiavel et les trannies modernes, –. This was the only review of Arendt’s book to appear in French before the abridged translation in . See Pierre Hassner, Violence and Peace from the Atomic Bomb to Ethnic Cleansing (London, ), ; Claude Lefort, ‘Hannah Arendt et la question du politique’ in his Essais sur le politique (Paris, ), –, . On the French reception of Arendt see Olivier Mongin, ‘La réception d’Arendt en France’ in Miguel Abensour et al. (eds.), Ontologie et politique: actes du colloque Hannah Arendt (Paris, ), –. James D. Ingram suggests that Aron’s role in promoting Arendt’s work contributed to its relative obscurity in France: ‘France came late to Arendt, mostly because she was introduced as an anti-communist thinker, notably by Raymond Aron, and subsequently ignored by the marxisant intellectual left.’ See James D. Ingram, ‘The politics of Claude Lefort’s political: between liberalism and radical democracy’, Thesis Eleven,  (November ), –, .  ‘L’essence du totalitarisme’, . Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, –. ‘L’essence du totalitarisme’, . Aron had earlier made this point in Le grand schisme, –. ‘Ibid., .



Antitotalitarianism

the total state in Germany’ in his critique of Élie Halévy. Although the structure of individual parties and the party system as a whole had not been central to his differentiation between ‘Democratic States and Totalitarian States’ in , this issue was fundamental to the brief comparative analysis of democratic ‘pluralism’ and totalitarian ‘monism’ set out by Aron in a standalone chapter of The French People and the Constitutional Referendum, published at the end of . Whereas previously he had defined democracy as a regime that ‘controls the authority of its governors through a system of representation’ and ‘where there are laws and where power is not arbitrary and without limits’, Aron now wrote that ‘democracy in our epoch is essentially defined by the multi-party system.’ This form of democratic pluralism, so long as it functioned properly, led to the safeguarding of individual liberties; totalitarian monism, as instantiated in the single-party State, entailed their suppression because ‘The single party system implies . . . the identification of the State with an official doctrine.’ The imposition of totalitarian rule proceeded through the elimination of independent social and professional groups, the establishment of the party’s position as the sole means of accessing public office, and the intervention of the political police to guarantee the ideological orthodoxy required of all candidates. Aron returned more substantially to this theme in a lecture course at the École nationale d’administration in . Presented as an ‘Introduction to Political Philosophy’, the course examined the themes of ‘democracy and revolution’ through a comparative study of contemporary democratic and communist regimes in the developed world. Aron justified his inductive method on the grounds that the absence of consensus on basic political values in contemporary France ruled out the possibility of a political philosophy rooted in deduction from metaphysical principles. Thus democracy was to be defined not by the principle of popular sovereignty, but as ‘the organisation of peaceful competition for the exercise of power’ as manifested in the constitutional operation of a multi-party system. At the start of the second half of the course, however, Aron argued that communism, ‘the other kind of democracy’, ‘cannot and must not be defined by its institutions’. Although communist regimes were often defined as single-party dictatorships, he insisted ‘we understand nothing about this other sort of regime and this other way of thinking if we start

 

‘États démocratiques et États totalitaries’, . Introduction à la philosophie politique, –.

 

Les Français devant la Constitution, . Ibid., –.

The Limitations of Antitotalitarianism



from institutions. In the case of the other sort of democracy, we must start with the idea.’ The ideological foundation of Soviet communism, Aron claimed, was ‘the transformation of Marxism into millenarianism’ effected by the Bolsheviks’ voluntarist revision of Marxist orthodoxy and, above all, ‘the substitution of the party for the proletariat’. Communist millenarianism, however, was just one example of a feature common to revolutionary politics more broadly. Here the significance of the course’s thematic division into sections on democracy and revolution, rather than democracy and totalitarianism, became apparent. As a philosophy of history, Aron argued, Marxism, like all modern philosophies of history, found its ultimate cultural origin in Christianity, while the Bolsheviks’ substitution of the party for the proletariat represented a secularisation of the doctrine of incarnation. But the Bolsheviks were not the first revolutionaries to have claimed to incarnate an undivided popular will. Contemporary communist claims to incarnate the proletariat ‘would not’, Aron argued, ‘have surprised the Jacobins’ because ‘The incarnation of the people or the proletariat by a party is an essential feature of revolution, or at least of the revolutionary paroxysm.’ Here Aron shifted his attention from communism’s ultimate cultural origins in Christianity towards its emergence from a more recent western philosophical tradition of revolutionary optimism exemplified by Rousseau, whose vision of the infallibility of the general will had proven susceptible to a dangerous vulgarisation that informed both Jacobinism and Bolshevism. ‘In this regard’, he argued, ‘the Bolsheviks . . . are in reality, historically and without any doubt, the great nephews of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.’ Aron’s account of Soviet totalitarianism thus differed from Arendt’s in that it not only extended beyond the Stalinist period to encompass the foundation of the Bolshevik Party itself, but also because it linked that party’s claim to embody the will of the proletariat to a vulgarisation of Rousseau’s theory of the general will. In doing so, he pointed towards a theory of totalitarian democracy first advanced by Catholic opponents of    

Ibid., . Ibid., –, . Aron attributes responsibility for this conversion of Marxism into millenarianism both to Lenin and Trotsky. See pages –.  Ibid., , –. Ibid., –. Ibid., –. Aron had first raised this issue with specific reference to Rousseau in April : ‘Rousseau’s juridical fictions – the social contract, popular sovereignty, general will – easily lend themselves to mythical transfiguration and, as myths, they risk serving as justification for new forms of tyranny.’ See Aron, ‘De la liberté politique’ in L’homme contre les tyrans, –, .



Antitotalitarianism

the Popular Front on the basis of their reading of Carl Schmitt in the s. This theory would become much more widely influential in the context of the Cold War through the work of Jacob Talmon, which Aron published in French translation through his Liberté de l’esprit series in . But while in these respects Aron was more pessimistic than Arendt about the ideological origins of totalitarianism, he was less pessimistic than her about the possible ‘normalisation’ of the Soviet regime. In his discussion of democratic ‘pluralism’ and totalitarian ‘monism’ in The French People and the Constitutional Referendum Aron remarked that It is possible for such a regime, after a certain period, to be broadly accepted by the population and, consequently, for the minimum of ideological orthodoxy to be maintained almost spontaneously, the various interpretations of the official doctrine becoming little by little the equivalents of contradictory opinions in a pluralist community. It is possible for the single party to open itself up sufficiently for promotions to be made increasingly on the basis of merit. It is possible for enough room to be allowed to nonparty members so that the obsession of the secular religion disappears. There nevertheless would remain a certain mode of elite recruitment, a certain collective discipline, the suppression of the old forms of liberty resulting inevitably in the decision in favour of monism.

The potential ‘normalisation’ of totalitarian regimes would not be a prominent theme in Aron’s writing once the Cold War set in a few months later, but in  he returned to it in his review of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Whereas three years earlier in The Century of Total War Aron had apparently accepted Arendt’s account of totalitarian rationality, by now he had begun to harbour doubts. While he still believed Arendt offered a valuable corrective to authors like Isaac Deutscher, who regarded Soviet totalitarianism as an ephemeral byproduct of forced industrialisation, Aron now held that Soviet terror and work camps were partially intelligible in nonideological terms and was sceptical of Arendt’s claim in her  chapter on ‘Ideology and Terror’ that terror constituted the essence of totalitarianism. Summing up his reservations, he wrote that



 

As Samuel Moyn has noted, ‘The perception of ‘Cold War liberals’ that Rousseau paved the way for totalitarianism originated as a commonplace of Christian intellectuals in their interwar reactionary days.’ Moyn, Christian Human Rights, . On the influence of Carl Schmitt on interwar Catholic antitotalitarianism see Chappel, ‘The Catholic origins of totalitarianism theory in interwar Europe’. Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, ), published in French translation as Les origines de la démocratie totalitaire (Paris, ).  Les Français devant la Constitution, . ‘L’essence du totalitarisme’, –, –.

Conclusion



The totalitarian phenomenon . . . entails multiple interpretations because it has multiple causes. The method that aims to grasp the essence is not illegitimate, but on condition that it does not neglect complimentary methods. Otherwise we risk stopping ourselves from asking perhaps the most important question: how long will totalitarianism last? Is it the temporary and pathological accompaniment of certain transformations? Or is it, in spite of its intrinsic absurdity, susceptible to prolong itself in a sort of permanent dehumanisation of human societies?

The death of Stalin in March  had made the contemporary relevance of such questions obvious: a theory of totalitarianism centred on the primacy of ideology and terror now appeared ill-suited to understanding the new era that had opened in Soviet history. His review of The Origins of Totalitarianism signalled an imminent shift of emphasis in Aron’s writing on Soviet communism, which from the mid-s into the s would decentre notions of totalitarianism and secular religion in favour of a comparative analysis of Soviet and western models of industrial society.

Conclusion Raymond Aron’s decentring of the concepts of totalitarianism and secular religion from his analysis of Soviet communism in the mid-s was not just a response to the new political situation in the USSR. It also reflected his concern, which preceded the death of Stalin, that antitotalitarianism had failed to make a significant impact on French political opinion, particularly within the non-communist left. During a speech delivered in May  at the Amis de la liberté, a French auxiliary of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Aron remarked that several years of anti-communist propaganda had exposed the awful reality of totalitarian rule in all its forms; however, the results thereby achieved had far from matched up to the effort expended on this task. An excessive insistence on the worst features of the Soviet regime had in fact often proved counterproductive because, despite its solid factual basis, it came across as an aggressive propaganda offensive. ‘Communist propaganda’, he opined, ‘is grotesquely Manichean. Anti-communist propaganda must not be.’ The conclusion Aron drew from this was that ‘It is not enough to denounce the lies of totalitarianism. It remains to justify liberty.’ The conclusion that we might draw here is that for Aron the concepts of totalitarianism and secular religion served primarily as rhetorical devices 

Ibid., .



Aron, ‘Séduction du totalitarisme’ in Polémiques, –, .



Antitotalitarianism

whose polemical function far outweighed their heuristic value. Once it had become clear that the use of such language had failed substantially to erode communism’s patriotic, anti-fascist and pacifist credentials, Aron, while not abandoning it altogether, no longer based his analysis of communism primarily on the totalitarian model. What is more, although Aron made extensive use of religious metaphor in his polemical writings, the theoretical basis for this was underdeveloped. The change of terminology from political to secular religion at the end of the Second World War, which coincided with a shift in emphasis from fascist to communist totalitarianism, is one obvious inconsistency that also points towards the increasingly polemical function that this theory would be made to perform in the context of the early Cold War. Other inconsistencies are not difficult to find: Aron used the notions of political or secular religion to explain, for instance, both the propaganda technique of totalitarian regimes and the receptivity of ‘the masses’ to that technique, to describe an extreme degree of ideological commitment in general and the eschatological structure of Marxism-Leninism in particular. It would nevertheless be a mistake to reduce the significance of Aron’s use of the concepts of totalitarianism and secular religion to their rhetorical function. His use of these terms may have been inconsistent, but the various interpretations that he applied to them were not incompatible. Aron himself recognised that the concept of secular religion ‘presents more difficulties than advantages’, but despite these shortcomings it helped to produce an understanding of totalitarianism and its relationship with democracy that informed wider reflection on this issue during France’s late twentieth-century antitotalitarian moment. For while there can be no doubting the strength of Aron’s Cold War anti-communism, this never entailed any equally unequivocal promotion of western democracy as an idealised antithesis of Soviet totalitarianism. In fact, what is remarkable about his reflection on totalitarianism and democracy is the extent to which he saw the two regime types less as radical opposites than as frères ennemis, each competing to embody democratic ideals of liberty, equality, and popular sovereignty more authentically than the other. In this respect an examination of Raymond Aron’s early writings on totalitarianism indicates that while recent scholarship on French antitotalitarianism has been right to highlight its predominant focus on totalitarianism’s

 

This argument is made in Seubert, ‘Recalling the “engaged observer” in changed times’. Mémoires, .

Conclusion



democratic origins, it has been wrong to identify this as a discovery made only in the s. In addition to enhancing our understanding of France’s antitotalitarian moment, studying the early development of Raymond Aron’s theory of totalitarianism contributes to a new understanding of the history of ‘Cold War liberalism’, a phenomenon now coming to be recognised as having originated in the late interwar period and drawn substantially on non- and anti-liberal sources for inspiration. The case of Aron supports this interpretation. Sensitivity to the totalitarian potential pregnant within modern democracy led him to redefine democratic values along broadly liberal lines on the eve of the Second World War. But he was reluctant to identify his position as a liberal one, and while the work of Élie Halévy was undeniably an important starting point for Aron’s theory of totalitarianism, by  his position arguably owed more to avowedly anti-liberal thinkers like Carl Schmitt than it did to the venerable liberal historian. This is an important point not only in terms of our understanding of Aron’s work in relation to ‘Cold War liberalism’, but also from the perspective of the ‘French liberal revival’ of the s. It is now well known that the antitotalitarian turn in French thought involved a rediscovery of authors like Alexis de Tocqueville and Benjamin Constant. Raymond Aron’s influence on this development is widely recognised and, indeed, celebrated. What is seldom acknowledged, however, is the fact that nineteenth-century French liberalism was a fairly marginal influence on Aron’s political thought before the mid-s. The question of how and why he eventually came to define and align himself with a particular understanding of this French liberal tradition will begin to be discussed at the end of the following chapter.   

Kevin Duong argues it was only in the s that French intellectuals began to explore the democratic origins of totalitarianism. See his ‘Does democracy end in terror?’, . Moyn, Christian Human Rights, , , ; Chappel, ‘The Catholic origins of totalitarianism theory’, Chappel, ‘Slaying the Leviathan’, –, . Aron’s role in the rediscovery of liberal thought during the s is discussed at length in Chapter  of this book. For a recent account of this see Sawyer and Stewart (eds.), In Search of the Liberal Moment. Brian C. Anderson has described this liberal moment as an ‘Aronian renewal’, while more recently Emile Chabal has claimed that Aron ‘has defined what it has meant to be a liberal in France in the last thirty years’. See Brian C. Anderson, ‘The Aronian renewal’, First Things,  (March ), –; Emile Chabal, A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge, ), .

 

The End of Ideology

From the mid-s to the early s, Raymond Aron played an important role in popularising the notion that the post-Second World War achievements of Europe’s partially managed, mixed economies held out the possibility of an end to the ‘ideological’ politics of class conflict and polarisation between left and right. This ‘end of ideology’ thesis exemplifies what David Ellwood has called the ‘canonisation of the growth idea’ in postwar Europe. The degree of optimism with which it was articulated varied, but its different proponents shared the fundamental assumption that sustained economic growth, managed by a moderately interventionist state in cooperation with labour and enterprise, could simultaneously deliver increasing levels of wages, benefits, profits, and investment. By thus aligning the interests of capital and labour, a new politics of productivity could replace the old politics of class conflict, rendering traditional ideological distinctions between left and right redundant in the process. The end of ideology thus did not constitute a positive political theory, but rather an attempt at redefining the discursive parameters of postwar political debate so as to discredit communism and, to a lesser extent, laissez-faire economic liberalism. End of ideology discourse was as much a response to developments in the Soviet world as it was a celebration of Western Europe’s unexpectedly strong economic recovery. The relaxation of domestic repression since the death of Stalin in  was accompanied by a de-escalation of the Cold War, as the USSR’s new leaders unilaterally adopted a strategy of ‘peaceful   

David W. Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America, and Postwar Reconstruction (London, ), . The term ‘politics of productivity’ is taken from Charles S. Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge, ), –. Giles Scott-Smith, ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the end of ideology and the  Milan conference: “defining the parameters of discourse”’, Journal of Contemporary History,  (July ), –.



The End of Ideology



co-existence’ with the West. By initiating a cultural thaw at home and ostensibly shifting the locus of international competition from the military to the socioeconomic sphere, the new Soviet strategy posed a major ideological challenge to anti-communist intellectuals, who would no longer be able to rely so heavily on the negative antitotalitarianism of the early Cold War. The Congress for Cultural Freedom’s ‘Future of Freedom’ conference held in Milan in September  was a milestone in the organisation’s post-Stalinist reorientation towards the end of ideology theme. Raymond Aron played an important role in bringing about this shift. Aron sat on the organising panel of the ‘Future of Freedom’ conference, and the event drew thematic inspiration from The Opium of the Intellectuals, whose conclusion raised the possibility of ‘the end of the ideological age’. In his own work, Aron went on to address the end of ideology question by reviving the Saint-Simonian concept of the industrial society, which enabled him to replace the dichotomy of democracy and totalitarianism with a conceptual framework that facilitated an empirical comparison of rival systems re-conceived as two species of the same genus. Because of its immediate origins, the end of ideology doctrine has been identified as a distinguishing feature of ‘Cold War liberalism’, a rhetorical shift in the language of anti-communism marking the dawn of a ‘golden age of capitalism’. But this does not tell the whole story. As a piece of conceptual branding, it may have been born from debates within the CCF in the mid-s, but the substance of those debates was hardly new. Here the roots of the end of ideology stretch beyond the postwar ‘golden age of capitalism’ into the much less propitious era of the Great Depression. Viewed from this angle, the ‘Future of Freedom’ conference appears less as a new departure for the CCF than as the continuation of overlapping debates among revisionist socialists and liberals whose origins significantly   



On this conference see Scott-Smith, ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom’. Aron, L’opium des intellectuels (Paris, ), –. Scott-Smith, ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom’; Anthony Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (Oxford, ), –. The ‘golden age of capitalism’ quote is from Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (London, ), –. This in turn is an adaptation from the formulation used in Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, – (London, ), –. In Europe, its roots in fact stretched still further back into the s. The analysis presented here will, however, focus on the s onwards because it was during these years that the individuals with whom we shall be concerned began to engage in the debates out of which the end of ideology theory directly emerged. For a survey of European theories of economic planning, technocracy and industrial democracy in the s see Charles S. Maier, ‘Between Taylorism and technocracy: European ideologies and the vision of industrial productivity in the s’, Journal of Contemporary History,  (April ), –.



The End of Ideology

predated the Cold War. By seeking to ‘forward the process of breaking the encrustations of liberal and socialist thought’, the organisers of this event looked to continue an endeavour that was begun in the late s by many of the same individuals who were invited to Milan. This was true of Raymond Aron, whose prominent involvement in the formulation of the end of ideology doctrine bears the imprint of his more marginal participation in these earlier debates.

Aron at the Margins of Neo-socialism and Neo-liberalism Towards the end of his life, Raymond Aron described his political orientation in the s and s as ‘vaguely socialist’. Most of his subsequent commentators have been equally vague on this subject, emphasising the strength of Aron’s socialist convictions before the Cold War without analysing their content. Yet interwar French socialism was so heterogeneous that simply to assert Aron’s passionate commitment to socialism in this period does not tell us a great deal. The limitations of this approach are most obvious when it comes to explaining the development of Aron’s economic thought. For although during the late s Aron continued to self-identify as a socialist, in the same period he participated in some of the earliest French and international attempts to develop a ‘neo-liberal’ economics. This is, however, less paradoxical than it might at first appear. Recent scholarship on the intellectual history of neoliberalism has highlighted its early ideological heterogeneity, and a preoccupation on the part of neo-liberal network builders to involve sections of the political left in their projects. In the s, when socialist theory was itself in a state of  

 

Aron, Le spectateur engagé (Paris, ), –. Robert Colquhoun, Raymond Aron: The Philosopher in History, – (Beverly Hills, ), –; Nicolas Baverez, Raymond Aron: un moraliste au temps des idéologies (Paris, ), –; JeanFrançois Sirinelli, Sartre et Aron, deux intellectuels dans le siècle (Paris, ), –. Sirinelli gives a more detailed account of Aron’s involvement in normalien socialism, but from this draws no substantive conclusions about the specific nature of Aron’s socialism, reverting instead to quotations from Le spectateur engagé to describe the latter’s socialism as ‘vague’ and ‘ill-defined’. Colqhuhoun, Raymond Aron, . François Denord, Néo-libéralisme version française: histoire d’une idéologie politique (Paris, ); Serge Audier, Le Colloque Lippmann: aux origines du néo-libéralisme (Paris, ); Serge Audier, Néolibéralisme(s): une archéologie intellectuelle (Paris, ); Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neo-Liberal Thought Collective (Cambridge MA., ); Ben Jackson, ‘At the origins of neo-liberalism: the free economy and the strong state, -’, The Historical Journal,  (March ), –; Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge MA., ). For a sustained discussion of neoliberalism’s socialist roots see Johanna Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism: The LeftWing Origins of Neoliberalism (Stanford, ).

Aron at the Margins of Neo-socialism and Neo-liberalism



flux following the successive ideological challenges of the Great War, the rise of fascism and communism, and the Depression, new possibilities for dialogue between liberal and socialist revisionists emerged. Between his return to Paris in the summer of  and the start of the war, Aron’s academic career followed an institutional path that at once returned him to the revisionist socialist milieu of his undergraduate years while also exposing him to some of the earliest debates over what was beginning to be called ‘neo-liberalism’. These five years on the overlapping peripheries of revisionist socialist and neo-liberal economic debates would prove to be a formative experience for the development of Aron’s account of a possible end of ideology. Although Aron’s move to Germany took him away from the political milieu of his youth, he continued to show an interest in heterodox socialism and became personally acquainted with the Belgian socialist theoretician Hendrik de Man while living there. In , he published an enthusiastic review of De Man’s Beyond Marxism, which Aron praised for offering a viable third way between the doctrinal cul-de-sacs of reformism and revolution. Echoing the sentiments of Marcel Déat, another politician whom Aron much admired around this time, this was typical of the broader reception of de Man’s work among French socialist revisionists. De Man’s influence among some French socialists later began to extend beyond doctrinal discussion over Marxism to encompass more practical policy debates over economic planning. In December , the Belgian government implemented his Plan du Travail, which was simultaneously published in France by a group of socialists from the Groupe d’études des socialistes des Écoles normales supérieures [GESENS] and the SFIO’s Bureau d’Études. By this point many French revisionist socialists had come to view the state less as an agent of class domination than as a tool for implementing structural economic reforms aimed more at 



 

Aron, ‘Henri de Man: Au delà du marxisme’, Libres Propos,  (January ), –. Although only a book review, this piece held a lasting significance for Aron, who republished it in . See Aron ‘Henri de Man: Au delà du marxisme’, Contrepoint,  (), –. See too Aron, ‘De Man – L’idée socialiste’, Les annales sociologiques. Série A. Sociologie Générale, no.  (), . ‘We wanted to propose something other than a gradualist and ineffective reformism, something other than the vague escape [exutoire] of a formless, dateless revolution. A clear, immediate, . . . forward looking plan of action. Thus cutting through the old quarrels, more inspiring than mass revolution, more realist than piecemeal reformism.’ Déat, Perspectives, . The influence of De Man is apparent throughout this text – see, e.g., , , . Aron, Mémoires:  ans de réflexion politique (Paris, ), –, . Stéphane Clouet, De la révolution à l’utopie socialistes: Révolution Constructive, un groupe d’intellectuels socialistes des années  (Nancy, ), –.



The End of Ideology

promoting economic growth than at redistributing wealth. Progressive nationalisation was expected to play a part in these reforms, but more important than state ownership of the means of production was the ability of the state effectively to manage a mixed economy through its monopoly of credit and collaboration with unions. Economic planning therefore became a major preoccupation of heterodox socialists in France, whose new economic vision was seen to complement their more longstanding political strategy aimed at appealing to a broad spectrum of working and middle class voters. Unlike his earlier theoretical texts, however, the influence of the plan de Man extended far beyond the confines of the SFIO, as an explosion of interest in ‘planism’ affected a wide spectrum of French politics during . It was at the peak of French ‘planomania’ that Raymond Aron returned to Paris to become secretary-archivist of the École normale’s Centre de documentation sociale, a position he would hold from the autumn of  until the war. Established in  by the sociologist Célestin Bouglé, the Centre de documentation sociale occupies an important place in the social and intellectual history of French socialist revisionism. One of Aron’s predecessors there was Marcel Déat, who was secretary-archivist in – and again in –. Déat’s second stint in this role came shortly after the establishment of the GESENS, which held its meetings at the centre. Consequently, it provided one of the sites where heterodox student socialists first came into contact with likeminded young deputies from the revisionist wing of the Socialist Party. The Centre de documentation sociale also played an important part in the development of French socialist revisionism because of its role in promoting the rediscovery of France’s non-Marxian traditions of socialist thought. Home to Charles Fourier’s personal archive, it was the base from which new editions of important Saint-Simonian texts and the complete works of Proudhon were prepared in the interwar period. It was partly out of this French socialist   

 

Julian Jackson, The Politics of Depression in France, – (Cambridge, ), . The key text here is Marcel Déat, Perspectives Socialistes (Paris, ). On ‘planomania’ see Jackson, The Politics of Depression, –. In – Aron was a lycée teacher in Le Havre. Aron’s post at the Centre de documentation sociale was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, details of which can be found in Célestin Bouglé’s archived papers relating to the Centre de documentation sociale in AN AJ/, AN AJ/. Jean-François Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle: khâgneux et normaliens dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris, ), –. As per note  above, details of these projects can be found in AN AJ/ and AN AJ/. The relevant reeditions of Saint-Simon are La doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition, Première Année,  (ed.), Célestin Bouglé and Élie Halévy (Paris, ); Henri de Saint-Simon, L’Oeuvre d’Henri de Saint-Simon. Textes choisis avec une introduction de Célestin Bouglé (Paris, ).

Aron at the Margins of Neo-socialism and Neo-liberalism



revival that a new lexical distinction between ‘the political’ (le politique) and ‘the economic’ entered the vocabulary of the social sciences in France. Aron’s employment at the Centre de documentation sociale not only reconnected him with the socialist milieu of his undergraduate years, it also brought him into contact with various heterodox liberal economists whose work in the s would have a significant influence on the relationship between state and economy in postwar France. What brought this about was his close working relationship with Robert Marjolin. This economist is now best remembered for a stellar post-Second World War career that began working with Jean Monnet and Étienne Hirsch as one of the architects of France’s economic recovery plan. Although Marjolin’s career trajectory was exceptional, he was typical of many postwar French technocrats in having begun it in the comparative obscurity of interwar nonconformism. A founding member of Révolution Constructive, the heterodox socialist think tank responsible for publishing the Plan de Man in France, he joined the Centre de documentation sociale in September  after spending the previous year studying trade unionism in the United States. In  he was appointed economics editor of the official SFIO newspaper Le Populaire by Léon Blum, and in  he joined the Popular Front’s Ministry for the National Economy as an advisor on economic policy. Marjolin was almost as well connected to heterodox liberal economics as he was to the cutting edge of policy debates in and around the SFIO. This was largely due to his parallel employment at Charles Rist’s Institut de recherches économiques et sociales. Founded in , this institute had close ties to the London School of Economics, which was then undergoing its conversion to economic liberalism under the influence of Lionel Robbins and Friedrich von Hayek. Marjolin was on good terms with both these men, whom he regularly visited at the Reform Club in London. 



 

Robert Marjolin was subsequently secretary general of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (–), and later vice president of the Commission of the European Economic Community (–). The links between nonconformist think tanks in the s and France’s post-war technocratic elite are fundamental to the transwar perspective of Philip Nord’s France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton, ), –. Biographical details in this paragraph are taken from Robert Marjolin, Le travail d’une vie: mémoires, – (Paris, ), –. See Marjolin, Le travail, : ‘I often went to London to meet British economists of the London School of Economics, with which Rist’s institute had a collaborative arrangement. I recall that my English friends used to meet on Wednesday evenings at the Reform Club in Pall Mall. Whenever I was in London I attended those meetings where we would discuss contemporary economic and political issues at length.’ It is probably through Marjolin that Aron became acquainted Robbins



The End of Ideology

Although Raymond Aron did not publish anything substantial on economics before , the development of Marjolin’s position in some of the policy debates of the mid-s offers an indirect sense of Aron’s stance in this period. Marjolin was the figure with whom Aron worked most closely at the Centre de documentation sociale, where the two men cotaught a course on political economy. Reminiscing about their friendship in his memoir, Marjolin remarked that ‘our moral and intellectual universes, our value systems were the same, not just on the whole but even in detail.’ More specifically, he attributed the cooling of his enthusiasm for economic planning in this period to Aron’s influence. According to Marjolin, by the mid-s Aron considered planning to have become so idealised as to offer little more than unrealistic images d’Épinal. These were broadly the terms in which Marjolin explained his last minute refusal to endorse Jules Romains’s Plan du  juillet, the most famous of the numerous planning manifestos published in the mid-s. He would later describe the development of his economic thought in this decade as a move from socialism towards liberalism. Yet Marjolin and Aron’s shared reluctance to view economic planning as a social panacea indicates scepticism towards its utopian idealisation rather than a classical liberal rejection on principle. Both men remained persuaded of the virtues of a mixed economy in which the state would have an enhanced planning and regulatory role. And they were both among the earliest and most enthusiastic French readers of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Insofar as the prewar development of their economic thought traced a path from socialism to liberalism, the economic liberalism at

 



 

and Hayek, with whom he too would dine every week at the Reform Club during the war. On this see Mémoires, , . On the reorientation of economics at LSE see Burgin, The Great Persuasion, – and Marjolin, Le travail, .  Ibid., . Robert Marjolin, ‘Les années ’, Commentaire, – (Winter ), –, . Ibid., . Aron’s recollection on this point differs somewhat from Marjolin’s. In  he wrote that ‘In  or in , a French equivalent of the de Man plan would have avoided the cruelties of Laval’s deflation and the contrary errors of the Popular Front.’ See Aron’s commentary on his ‘Henri de Man: Au-delà du marxisme’, as re-published in Contrepoint  (), –, . Marjolin announced his withdrawal from the Plan du  juillet as a rejection of ‘empty alliances which have no other common basis than a desire to organise the economy’, warning ‘Be careful of chimeras and universal harmonies.’ Quoted in Julian Jackson, Politics of Depression, –. The Plan du  Juillet drew support from a broad political spectrum, which encompassed socialists, neosocialists, members of the think tanks Révolution Constructive and X-Crise, and even the far-right Croix de Feu. Marjolin, Le travail, , . Pierre Rosanvallon, ‘Histoire des idées keynésiennes en France’, Revue française d’économie,  (Autumn ), –, –; Le spectateur engagé, ; Marjolin, Le travail, . Aron had been writing a book on Keynesian economics on the eve of the war but lost the manuscript. See Mémoires, .

Aron at the Margins of Neo-socialism and Neo-liberalism



which they arrived was one that had incorporated aspects of neo-socialist planning with a view towards saving capitalism from itself. This syncretic left neo-liberalism was one of several competing projects aimed at a critical renewal of liberal economics during the mid-to-late s. Although the wider debate was transnational, the specific brand of revisionist liberalism on which Aron and Marjolin settled was forged in large part at the Groupe X-Crise, an economic think tank based at the École polytechnique. Founded in , X-Crise exemplified technocratic nonconformity’s ecumenical, neither left nor right quality. Although its participants included relatively conventional economic liberals like Jacques Rueff, it also attracted the participation of a minority of revisionist socialists, like Jules Moch and Robert Marjolin, alongside individuals, like Aron and the statistician Alfred Sauvy, who were sympathetic to the SFIO but critical of its economic policies. Other regular participants included reform-minded industrialists like Auguste Detoeuf and Ernest Mercier alongside moderate trade unionists such as Robert Lacoste. X-Crise was thus anything but an enclave of liberal orthodoxy. By embracing the latest econometric techniques, the group aimed to formulate a ‘rational economics’ that did not rely on the dubious assumptions about individual rationality that it attributed to the ‘literary political economy’ of classical and neoclassical liberalism. Coupled to this critique of liberalism’s individualist philosophy was a practical concern with identifying effective forms of state intervention with which to address France’s economic crisis. Planning thus became a major preoccupation at X-Crise, but what differentiated this group’s planist vision from that of the neo-socialist left was the less statist language in which it was articulated and its explicit aim of saving capitalism. The participation of figures like Aron, Marjolin, and Moch suggests it would be a mistake to define X-Crise as a straightforwardly anti-socialist





 

Richard Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France (Cambridge, ), –; Jackie Clarke, France in the Age of Organisation: Factory, Home and Nation from the s to Vichy (New York, ), . From May to June  Sauvy was an economics advisor to the Blum government, implementing the ‘pause’ in the Popular Front’s programme of socioeconomic reforms. He continued his advisory role with subsequent governments and was tasked with designing the liberalising economic reforms implemented with decree powers by Paul Reynaud between  and . See Michel Lévy, Alfred Sauvy: compagnon du siècle (Paris, ), –. On X-Crise see Olivier Dard, ‘Voyage à l’intérieur d’X-Crise’, Vingtième siècle,  (July–September ), –, ; Clarke, Age of Organisation, –.  Ibid., . Nord, France’s New Deal, .

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The End of Ideology

group. Yet those socialists who attended the group’s meetings did ultimately tend to distance themselves from the SFIO, particularly after the collapse of the first Popular Front government. This was true of Robert Marjolin and Raymond Aron. As an act of loyalty to Léon Blum, Marjolin had resigned from Révolution Constructive in  over the group’s incessant criticism of the SFIO’s leadership. But his loyalty was tested to breaking point by his experience as an economic advisor to the Popular Front. After Marjolin’s private criticisms of the Blum government’s economic policy were ignored, he went public, ultimately resigning from the SFIO in . The same year Aron published his own critique of the Blum experiment, his first foray into the economic policy debates of the mid-to-late s. In this piece, Aron attacked both the redistributionist logic underlying the Popular Front’s economic programme and the two policies that he regarded as having condemned the experiment to failure: the refusal of currency devaluation before September  and the implementation of the forty-hour week in the same month. Failure to recognise the necessity of devaluation was not exclusively the fault of the Blum government; its right-wing predecessors had been equally reluctant to devalue, but, for Aron, the Popular Front had been guilty of demagogy when campaigning in  on a platform of ‘neither deflation nor devaluation’. Both deflationary cuts in government spending and currency devaluation had, he argued, been painful necessities since the deterioration of the economic crisis in . Contrary to received opinion on the French left, the mistake of the Laval ministry in  had not been its deflationary economic policy but its failure to combine this with devaluation. When the Blum government eventually accepted the necessity of devaluation, its simultaneous implementation of the forty-hour week ultimately choked off the return to growth that its new monetary policy had initially stimulated. The redistributionist logic underpinning the wage rises and reduction in working hours initiated by the Popular Front failed to recognise that such reforms, however desirable, were ultimately dependent upon long-term improvements in the productivity of the French economy. ‘[I]t is futile,’ Aron argued, ‘to expect to improve the situation of a class if the new

  

François Denord, while acknowledging the heterogeneity of interwar French neo-liberalism, defines it as fundamentally anti-socialist. See his Néo-libéralisme version française, –, . Marjolin’s letter of resignation is reproduced in Clouet, Révolution Constructive, –. Marjolin, Le travail, –.

Aron at the Margins of Neo-socialism and Neo-liberalism



distribution of wealth is not accompanied by an increase in overall wealth.’ Aron was not only critical of the redistributionist economic policies of the Popular Front; he was also sceptical of the structural reforms promoted by planist socialists and trade unionists as an alternative. Some nationalisations, such as in the insurance industry, might be desirable, he argued. But an extensive programme of nationalisations was unrealistic given the dire state of French public finances. It was not clear that nationalising credit would be an effective mechanism for managing the economy, and French civil servants and politicians lacked the expertise for this task anyway. More important than the ownership status of industry was its productivity, profitability, and capacity to modernise through capital investment. Decisions about nationalisations should thus be taken on pragmatic grounds and not dictated by ideology. Furthermore, the scale of ambition on the planist left was excessive. While some structural reforms may be realisable, to attempt a comprehensive programme in such a highly polarised political context would be to invite civil war. In this regard, the role of the trade unions, where planism had traditionally been most influential, was vital. During the massive industrial unrest that greeted the electoral victory of the Popular Front, the unions had, Aron believed, behaved irresponsibly in pushing for the forty-hour week. In future, if France’s economy was to recover and its political life was to depolarise, the trade unions, which were now largely under Communist control, would need ‘to discover both the limits and obligations of power.’ Aron’s article on the Popular Front scandalised his friends on the antifascist left, but its arguments would have been entirely uncontroversial among his acquaintances at X-Crise. The historian François Denord suggests that the critique of the Popular Front’s economic policies emanating from in and around this think tank provided a seedbed for a specifically French brand of neo-liberalism. This is debatable. Few of these individuals self-identified as ‘neo-liberals’ and none of them appear as such from the perspective of most contemporary understandings of this term today. Raymond Aron himself never explicitly promoted   



Aron, ‘Réflexions sur les problèmes économiques français’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (October ), –, .  Ibid., . Colquhoun, Raymond Aron,  n. . François Denord, ‘French neo-liberalism and its divisions from the Colloque Walter Lippmann to the Fifth Republic’ in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neo-Liberal Thought Collective (Cambridge MA, ), –, . On the history of the term ‘neo-liberalism’ in France see Audier, Néo-libéralisme(s), –.



The End of Ideology

‘neo-liberal’ economics, and his occasional references to ‘neo-liberalism’ in the postwar period equated this with Hayekian free market radicalism, which Aron consistently rejected. But insofar as Aron and likeminded critics of the Blum government were simultaneously concerned with refounding liberal economics by challenging free market orthodoxies, the case for a French neo-liberalism of the late s remains plausible. Those historians and political scientists who have made this case follow the example of commentators at the time, who themselves placed these debates under the rubric of ‘neo-liberalism’. But the term probably would not have achieved the limited traction that it did gain in France on the eve of the war were it not for the influence of a larger transnational debate. This debate was initiated at the Colloque Walter Lippmann, held in Paris on – August . It was here that the first collective attempt to define ‘neo-liberalism’ took place. Organised in honour of the famous American commentator whose book The Good Society had just been translated into French, this international colloquium attracted participants from a range of opinions and professional backgrounds similar to XCrise. Although no consensus as to what ‘neo-liberalism’ might mean in practice was reached at this event, the Lippmann conference did establish a durable transnational network of intellectuals dedicated to the defence and renewal of economic liberalism, variously reconceived. Its immediate outcome was the establishment in Paris of a short-lived Centre d’études pour la rénovation du libéralisme, a direct precursor of the Mont Pèlerin Society founded by Hayek after the war. There is no record of any contribution by Aron to the discussions at the Colloque Walter 

    

Aron, Essai sur les libertés (Paris, ), , –; Aron, ‘La définition libérale de la liberté’ [] in Aron, Études politiques (Paris, ), –. For Aron’s critique of Hayekian methodological individualism see Aron, Leçons sur l’histoire: cours du Collège de France (Paris, ), –. Gwendal Châton provides a good recent discussion of Aron in relation to Hayek in his Introduction à Raymond Aron (Paris, ), –. See also Gwendal Châton, ‘Libéralisme ou démocratie? Raymond Aron lecteur de Friedrich Hayek’, Revue de philosophie économique,  (), –. Gaétan Pirou, Néo-Libéralisme, Néo-Corporatisme, Néo-Socialisme (Paris, ), –. For the proceedings see Serge Audier, Le Colloque Lippmann: aux origines du néo-libéralisme (Paris, ). Walter Lippmann, Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society (Boston, ) translated by Georges Blumberg as La Cité Libre (Paris, ). For a contemporary account of the internal divisions among ‘neo-liberals’ see Pirou, –. For a more recent account see Burgin, The Great Persuasion, –. Denord, Néo-libéralisme version française, . Twelve out of twenty-six participants at the Colloque Walter Lippmann also joined the Mont Pèlerin Society. These included Raymond Aron, Louis Baudin, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Michael Polanyi, Wilhelm Röpke, Louis Rougier, Jacques Rueff, and Alexander Ru¨stow. On this see R.M. Hartwell, A History of the Mont Pèlerin Society (Indianapolis, ), . Aron resigned from the Mont Pèlerin Society in

Aron at the Margins of Neo-socialism and Neo-liberalism



Lippmann, but he did give a speech at the opening of the Centre d’études pour la rénovation du libéralisme. Although the text has apparently been lost, the record of this speech’s occurrence, together with Aron’s participation in the Lippmann colloquium, suggests that his involvement in the emergent neo-liberal project was ideologically significant and not purely circumstantial. A glimpse of Aron’s position in the earliest transnational debates over neo-liberalism can be gained by consulting an article on objectivity in the social sciences published in . In this piece, Aron critiqued economic theory for its tendency to calcify into doctrine, citing the Austrian and neoclassical schools of economic liberalism among his examples. What separated theory from doctrine, Aron suggested, was a willingness to distinguish between ‘logical truth’ and ‘factual truth’. To make this distinction was to recognise an inevitable gap between abstract schema and concrete reality. As Aron explained, These uncertainties must neither surprise or discourage us. They are not due to the inadequacy of economists but to the complexity of economic reality. Economic subjects are men; their decisions are only intelligible if they are rational. Yet they are not always rational. The economy only exists through the economist’s abstraction; it takes place in an ensemble of institutions and is subjected to the repercussions of political and social events. All parts of the system are interdependent, hence the multiplicity of possible actions and reactions between these parts. Finally, the situations analysed by theoretical schemas are precisely defined, while concrete situations are always imperfectly known.

Having criticised the economics of the socialist and neo-socialist left in his article on the Popular Front, here Aron began to set out elements of a critique of the neo-liberal right that he would expand upon in the postwar period. His position is consistent with the social ontology of Introduction to the Philosophy of History, and the article draws similar conclusions to Aron’s doctoral thesis in favour of methodological and interpretative pluralism in







 owing to his disagreement with its free market radicalism. See Denord, ‘French neoliberalism’, . No presentations or interventions by Aron are recorded in the proceedings of the Colloque Walter Lippmann, which can be accessed in the appendix of Serge Audier, Le Colloque Lippmann: aux origines du néo-libéralisme (Paris, ), –. His speech at the opening of the CIERL, but not its contents, is noted in Denord, Néo-libéralisme version française, . Aron, ‘Remarques sur l’objectivité des sciences sociales’, Théoria,  (January ), –, , . This charge is repeated in Aron, ‘Comment l’historien écrit l’épistémologie: à propos du livre de Paul Veyne’ [] as included in the appendix of Aron, Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire (Paris, [] ), –, .  ‘Remarques sur l’objectivité’, , . Ibid., .



The End of Ideology

the field of economics. It also aligns Aron with the critique of ‘literary political economy’ underway at X-Crise around this time. But at this point the prescriptive dimension of Aron’s economic thought remained comparatively vague. This would only begin to change with the imminent approach of the war.

Planning for Postwar Democratic Renewal Raymond Aron’s first foray into prescriptive economic commentary occurred in his presentation on ‘Democratic States and Totalitarian States’ at the Société française de philosophie in June . Here Aron outlined a triple economic, ideological, and elite-based reform required for the survival of democratic regimes in the face of their totalitarian enemies. Written in anticipation of war, this presentation would also provide the basis for Aron’s reflection on postwar democratic recovery. Comparing democratic and totalitarian regimes, he argued that democracies should learn from the strengths of their enemies, and that certain imitative adaptations could be made without sacrificing the values separating democracy and totalitarianism. That economic planning in totalitarian regimes was authoritarian and militaristic reflected the particular political aims of those regimes’ ruling elites; it was thus ideologically determined, not a necessary outcome of planning itself. This implied that democracies could adopt aspects of totalitarian economic organisation without sacrificing individual liberties altogether provided they were led by elites possessing the requisite technical capacity and ideological commitment to democracy. Acknowledging that a minimum of economic liberty was a prerequisite for political liberty, Aron suggested that democratic planning should utilise capitalist industrial expertise, establishing itself on the basis of class cooperation, not conflict. As for the necessary renewal of faith in democratic ideals, this called for reflection on precisely which of these were essential and which secondary. As we saw in the previous chapter, Aron considered some form of representative government to be essential to democracy, but thought that the ideal of popular sovereignty was inessential because it was sufficiently equivocal to risk being subverted in support of totalitarian ends. Instead, he argued for a redefinition of democratic values, which prioritised constitutionality and the protection of individual liberties.  

Aron, ‘États démocratiques et états totalitaires’ [] in Aron, Penser la liberté, penser la démocratie (Paris, ), –.    ‘Ibid., . Ibid., –. Ibid., –, –. Ibid., .

Planning for Postwar Democratic Renewal



Aron elaborated upon the interrelated themes of economic organisation, elite renewal, and ideological reinforcement in much of his writing for La France libre, the journal he edited alongside André Labarthe in London during the war. In an article published in May  that had repeated his argument for a limited imitative adaptation of democracies to the virtues of totalitarian organisation, Aron concluded with a reminder of the importance of renewing faith in democratic values since ‘while it is possible to win the war without believing in democracy, it will not be possible to win the peace if we do not believe in democracy.’ In September  he emphasised that allied victory would require peacetime economic organisation to be reoriented towards new goals: ‘Finally, liberated from the Germans, liberated from tyranny, men must also be liberated “from want and fear”, the fear spread by war, the poverty spread by unemployment.’ Three months later, he reiterated that any such postwar settlement must be based not on a politics of class conflict, but on ‘the broader collaborations that the economic technique . . . of our epoch demands’. Aron repeated this argument in March  in an article that reemphasised the decisive moral and technical importance of elite renewal for a postwar recovery that must combine enhanced state economic intervention with the safeguarding of democratic values. During the winter of – Aron’s writing on these themes became more detailed and specific in its recommendations. In an article dated November–December , he wrote that, ‘it is an indisputable fact that the prosperity and grandeur of a nation depends to a large extent on the minority which holds the positions of command’, but warned against the technocratic illusion that the administration of things would replace the government of people in a postwar French democracy. It would, he argued, be essential to reanimate the faith of the masses in the democratic system, but the organisation of mass democratic enthusiasm must be steered along nonpartisan lines. The only way to avoid a return to the radical polarisation of the s would be to learn the lesson of that decade’s failed economic policies: 

    

Aron, ‘La stratégie totalitaire et l’avenir des démocraties’ [] in Aron, L’homme contre les tyrans (New York, ), –, . See also Aron, ‘Démocratie et enthousiasme’ [] in L’homme contre les tyrans, –. Aron, ‘Bataille des propagandes’ [] in L’homme contre les tyrans, –, –. Aron, ‘La menace des Césars’, [] in L’homme contre les tyrans, –, . Aron, ‘Du pessimisme historique’, [] in L’homme contre les tyrans, –, –. Aron, ‘Du renouvellement des élites’, [] in Aron, L’âge des empires et l’avenir de la France (Paris, ), –, –, . Ibid., .



The End of Ideology No economic, social or political equilibrium was possible as long as the stagnation of economic activity obliged us to share a static revenue between growing appetites. As long as the collective wealth was not growing, it was only possible to satisfy the aspirations, however legitimate, of one section of the community at the expense of meeting the expectations of others.

Returning to this theme in the spring of , Aron attributed the failure of French economic policy in the s to a disconnection of technical expertise and government. After the war, this should be addressed by linking public administration and independent think tanks, and by overhauling civil service training to instil a culture that was ‘less bookish, more international’. It was, he argued, ‘inadmissible that an inspector of finances should not have completed sufficient work experience in a bank or large enterprise, that he should not have direct experience of English and American markets.’ Economic planning would thus be fundamental to stimulating the French economy into the growth upon which postwar social stability depended, but it should be based upon a consultative, cooperative relationship with private enterprise. Favouring a targeted, indicative form of planning over more comprehensive socialist approaches, Aron also suggested that the extent of state-led economic planning would reduce once the immediate demands of postwar reconstruction had been met, allowing for a relative expansion of the private sector within the mixed economy. Written between March and April , this article shows Aron diverging somewhat from the social democratic mainstream of planning debate as represented in the then recently published programme of the Conseil national de la Résistance (CNR). This was also apparent in a later piece in which he discussed the question of nationalisation. Acknowledging the strength of public opinion on this issue, Aron recognised the political case for nationalisation, even if the economic argument was sometimes unconvincing. He thus accepted in principle the nationalisation of the mining, insurance, transport, chemical, and electricity industries, but emphasised that public ownership should not be viewed as a panacea. Elsewhere, his favourable attitude towards comprehensive social insurance was balanced with a similarly pragmatic warning that its long-term feasibility would depend upon tackling France’s historically low birth rate. Aron’s    

 Ibid., . Aron, ‘Le renforcement du pouvoir’ [] in L’âge des empires, –, –.   Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., –. Aron, ‘Révolution et rénovation’ [] in L’âge des empires, –, . ‘Le renforcement’, –. Aron had first addressed this theme in : see ‘Réflexions’, –.

Planning for Postwar Democratic Renewal



moderation regarding such issues was not only rooted in an awareness of practical limitations; it was equally motivated by a political concern that any postwar settlement should have a broad-based appeal and refrain from the kind of divisive economic demagogy that he considered to have doomed the Popular Front to failure. Later that year he suggested that postwar economic planning should be Saint-Simonian in inspiration rather than socialist because whereas the socialist ideal would arouse confrontation, its Saint-Simonian counterpart offered an opportunity for collaboration in good faith between social classes. What this meant in practical terms, he later wrote, was that the direction suggested by French experience is not towards integral planning of the nation’s economic life . . . it is even less to return to a liberalism that is, momentarily at least, excluded both by circumstances and the state of public opinion. The direction suggested by French experience is to demand from state intervention that it gives the necessary impetus towards the modernisation of our tools and our working practices.

Where the CNR’s planning agenda was oriented towards the establishment of an extensive social and economic democracy, with substantial worker control at all levels and generous minimum wage guarantees, the vision promoted by Aron stressed the need to subordinate the demands of both wages and profitability to those of productivity: ‘Such a plan’, he wrote, ‘would transcend partisan quarrels, offer the French people an opportunity to work together, and create a space for reconciliation between political parties.’ For Aron, then, postwar economic planning would perform a socially didactic role in addition to its immediate technical function: a broad-based, collaborative approach, centred on modernisation and efficiency rather than socialisation and redistribution, would ultimately serve to teach a lesson of civic virtue. Thus conceived, planning offered an opportunity to break the cycle of moral and political crises fuelled by the recurrence of Manichean polarisation in national political debate since the French Revolution. While this vision stood in contrast to the socialist mainstream of wartime planning debate, it would prove to be very closely aligned with      

On the Popular Front’s ‘economic demagogy’ see ‘États démocratiques’, . Aron, ‘Organisation des partis’ [] in L’âge des empires, –, . ‘Révolution et rénovation’, . ‘Organisation des partis’, –. See also ‘Révolution et rénovation’, ; Aron, ‘Signification des problèmes français’ [] in L’âge des empires, –, –. Aron, ‘Victoire idéologique’ [] in L’âge des empires, –, . Aron, ‘Introduction’ [] in L’âge des empires, –, –.



The End of Ideology

the planning model that was eventually established by Jean Monnet, Robert Marjolin, and Étienne Hirsch at the Commissariat-général au Plan in . This is not to suggest that men whose combined economic expertise greatly surpassed Aron’s were substantially influenced by his wartime writings. But the basic similarities between their respective visions do point to a common historical origin that lay partly in the heterodox economic theory developed in prewar think tanks like X-Crise. This kind of economic thought, which had been relatively marginal in the s, became much less so after the war when it achieved hegemony within France’s elite administrative training schools. Between  and  Aron participated in this ideological reorientation of French institutions, teaching Keynesian economics at the new École nationale d’administration and at the reformed Institut d’études politiques de Paris, previously a bastion of classical economic liberalism. After Aron swapped these positions for a professorship in sociology at the Sorbonne in , he would help popularise the new economic orthodoxy for a much wider audience at home and abroad.

The End of Ideology and the Congress for Cultural Freedom By  the economic vision outlined in Aron’s wartime writings was beginning to come to fruition. In his editorial for Le Figaro on  May he wrote that Ten years after the end of the war, Europe has achieved a level of prosperity that surpasses the most optimistic predictions made at the start of the Marshall Plan. . . . [A] semi-dirigiste, semi-liberal commercial policy has brought the same results that would theoretically have been induced through liberal mechanisms. Impassioned controversies between the doctrinaires of liberty and the doctrinaires of administrative control today take on an outdated and almost trivial character. 

   

See Nord, France’s New Deal –,–. See also Étienne Hirsch quoted in Denord, Néolibéralisme version française, : ‘the goal . . . cannot be to establish a directed or planned economy strictly speaking, but to create the general ambience, the climate, the incentives [les pentes] that, with the minium of constraints, will incline the economy in directions deemed desirable for the accomplishment of social goals’. The experiences and connections of Marjolin and Monnet in the United States were, of course, also influential in shaping their vision of postwar planning. Nord, France’s New Deal, –. One of Aron’s ENA courses from  was posthumously published as Aron, Introduction à la philosophie politique: démocratie et révolution (Paris, ). Nord, France’s New Deal, –, –, –. Aron, ‘La reconstruction de l’Europe’, [ May ] in Aron, Les articles de politique internationale dans Le Figaro de -, tome première, La Guerre froide (Juin  à mai ) (Paris, ),

The End of Ideology and the Congress for Cultural Freedom



This editorial echoed arguments advanced in Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals, published in France the same month. The strength of the postwar recovery in Western Europe placed into question some of the fundamental assumptions of Marxist socialism and classical economic liberalism. Capitalism had defied Marxist predictions of self-destruction by incorporating the welfare state, economic planning, and the coexistence of nationalised and private sectors. Liberal fears that this would lead to tyranny had not been realised. For Aron, this posed the question raised in the conclusion of Opium of the Intellectuals: could the West be approaching ‘the end of the ideological age?’ This question provided the central theme for the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s ‘Future of Freedom’ conference held in Milan in September . During his opening address in Milan, Aron revisited points made in Opium of the Intellectuals and repeated in his editorial for Le Figaro. ‘[E]conomic rules differ in fact less than theories or doctrines which are fundamentally opposed in theory’, he argued, remarking that the conference was inspired by the observation that ‘doctrinaire liberalism was just as dead as doctrinaire socialism and that the economies of the western world differ less in practice than they do in theory.’ By this point Aron was arguably the most influential figure within the CCF and had been closely involved in planning the conference, which aimed to ‘forward the process of breaking the encrustations of liberal and socialist thought, to discover their common ground, and to push forward with the task of formulating more realistic and more inclusive ideas on the conditions of the free society’. Participants included anti-communist intellectuals from a range



   

–, , . At the time of writing the French economy was on its way towards comfortably exceeding the targets of its second Plan (–). See Tom Buchanan, Europe’s Troubled Peace, – (Oxford, ), . ‘Liberalism and socialism continue to inspire convictions, to feed controversies. It is becoming more and more difficult reasonably to transfigure such preferences into doctrines. . . . The market economy and total planification are models to which no real economy conforms, not successive evolutionary stages. . . . Mixed regimes are not monsters incapable of living, or transitional forms towards a pure type, but the normal state of affairs.’ L’opium, , . Ibid., –. Giles Scott-Smith claims that Opium of the Intellectuals provided the thematic inspiration for the Milan conference in his ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom’, –, –. Quoted in Pierre Grémion, Intelligence de l’anticommunisme: Le Congrès pour la liberté de la culture à Paris, – (Paris, ), . Edward Shils, ‘The end of ideology?’, Encounter,  (November ), –, . For the full conference agenda see Grémion, Intelligence de l’anticommunisme, –. On Aron’s preponderate influence within the CCF see Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (London, ), ; François Bondy, ‘Une revue française pas comme les autres’ in Pierre Grémion (ed.) Preuves: une revue européenne à Paris



The End of Ideology

of political backgrounds alongside moderate socialist politicians and trade unionists, civil servants, and business leaders. The interprofessional nature of the event was reminiscent of some of the revisionist think tanks and conferences of the interwar years, and indeed the French contingent included several individuals with former links to the nonconformism of the late s and early s. Historians of the CCF view this event as a particularly significant moment in the organisation’s development. Giles Scott-Smith notes that the Milan conference marked the point at which the CCF positioned itself as the leading public forum for the intellectual justification of the Marshall Plan. Especially since the outbreak of the Korean War, the European Recovery Programme had placed an increasingly strong emphasis on improving efficiency, promoting major productivity enhancement programmes in all its recipient countries. Thus by preaching the gospel of productivity the CCF set itself in close alignment with wider American policy in Europe. The Future of Freedom conference also marked a renewal of the Congress’s efforts to engage reformist tendencies within West European socialist parties. The presence of a senior delegation from the revisionist wing of the British Labour Party was important in this regard. Party leader Hugh Gaitskell spoke on the relation between



 



(Paris, ), –, ; Walter Laqueur, Fin de Siècle and Other Essays on America and Europe: (New Brunswick, ), . Raymond Aron, Denis de Rougement, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Alfred Sauvy, André Philip, Robert Buron, Raoul Girardet and Charles Morazé attended the conference in Milan. Robert Marjolin, André Siegfried, François Goguel, Georges Friedmann and Alexandre Marc were all present on draft invitation lists. See Grémion, Intelligence de l’anticommunisme, , –. The participation of these individuals in nonconformist groups and publications may be cross-referenced by referring to the indices of Nord, France’s New Deal and Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années : une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris, ). Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and Post-War American Hegemony (London, ), . A focus on encouraging economic productivity had always been present within the Marshall Plan, but received much greater emphasis in the early-to-mid s. The annual budget of its productivity and technical assistance department rose from $ million in  to $ million in , leading to the establishment of national productivity centres in recipient countries and a dramatic increase in technical assistance programmes, with thousands of Europeans visiting the United States to study industrial practices there and hundreds of American productivity consultants working in Europe to impart their efficiency expertise to civil servants, leaders of enterprise, and trades unions. See Anthony Carew, ‘The politics of productivity and the politics of anticommunism: American and European labour in the Cold War’ in Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam (eds.), The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, – (London, ), –, –. Reform-minded socialist politicians such as Richard Crossman and Carlo Schmid had been present within the CCF’s leadership from its inception but had been somewhat marginalised prior to the Milan conference. See Grémion, Intelligence de l’anticommunisme, –, –. This Labour presence was presumably organised by C.A.R. Crosland, who was also on the organising panel.

The End of Ideology and the Congress for Cultural Freedom



political and economic liberty at Milan’s opening session, denying that political freedom was conditional upon the implementation of unrestricted economic liberalism and suggesting that the contemporary scope of realistic macroeconomic policy debate was restricted to discussions over the degree, not the principle, of state intervention. Senior delegates from the Italian, German, and French socialist parties also attended the conference and, during the later s and s, CCF journals such as Encounter, Preuves, Tempo Presente and Der Monat provided important platforms for socialist politicians who wanted to distance their parties from Marxism. The reorientation of the CCF towards the end of ideology also marked a shift away from the militant antitotalitarianism that had characterised the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s early history. This change of approach reflected concern within the CCF leadership that partisan antitotalitarian rhetoric had become increasingly counterproductive with its intended audience on the non-communist left, especially since the death of Stalin in  and the bad publicity surrounding the rise of McCarthyism in the United States. Raymond Aron had been advocating a shift away from radical antitotalitarian rhetoric at the CCF since as early as May . The ‘Future of Freedom’ conference marked the ultimate victory of this point of view. Yet while it is true that ‘In Milan, totalitarianism was no longer denounced, it was analysed’, this should not be interpreted as a weakening of the Congress’s anti-communism. As Aron himself observed at a later CCF conference, ‘it suffices to be . . . scientific in the observation of Soviet reality to be aggressive.’ It would, then, be a mistake to suppose that the adoption of end of ideology discourse entailed a complete jettisoning of the CCF’s earlier antitotalitarianism; indeed in some respects the





   

Aron was an admirer of Labour revisionism – see his endorsement of the post-ideological socialism of the New Fabian Essays in L’opium, –. Grémion, Intelligence de l’anticommunisme, –. Also present in the Labour delegation were Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins, Richard Crossman, and C.A.R. Crosland, the latter of whom was part of the planning committees for both the conference itself and the international seminar series that grew out of it. Crosland was in the process of writing the fundamental revisionist text The Future of Socialism during the Milan conference. See Grémion, Intelligence de l’anticommunisme, , , . On this basis Pierre Grémion has interpreted the historic abandonment of Marxist doctrine by the German SPD in  as a major victory for the Congress for Cultural Freedom. See Grémion, Intelligence de l’anticommunisme, , . Scott-Smith, ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom’, . Aron, ‘Séduction du totalitarisme’ in Aron, Polémiques (), . Grémion, Intelligence de l’anticommunisme, . Aron et al., Colloques de Rheinfelden (Paris, ), –.



The End of Ideology

‘end of ideology’ was itself an outgrowth from earlier theories of totalitarianism associated with the Congress. The American sociologist Edward Shils played an important role in solidifying the identification of the new direction of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the language of the end of ideology. His official conference report, published in Encounter, described how The papers, despite their diversity of viewpoint and subject matter, circled over a single theme. Almost every paper was in one way or another a critique of doctrinarism, of fanaticism, of ideological possession. Almost every paper at least expressed the author’s idea of mankind cultivating and improving its own garden, secure against obsessional visions and phantasies, and free from the harassment of ideologists and zealots. It was the intention of the conference’s organisers to move thought further around the turning point to which we have come in the last years. This turning point might be described as the end of ideological enthusiasm.

Shils’s report suggests that the vision of the ‘end of ideology’ to which most participants at the Milan conference subscribed applied equally to communism and radical laissez-faire liberalism, both of which were rejected for holding to ‘the idea that liberty rests on an economic basis’. In this regard, however, there was not a universal consensus. Seymour Martin Lipset’s account of the event recalls how Friedrich von Hayek, in a speech at the end of the conference, ‘attacked the delegates for preparing to bury freedom instead of saving it’. According to Lipset, ‘Hayek, honestly believing that state intervention is bad and inherently totalitarian, found





Thus Daniel Bell, whose The End of Ideology () was partly based upon his contributions to the Milan conference, explained his version of the thesis as an extension of Aron’s secular religion theory, while Aron’s Opium of the Intellectuals was itself both a reflection on secular religion and a major influence on the adoption of end of ideology theory by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. See Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York, [] ), xiv–xv, –. The slightly confused relationship between antitotalitarianism and the end of ideology helped to produce inconsistencies in the way ‘ideology’ was understood. Aron, for instance, defined this term as both ‘the pseudo-systematic formulation of an all-encompassing vision of the historical world’ and, more prosaically, ‘an apparently systematic formulation of facts, interpretations, desires [and] predictions’. Compare here L’opium, ,  and Aron, Trois essais sur l’âge industriel (Paris, ), . This inconsistency was a feature of CCF end of ideology discourse more broadly, with some of its proponents understanding ‘ideology’ to refer to liberal and socialist forms of economic dogmatism in general, while others retained a specific sense of ideology as a ‘secular religion’. Compare here e.g. Bell, End of Ideology, –,  and Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (London, ), –. A more comprehensive account of these inconsistencies is given in the editor’s introduction to Chaim I. Waxman (ed.), The End of Ideology Debate (New York, ), –.  Shils, ‘The end of ideology?’, . Ibid., .

A Liberal Retreat from Empire?



himself in a small minority of those who still took the cleavages within the democratic camp seriously.’ Edward Shils’s review of the ‘Future of Freedom’ conference may have glossed over Hayek’s dissent, but it is more revealing in identifying a conspicuous gap in the range of enquiry carried out in Milan. This was the near-total absence of normative political theory. Shils noted that ‘calls for a renewal of faith or a system of beliefs which we could offer in competition with Bolshevism were very few and were either rejected or disregarded.’ The conference had, he claimed, ‘the atmosphere of a post-victory ball’ wherein the superiority of Western liberal democracy was regarded as self-evident and beyond the need for normative philosophical justification. This complacency would reach its apex in the interpretation of the end of ideology thesis offered by Seymour Martin Lipset, who would later write that ‘the fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution have been solved’ and that contemporary Western democracy represented ‘the good society itself in operation’. Yet the optimism with which theorists of the end of ideology articulated their arguments actually varied quite widely. In this respect, Raymond Aron was Lipset’s opposite. Rather than representing the achievement of the good society, Aron insisted that Western liberal democracy could not, in practice, help but betray the abstract values of freedom and equality to which it laid claim in theory. The fact that French politics since the Liberation had been conducted under the shadow of increasingly violent and destabilising colonial wars made this painfully clear.

A Liberal Retreat from Empire? Critics of the end of ideology were not slow to point out the irony of this doctrine being promulgated at a moment when anti-colonial struggles in the ‘third world’ were reaching new peaks of ideological intensity and physical violence. While even the end of ideology’s most optimistic proponents never claimed that it described the contemporary ‘third world’, they tended to view its developmentalist logic as universally applicable and underestimated the ramifications that national liberation struggles in Asia

  

  Lipset, Political Man, –. Shils, ‘The end of ideology?’, . Ibid., .  Lipset, Political Man, , . L’opium, . C. Wright Mills, ‘Letter to the New Left’, New Left Review,  (September–October ), –, .



The End of Ideology

and Africa might have in Europe and North America. Moreover, the quiescence of most intellectuals at the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the face of the violence that western democracies deployed in the struggle against national liberation movements exposed the double standards of a Cold War liberalism that was more comfortable denouncing imperialism in Eastern Europe than in Asia or Africa. It is on this last point that Raymond Aron most stands apart from his peers, because in  he was one of the first public figures in France to advocate Algerian independence. But the idea that Aron’s defence of this position amounted to a liberal justification for decolonisation is mistaken. While there was never a consensus as to what constituted a liberal policy towards France’s overseas territories, Aron ultimately rejected the main liberal arguments for and against the war in Algeria. In doing so, he also abandoned the liberal reformist position on empire that he had defended intermittently since . At the end of the Vietnam War Aron wrote to André Fontaine, the editor-in-chief of Le Monde, that ‘In  the Gaullists in London called me a traitor because I implored them to grant immediate and unconditional independence to the three States of Indochina.’ Aron told Fontaine that he had always regretted his public silence on this question once the Indochina War had begun. ‘If I took such a strong stand over Algerian independence’, he wrote, ‘it was so that this time I would not be imputed with endorsing a policy I had always detested and from which I had tried to dissuade those responsible.’ A few years later Aron would restate this argument in his memoirs, where he asserted that his famous stand on the question of Algerian independence ‘did not mark a rupture in my thought.’ Yet there is little evidence to support this claim in Aron’s writings prior to the achievement of decolonisation. The postwar status of 

  



The leading American end of ideology theorists considered ‘ideological’ politics appropriate for the postcolonial world. This view derived from the same underlying logic that informed the end of ideology thesis, which was extended to the postcolonial world in the form of modernisation theory. See Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernisation Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, ), –. Tentatively in Espoir et peur du siècle: essais non-partisans (Paris, ), –; then emphatically in La tragédie algérienne (Paris, ). For Aron as proponent of a ‘liberal retreat from empire’ see James D. Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria (Lincoln, ), –. Letter from Raymond Aron to André Fontaine,  July , Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF(). See also Le spectateur, : ‘I thought at the time that I had not written enough, had not sufficiently made my opinion public on the Indochina War, and I decided that this time I would do my best.’ Mémoires, .

A Liberal Retreat from Empire?



the French Empire is hardly discussed in La France libre, even at moments, such as following the Brazzaville conference of January , when the question was highly topical. When the subject of national liberation from imperialism is discussed explicitly in this journal, Aron refers only to the liberation of occupied Europe and observes that national selfdetermination is not a universally applicable principle. The only article that La France libre published on the future of the French Empire focuses on its economic costs and benefits, avoiding the question of the empire’s political status altogether. As Aron indicated with the title of a collection of his wartime writings published in , he thought the end of the war would mark the advent of an ‘age of empires.’ Although he was referring primarily to the global reach of Soviet and American influence, it seems clear that he hoped this would also include the empires of France and Britain. Aron was not being totally disingenuous in his correspondence with Fontaine. He was only the de facto editor of La France libre and may have been prevented from publishing his views on Indochina by his nominal superior André Labarthe, or he may have been reluctant to do so for fear that, because of the journal’s title, they be mistakenly understood to represent the official view of the Gaullist movement. Moreover, it is true that in an article published in International Affairs in October  he tentatively endorsed the decolonisation of French Indochina, a view that led to the French language version of the text being refused for publication in Combat. But his position on this question was not based on a principled objection to empire as such; indeed, in the same article Aron identified the preservation of empire as the first ‘essential objective’ of French foreign policy. The point of recognising the independence of    



Aron, ‘Destin des nationalités’ [] in Aron, Chroniques de guerre: La France libre, – (Paris, ), –. Anon, ‘Possibilités économiques dans l’Empire français’, La France libre,  (February ), –. The author of this anonymous article is most probably Aron. Aron, ‘Pour l’alliance de l’Occident’ [] in L’âge des empires, –, –; Aron, ‘Remarques sur la politique étrangère de la France’ in Ibid., –, . Aron, ‘Reflections on the foreign policy of France’, International Affairs,  (October ), –, . On the rejection of the French version of the article see Aron, L’Algérie et la République (Paris, ), . ‘What are the essential objectives of all French foreign policy today? The first is the maintenance of the integrity of the French Empire.’ See ‘Reflections on the foreign policy of France’, . ‘I was not “anti-colonialist” on principle . . . But I was struck, from , by the contrast between France’s overseas obligations and the resources of the country coming out of the occupation.’ See L’Algérie et la République, –. When interviewed in  Aron seemed to contradict himself on this point: ‘There was no purpose in my saying that I was against colonization, because others were already saying it. Like them, I was against colonization for reasons of principle, or for moral



The End of Ideology

Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam was to free future French governments of an unaffordable economic burden, allowing them to focus on preserving the more important African territories: France’s colonies are not all situated in the zone in which her limited strength makes action possible. The furthermost colonies do not represent a material benefit. The region in which we still occupy an important place, which still holds for us the possibility of power, is the Mediterranean . . . Thus the only part of the French Empire which effectively adds to our resources is North Africa and, to a lesser extent, West Africa. Africa has been, since the end of , the cradle of French renaissance and holds a position of decisive importance in our future. Concessions elsewhere may be envisaged in order to keep the main positions. It must be added that on no account does the preservation of the Empire mean the maintenance, pure and simple, of the colonial regime in force today. On the contrary, reforms of a liberal character are probably the indispensable condition for the survival of the Empire.

Aron did not specify what ‘liberal’ reform in France’s African possessions would entail. In the brief discussion of this article in his memoirs he summarised his argument as being that ‘we could dedicate our essential resources to North Africa and to black Africa so as to bring about, in a generation, the progressive emancipation of our colonies and protectorates’, but the gist of his original argument is different: the point of liberal reform was not gradually to abolish France’s African Empire but rather to preserve it in a new form. This was broadly consistent with official government policy at the time, which was also being framed as a programme of ‘liberal’ reform by the Socialist Minister for Overseas France, Maurius Moutet. It is possible that the reforms favoured by Aron would have gone further than those envisaged within the French government. For the moderate wing of the Algerian nationalist movement, liberal reform meant self-government within a federal system, a prospect

 



reasons, if you prefer. But what was important was to convince those who were using the opposite argument.’ See Le spectateur, .  Ibid. Mémoires, . In this respect Aron’s reformism was consistent with other ‘evolutionist’ views on French policy towards Algeria, none of which posited independence as the end goal of the evolutionary process. On this see Hartmut Elsenhans, La guerre d’Algérie – (Paris, ), –. Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Oxford, ), –. Moutet had previously been Minister of Colonies in the Popular Front government, whose own programme of liberal reform laid the groundwork for the establishment of the ‘developmentalist Welfare State’ established in the French Union after the Second World War. See Martin Shipway, Decolonization and its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of Colonial Empires (Oxford, ), , –.

A Liberal Retreat from Empire?



that had been ruled out since the Brazzaville Conference in January . Federalism was certainly Aron’s preferred solution to the Algerian crisis in early , although we cannot be sure that this was true in . In other respects, however, Aron’s liberalism may have been less advanced than the official position, whose reform agenda included the creation of a developmentalist Welfare State whose affordability Aron’s calculations in La France libre might be read as having tentatively called into question. It would be a mistake, at any rate, to assume that Aron’s views on the relationship between France and its overseas territories remained the same between the end of the Second World War and the achievement of Algerian independence. As Aron himself acknowledged, he was torn between conflicting sentiments on this question; even during the course of the Algerian War his views seemed to change quite dramatically, and his private opinions were not always consistent with his publicly stated ones. A year before he denounced the war Aron had been one of twenty-six Sorbonne professors to sign a collective declaration of ‘considered support for the military effort demanded of the country.’ This declaration responded to an earlier appeal by the Sorbonne historian and former resistant Henri Marrou, who had urged his colleagues to speak out against censorship, torture, and collective punishment. Aligning themselves instead with the pro-government Union pour le salut et renouveau de l’Algérie française (USRAF), the signatories announced their will ‘that peace be re-established and fruitful work resumed under the French flag’ in Algeria. While recognising the need for ‘profound reforms’, they insisted that the French must be proud of their work over a hundred and twenty-five years in Algeria, work that ‘must be continued.’ The declaration also insisted on ‘the legitimacy and the urgency of the protective measures that the government has taken and will take to keep its solemn promise’ to protect the lives and property of Frenchmen in Algeria. This     



 Evans, Algeria, , ; Shipway, Decolonization, , , –. Espoir et peur, . ‘Possibilités économiques dans l’Empire français’, –; Shipway, Decolonization, –. L’Algérie et la République, . Henri Marrou, ‘France, ma patrie . . .’, Le Monde,  April . See Jean-François Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises: manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle (Paris, ), –. Although its founders later drifted to the far right, the USRAF initially drew support mainly from left liberal figures and its vision was broadly aligned with that of the Mollet government. See Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, –. For the original USRAF appeal see ‘Un appel “pour le salut et le renouveau de l’Algérie française”’, Le Monde,  April . ‘Des professeurs à la Sorbonne expriment leur adhésion à la politique gouvernementale’, Le Monde,  May .



The End of Ideology

was a reference to the special powers law passed that March, authorising the pacification of the Algerian rebellion by any means necessary, which in practice entailed mass arrests in urban areas, the forced internment of entire communities in the Algerian countryside, the bombing of civilians, and systematic use of torture. Aron acknowledged that such practices contravened liberal principles, but even once he abandoned his former support for the war he did not base his argument on this; instead, the arguments he used to make his case were amoral: French Algeria was economically unsustainable; in the long run large-scale immigration of Muslims posed a threat to social order in France; granting equal political rights while maintaining the integration of France and Algeria would leave the metropole ungovernable. According to Todd Shepard, even once acceptance of Algerian independence was widespread, few politicians cited these justifications publicly or in private. It was Aron’s ultimate conclusion that decolonisation was historically inevitable that gained most traction in public discourse about Algeria, an irony that was not lost on readers of Introduction to the Philosophy of History and The Opium of the Intellectuals. There was, however, one significant exception to this. Six months before publicly conceding the principle of Algerian selfdetermination, in March  General de Gaulle reportedly questioned whether France could ‘absorb ten million Muslims who tomorrow will be twenty million and the day after forty.’ He went on, ‘If all the Arabs and Berbers of Algeria were considered as French, how would we stop them from coming to install themselves in the metropole when the standard of living there is so much higher? My village would no longer be called Colombey-les-Deux-Églises but Columbey-les-Deux-Mosquées!’ De Gaulle’s nightmare scenario was imagined on the basis of demographic arguments made in The Algerian Tragedy, and though Aron had not gone so far in his own public imaginings he too was adamant that ‘The rate of demographic growth is too different on the two coasts of the Mediterranean for these peoples of different races and religions to be parts of the same community.’ Whatever the reason for Aron’s inconsistency on the Algerian question between May  and June , his change of position in this period is  



 La tragédie algérienne, . Ibid., –, , , –; L’Algérie et la République, –, . Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, ), . For Aron on the inevitability of decolonisation see La tragédie algérienne, , , .  Alain Peyrefitte, C’était de Gaulle (Paris, ), . La tragédie algérienne, .

A Liberal Retreat from Empire?



more readily comprehensible than the apparent contradiction between his stances in April and May of . According to Aron, in April he had sent what became the first of The Algerian Tragedy’s two parts to the prime minister, Guy Mollet. If this is true, then the month before he publicly sided with the cause of French Algeria Aron was privately advocating independence and the repatriation of a million pied noir settlers to France. How are we to make sense of this? April–May  was both a crucial moment in the war’s escalation and a time of intense concern that the war effort was threatened by poor morale, mutiny and desertion. Henri Marrou had published his denunciation of torture at the start of a major expansion in the number of reservists being sent to Algeria; this escalation was met with widespread resistance by conscripts, amounting to the largest antiwar protests in the history of the conflict. Mass protest was compounded by spectacular individual desertions, such as that of Henri Maillot, a French Algerian conscript who delivered a lorry of French arms and munitions to a communist militia. Finally, there was the defilement of the bodies of twenty-one reservists killed at Palestro on  May, the single greatest loss of life suffered by the French army until then. The Sorbonne professors’ declaration denounced one-sided criticism of French violence that ignored the crimes of the FLN and concluded by invoking student conscripts’ right to the moral support of their teachers. It was published the same day as news of Henri Maillot’s condemnation to death by a military tribunal and five days after the incident at Palestro. This context might help to make sense of the disparity between Aron’s views in April and May , but ultimately it is impossible to settle this question definitively. Nor would Aron’s controversial intervention in favour of Algerian independence the following year be the last time that he would seem to have changed his mind about the issue. With the publication of The Algerian Tragedy in the summer of  Aron broke with the main liberal arguments that had been used for and against French Algeria until then. Applying the same economic logic that he had once used to justify the decolonisation of Indochina, this pamphlet marks Aron’s abandonment of the liberal reformism he had endorsed for Algeria since . For it was the cost of the government’s ambitious reform agenda as much as the war itself that necessitated   

 Ibid., i; Le spectateur, . On repatriation see La tragédie algérienne, , –, –.  Evans, Algeria, . Ibid., . Aron was not the first person to make the case for Algerian independence on the basis of a costbenefit analysis. Since  this position had been named ‘Cartierism’ after a series of articles along these lines by Raymond Cartier in Paris-Match. See Elsenhans, La guerre d’Algérie, .



The End of Ideology

independence. Political reform and economic modernisation held no prospect of an end of ideology in Algeria, and the expense of pursuing these lost causes would ruin France, removing any prospect of an end of ideology there. Against those who defended French Algeria on the grounds that independence would lead to the establishment of a theocratic or totalitarian regime Aron countered that most French people would agree with their Algerian counterparts that national independence took priority over individual rights. And while he recognised the hypocrisy of invoking liberal ideals to justify the use of force to maintain French Algeria against the wishes of the majority of the population, Aron was almost as dismissive towards antiwar arguments based on moral outrage against torture as he had been in May . Finally, he now seemed to have given up on a federal solution to the Algerian problem. Although, unlike Albert Camus, Aron made no attempt to theorise such a solution, in early  he had still considered this the most desirable outcome of the conflict. By the summer of  it had all but disappeared from Aron’s writing on Algeria. This changed briefly, however, after a revolt of the French army in Algiers returned General de Gaulle to power in the semi-coup of  May . A month later in a speech at Harvard University, Aron endorsed de Gaulle’s ‘Roman dictatorship’ and criticised the double standard whereby Americans favoured federation for Europeans but full independence for non-Europeans. Because the Front de libération nationale (FLN) refused to negotiate without prior French recognition of Algeria’s right to full independence, any federal solution would have to be imposed through a decisive French victory. Though he had believed such a victory to be militarily possible when he published The Algerian Tragedy, Aron had concluded that the economic, social, and political costs of achieving it were too high. Now he reconsidered. Despite the dubious means by which the General had come to power, Aron remarked that de Gaulle had the backing of ‘Many among the so-called liberal Frenchmen who wanted a peaceful solution to the Algerian War’ because he was ‘the only man able 

  

La tragédie algérienne, –. On the relationship between violence and reform in Algeria after the Second World War see James McDougall, ‘The impossible Republic: the reconquest of Algeria and the decolonization of France, –’, The Journal of Modern History,  (December ), –.  Ibid., –. Ibid., . On Camus’s federalism see Stéphane Pierré-Caps, ‘Albert Camus, le fédéralisme et l’Algérie’, Civitas Europa,  (), –.  For a single passing reference to federalism see La tragédie algérienne, . Ibid., iii.

A Liberal Retreat from Empire?



to make their own views acceptable to the French in Algeria and to French public opinion.’ But if a liberal solution to the Algerian problem was now in reach, its achievement would require the full backing of France’s allies: The world must now take notice that neither the colons, nor the army, nor the government in Paris will ever be ready to abandon Algeria. We may like it or not, but the decision seems to be final. How will M. Bourguiba, the King of Morocco, the governments in Washington and London react to this new factor? Will they advise the F.L.N. to settle for less than full independence? Will the Moslem masses rally to the French and desert the F.L.N.? It may be that the answer depends on the attitude of the whole Western world. If the French plan could be ratified by France’s allies, there would appear to be the prospect of a progressive peace.

Aron’s Harvard speech was lauded in the pro-French Echo d’Alger, which heralded his ‘resounding conversion’ to the colonialist cause. In response to this ‘misunderstanding’ Aron publish an abridged version of the text in Le Monde, emphasising that the point of the speech had not been to express his personal view but to make an American audience understand the new situation created by the return of de Gaulle. The speech was arguably not so inconsistent with Aron’s previous positions anyway. Persuading the French to recognise Algeria’s claim to independence was a necessary precondition for negotiations, but these negotiations would not necessarily result in full independence. Ultimately, however, Aron found no way of reconciling his spontaneous preference for a federal solution with the arguments that he used to demonstrate the impossibility of maintaining the integration of Algeria and a democratic French Republic. That this problem arose contemporaneously with negotiations towards the Treaty of Rome, a defining moment in the history of European integration, did not make its resolution any easier. By the time he published Algeria and the Republic in July  Aron had dropped the federal solution to France’s Algerian dilemma once and for all. Discussions of Raymond Aron in the historiography of French decolonisation typically associate him with the search for ‘a liberal retreat from empire.’ But Aron’s ultimate endorsement of Algerian independence in     

Aron, ‘Commencement day address to Harvard Alumni Association’,  June , Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF(). ‘Une conversion retentissante’, L’Echo d’Alger,  June .  Aron, ‘Discours à Harvard’, Le Monde,  July . La tragédie algérienne, . L’Algérie et la République, –. Le Sueur, Uncivil War, –. See also Todd Shepard on ‘Raymond Aron’s National Liberalism’ in his Invention of Decolonization, –.



The End of Ideology

– marks a retreat from liberalism. This is not because liberal political thought was inherently imperialist: liberalism was invoked on both sides of the debate over decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century just as it had been invoked for and against imperialism in the nineteenth. But by arguing the case for Algerian independence Aron eventually broke with the liberal approach to empire as he had understood it since . This theorist of the end of ideology nevertheless retained a certain nostalgia for the ideology of liberal imperialism. ‘Personally’, he wrote in the summer of , ‘for reasons that are moral as well as economic, national as well as universal, I believe in the “mission” of France in Africa, I believe in France’s “African vocation”. But neither this mission nor this vocation are compatible with refusing the people of Africa the right to govern themselves.’ If the degree to which Aron was prepared publicly to make the case for decolonisation in North Africa set him apart from other intellectuals at the Congress for Cultural Freedom, his inability to formulate a coherent liberal response to the problem was more typical. As Malachi Haim Hacohen has argued, mid-century liberalism was at once acutely sensitive to the irrational forces at work in modern political conflicts and generally incapable of arbitrating between them; consequently, Cold War liberals often ended up ‘relegating major political conflicts to Realpolitik, where liberal rules were relaxed.’ Nowhere was this more true than in Aron’s writings on Algeria. ‘Political action’, he remarked in one such piece, ‘is a response to a situation, not an illustration of theories or an expression of sentiments.’ Not a political theory, the end of ideology described a socioeconomic situation in which conflict might be contained within tolerable limits. After World War Two, Aron generally supported decolonisation once it was clear that the alternative jeopardised first the achievement and later the maintenance of that situation in France. But if Aron’s writings on the end of ideology theme were more concerned with liberal democracy’s conditions of possibility than with its ultimate purpose, he became increasingly sensitive to the charge that end of ideology discourse  

  

For the nineteenth century see Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, ). Aron himself repeatedly differentiates his position on Algeria from a ‘liberal’ view in Mémoires, –. See also Le spectateur, : ‘All the suggestions about a liberal policy towards Algeria meant nothing; either the right to independence was accepted or the war would continue.’ La tragédie algérienne, –. Malachi Haim Hacohen, ‘The strange fact that the State of Israel exists: The Cold War liberals between cosmopolitanism and nationalism’, Jewish Social Studies,  (Winter ), –, . L’Algérie et la République, .

Political Theory at the End of Ideology



reduced modern democracy to ‘a system of technique sans telos’. Over the ten years following his intervention in the Algerian debate Aron would play a significant role in efforts to revive the kind of normative political theory that the end of ideology doctrine had seemed to make obsolete.

Political Theory at the End of Ideology Having posed the question of the end of the ideological age in Opium of the Intellectuals, Aron had then expanded on this theme by reviving the Saint-Simonian concept of the industrial society. What made this concept useful was that it could be applied equally to regimes on both sides of the iron curtain because of their common preoccupation with achieving economic growth through the application of science and technology to production. This enabled Aron to replace the dichotomy of democracy and totalitarianism with a conceptual framework that facilitated an empirical comparison of rival systems reconceived as two species of the same genus. He applied this conceptual framework most systematically in a trilogy of works comparing the economic, social and political systems of industrial societies in the East and West. These books became bestsellers after they were published in the new paperback livre de poche format between  and , but their contents originated from a series of lectures delivered at the Sorbonne between  and . As a response to the challenge posed to anti-communist intellectuals by the post-Stalinist reorientation of Soviet strategy in relation to the West, Aron’s work on industrial society largely succeeds. It demonstrates that although the Soviet Union was achieving formidable rates of growth, Soviet citizens benefited from this to a much lesser degree than did the populations of the capitalist West. The gap between de juré social equality and de facto inequality is shown to exist in both species of industrial society, but in an at once more attenuated and controversial  

 



Stephen W. Rousseas and James Farganis, ‘American politics and the end of ideology’, The British Journal of Sociology,  (December,), –, . According to Jean-Paul Cointet, a similar argument to this was made by Marcel Déat in the interwar period. See Jean-Paul Cointet, Marcel Déat: du socialisme au national-socialisme (Paris, ), . Aron, Dix-huit leçons sur la société industrielle (Paris, ); Aron, La lutte de classes: nouvelles leçons sur la société industrielle (Paris, ); Aron, Démocratie et totalitarisme (Paris, ). On the significance of the new paperback format for the popularisaion of the social sciences in postwar France see Alain Drouard, ‘Réflexions sur une chronologie: le développement des sciences sociales en France de  à la fin des années soixante’, Revue française de sociologie,  (January– March ), –, –. Dix-huit leçons, –, –, –, –.



The End of Ideology

form in western societies that, while better able to meet the basic needs of their populations, are more prone to social conflict because of their willingness to allow it free expression. And while acknowledging that both systems are able only imperfectly to institute their democratic ideals, Aron argues persuasively that the political imperfections of the Soviet regime are in this respect more essential than those of the constitutionalpluralistic political systems of the West. The problem with these arguments, however, was that their defence of western democracy was almost entirely reliant on demonstrating only its relative superiority compared to a Soviet model whose appeal was already in steep decline among readers on the noncommunist left by the time Aron’s industrial society trilogy was published. To readers expecting a positive argument for liberal democracy based on its own merits these books offered rather thin gruel. Although Aron was not insensitive to this problem, his efforts to come to grips with it were sporadic and inconsistent. In  he had chaired a debate on the question ‘Is there a human nature?’ at the Centre Catholique des intellectuels français. Here he had acknowledged that atheistic humanism was in crisis, but suggested that the ideal of a universal human vocation upon which to build a normative political philosophy remained salvageable. Two years later, however, Aron claimed that contemporary political philosophy could only be carried out empirically, a view he reiterated in his industrial society trilogy. Yet during the late s and early s Aron become increasingly concerned about the decline of normative political theory after engaging in a sympathetic reading of Leo Strauss, one of the most prominent critics of the ‘death of political philosophy’ in these years. Another famous contribution to this debate, Isaiah Berlin’s article ‘Does political theory still exist?’, was originally commissioned by Aron for a special issue of the Revue française de science politique in . By now Aron’s occassional preoccupation with this    



 La lutte de classes, , –, –, –, –. Démocratie et totalitarisme, –. ‘Y a-t-il une nature humaine?’, Recherches et débats du centre catholique des intellectuels français,  (February–March ), –, –, . Introduction à la philosophie politique, ; Démocratie et totalitarisme, . For Strauss’ intervention into the ‘death of political philosophy’ debate see Leo Strauss, ‘What is political philosophy?’ in Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Chicago, []), –. See also Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, ), which is discussed in Aron’s introduction to Max Weber, Le savant et le politique (Paris, ), –, –. See too Aron, ‘Le fanatisme, la prudence et la foi’, Preuves,  (May ), –, –; Aron, ‘Science et conscience de la société’ [] in Aron, Études sociologiques (Paris, ), –, –. Isaiah Berlin, ‘La théorie politique existe-t-elle?’, Revue française de science politique,  (June ), –. The other contributors to this special issue on the contemporary relevance of

Political Theory at the End of Ideology



issue was fairly longstanding. Two years earlier, he had organised a Congress for Cultural Freedom conference intended to challenge the equation of the end of ideology with the death of political philosophy. Speaking at this event, Aron remarked ‘I believe that in the West we have entered a phase of philosophical and religious reflection, not against the success of the positive sciences, but precisely as a function of their success, which brings us back to essential questions: what meaning do we want to give to life, what is the good life, what is the good society?’ Aron’s hesitancy in the face of such questions is not surprising since it is not clear that they were answerable on the basis of the historical epistemology underlying his political thought. Towards the end of the Introduction to the Philosophy of History he had attributed a triple historicity to human existence. The element of human historicity that Aron aphorised in the phrase ‘man is historical’ indicates that values are not universal but historically and socially specific. From this perspective, the classical philosophical problem of universally defining the good society or the best political regime is impossible. The aspect of human historicity described in Aron’s claim that ‘Man is a (hi)story’ (une histoire), however, posits a universal human history whose end would be the pacific reign of reason conceived as a Kantian ideal of pure reason. From this elevated level of abstraction the more optimistic view that ‘Man is a species of animal that gradually accedes to humanity’ becomes possible as the pursuit of truth through reason is effectively posited as a universal human vocation. At this point liberty joins truth at the top of Aron’s scale of values, effectively rooting intellectual freedom and ‘protection against arbitrary police power’ in natural law. But while this may ground Aron’s antitotalitarianism in a substantive negative morality, it is an insufficient basis from which positively to address the question of the best regime or the good society. It is true that in the Introduction Aron appears to give the democratic state a privileged role in enabling the fulfilment of humanity’s universal



  

political theory, edited by Aron, were Henri Lefebvre, Eric Weil, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Anthony Downs, and Stanley Hoffmann. These remarks are drawn from the transcribed discussion during the CCF’s conference in BâleRheinfelden in Colloques de Rheinfelden, . Aron sets out the conference agenda in more detail in his presentation ‘La société industrielle et les dialogues politiques de l’occident’, on pages – of the same collection. On this theme see also Trois essais, –. Introduction, . See also Paix et guerre, –. Aron, Les étapes de la pensée sociologique (Paris, ), . For the quotation and reference to natural law see Essai sur les libertés, . On this point see also Daniel J. Mahoney, The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron: A Critical Introduction (Lanham, ), –. Aron discusses the places of liberty and truth in his scale of values in Le spectateur engagé, –.



The End of Ideology

vocation. He later returned to this point in his An Essay on Liberty (), remarking that liberal democracy, by safeguarding fundamental negative liberties, offers ‘a chance to teach men, to make them capable of reason and morality’. But Aron never suggested that liberal democratic institutions would guarantee such moral progress, only that they offered the possibility of protecting the personal and intellectual liberties that were its necessary but insufficient prerequisites. Nor could the goal of maximising liberty meaningfully inform either a concrete political programme or a coherent abstract ideal, since Aron recognised the contents of liberty to be historically variable, plural and equivocal. Even assuming a minimal universal definition limited to freedom of thought and from arbitrary authority, safeguarding such negative liberty was for Aron only a necessary, not a sufficient condition for the gradual attainment of humanity by mankind. To suggest otherwise would require a degree of fundamental optimism about human nature that Aron, who expressly refused to believe that a social order could be based on the natural virtue and disinterestedness of its citizens, did not possess. Indeed, immediately after the apparently optimistic passage from the Introduction to the Philosophy of History in which he associated the democratic state with the achievement of a universal human vocation, Aron stressed that mankind’s ‘animalité’ must remain a permanent consideration of all political reflection. If in his later writings Aron only occasionally made passing references to the conciliatory Kantian political vision hinted at in the Introduction’s description of humankind as ‘a (hi)story’ (une histoire), a third element of human historicity, aphorised in this book with the words ‘man is in history’, was to inspire more substantial reflection in his subsequent work. The significance of this aspect of human historicity was that it revealed human existence to be essentially political. In  Aron expanded on this theme in a lecture that would later be published as the first chapter of Democracy and Totalitarianism, the third book in his industrial society trilogy: 

   

‘Thanks to his participation in two collective works, the State which makes a citizen of each individual, and culture, which makes shared knowledge accessible to all, he would realise his vocation: the reconciliation of humanity and nature, of essence and existence.’ Introduction, . Essai sur les libertés, . The published English translation of this book is Raymond Aron, An Essay on Freedom (New York, ). Aron, ‘Liberté, libérale ou libertaire?’ [] in Études politiques, –, .  Paix et guerre, . See too Essai sur les libertés, –. L’opium, .  Introduction, . For a discussion of this see Mémoires, –.

Political Theory at the End of Ideology



In relation to man, the political is more important that the economic by definition, because the political more directly concerns the very meaning of existence. Philosophers have always thought that human life is constituted by interpersonal relations. To live humanly is to live with other men. Relations between men are the fundamental phenomenon of all communities. And the organisation of authority impacts more directly on the way of life than any other aspect of society.

This assertion of the primacy of the political was lexically unusual and conceptually innovative. There had previously been no widely used word to distinguish in French between politics (la politique) and the political (le politique) because the masculine form had typically hitherto been used to denote ‘politician’ rather than a particular realm of social reality. The sociologist Célestin Bouglé had used ‘le politique’ to distinguish between ‘the political’ and ‘the economic’ in , and eleven years later he organised a seminar series entitled ‘The relations between the political and the economic’ at the Centre de documentation sociale. In the meantime Marcel Déat, who had close ties to Bouglé and the Centre de documentation sociale, had begun to make this distinction in some of his writings. Democracy and Totalitarianism was therefore not the first French text to use ‘le politique’ unconventionally, but it was the first and only text in which Aron himself theorised a conceptual distinction between politics and the political. Throughout his career, Aron defended the autonomy of politics against economic determinism of all kinds. Though better known as a critic of Marxism, he also rejected liberal claims that economic freedom was causally sufficient for securing political liberty, that all industrial societies were destined to converge towards the same social democratic politics, or that economic modernisation offered a royal road to political democracy in

  





Démocratie et totalitarisme, . On this point see David Ames Curtis’ translator’s forward to Claude Lefort’s Writing: The Political Test (Durham and London, ), xi. With regard to Saint-Simon Bouglé wrote that ‘His later works show him ready to absorb the political into the economic, and to move from liberalism to what Robert Owen was beginning to name socialism.’ See Célestin Bouglé, ‘Introduction’ in L’Oeuvre d’Henri de Saint-Simon. Textes Choisis (Paris, ), xvi–xvii. The proceedings, which include a chapter by Aron on ‘Les rapports de la politique et de l’économie dans la doctrine marxiste’, were published as Célestin Bouglé (ed.), Inventaires II: L’économique et le politique (Paris, ). For Aron’s chapter see pages –. Materials relating to the original seminar series can be found in AN AJ/, AN AJ/. Prochasson, Saint-Simon ou l’anti-Marx, .



The End of Ideology

the developing world. His use of le politique in Democracy and Totalitarianism is conceptually innovative, however, because the concept of the political designates not a discrete social domain distinguishable by specific institutions and practices but a preinstitutional, existential phenomenon. This usage departs from the way the term was used in interwar French neo-socialist circles, but there is a partial resemblance between Aron’s notion of the political and that of Carl Schmitt, whose The Concept of the Political Aron had studied with some admiration during his time in Germany. Schmitt’s basic argument that ‘[t]he concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political’ is certainly consistent with Aron’s use of le politique in Democracy and Totalitarianism, for instance. However, there are limits to the similarity between Aron and Schmitt’s conceptualisations of the political. Samuel Moyn has argued that Democracy and Totalitarianism established a French tradition of reflection on this concept that differed radically from the one founded by Schmitt. Moyn points out that while Schmitt’s understanding of the political was contrastive and exclusionary insofar as it sought to isolate the political from, for instance, the moral or economic domains, Aron presents the political not as isolable but as foundational in relation to all other social domains. For Aron this is the origin of the ambiguity wherein the word politique denotes ‘on the one hand, a particular sector of the social whole and, on the other hand, the social whole itself, observed from a certain point of view’. Although this insight is arguably underdeveloped in Democracy and Totalitarianism, where Aron soon reverts to a more conventional contrastive distinction between politics, society, and economy, Claude Lefort, who was Aron’s assistant at the Sorbonne when the lectures that were eventually published in this book 



 



On the first point, see, e.g., Introduction à la philosophie politique, ; on the second, see, e.g., Aron, ‘La Sociologie politique’ in Aron et al., Aspects de la sociologie française (Paris, ), –; Trois essais, –; on the third see e.g., Ibid., –, –. Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz: l’âge européen (Paris, ), . After Schmitt reached out to Aron by letter at the end of , Aron replied that ‘Whatever might have been my reactions to some of the positions that you took in the past, as seen from outside, I have always greatly admired [Carl Schmitt] the jurist and philosopher and have been for many years one of your attentive readers.’ Letter from Aron to Carl Schmitt,  January  in Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF(). On Aron’s relationship with Schmitt see Daniel SteinmetzJenkins, ‘Why did Raymond Aron write that Carl Schmitt was not a Nazi: an alternative genealogy of French liberalism’, Modern Intellectual History,  (November ), –. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago, [] ), . Samuel Moyn, ‘Concepts of the political in twentieth-century European thought’ in Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (Oxford, ), –, –. Démocratie et totalitarisme, .

Political Theory at the End of Ideology



were given, would later develop Aron’s foundational account of the political by replacing its emphasis on ‘the organisation of authority’ with an account of the political as a locus for the symbolic constitution of society. Furthermore, Moyn remarks that whereas Schmitt originally formulated the concept of the political as a means of identifying ‘the transcendental pre-supposition of the modern state’, Aron’s concern with the political, which speaks to the problem of organising authority in communal life of all kinds, ‘harkens more authentically to classical understanding’. It is true that Aron himself explicitly relates his discussion of the political in Democracy and Totalitarianism to classical political philosophy in general and Aristotle’s Politics in particular. But of greater consequence for the subsequent development of French reflection on the concept of the political was the fact that Aron also highlights the fecundity of a French liberal tradition embodied in the works of Montesquieu and Tocqueville in this regard. The following chapter will explore this issue in more detail. For now, however, it is worth noting that the connection in Aron’s thought between the concept of the political and a rediscovery of French liberalism further qualifies the notion of a Schmittian influence on Aron’s reflection on the political. And the fact that intellectuals like Claude Lefort, François Furet, and Pierre Rosanvallon also turned towards the works of nineteenth-century liberals such as Tocqueville in their subsequent discussions of le politique appears further to support Moyn’s view of Aron as the progenitor of ‘a strongly different tradition’ of thought on this subject than the one inaugurated by Schmitt. Instead of basing his argument on this, however, Moyn differentiates the French tradition initiated by Raymond Aron on the basis of its more fundamental departure from Schmitt: the decentring of enmity within its reflection on the political. In The Concept of the Political Schmitt famously remarked that ‘The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.’ Aron’s attitude towards this   

 

Claude Lefort, Essais sur le politique (Paris, ). Moyn, ‘Concepts of the political’, , . Démocratie et totalitarisme, , –. This has provided a basis for the influential neo-Aristotelian interpretation of Aron’s political thought originally set out by the philosopher Pierre Manent. On this see Daniel J. Mahoney, ‘A liberal and a classic: Pierre Manent’s neo-Aristotelian reading of Raymond Aron’, Perspectives on Political Science,  (), –.  Démocratie et totalitarisme, , –. Moyn, ‘Concepts of the political’, .  Ibid., , . Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, .



The End of Ideology

claim was ambivalent. In  he agreed to replace Jean Hyppolite as the supervisor of a doctoral thesis that Julien Freund was researching on the concept of the political after Hyppolite resigned over Freund’s extensive use of Carl Schmitt’s work and particularly his notion of the friend-enemy distinction. Hyppolite was later part of the jury of examiners at Freund’s thesis defence, where he again objected to Freund’s use of the friend-enemy distinction as the essence of the political. On this occasion Aron intervened in defence of Freund, criticising Hyppolite for refusing ‘to recognise that real politics obeys rules that do not correspond with your ideal norms’. This was not an unconditional endorsement of Schmitt’s conception of the friend-enemy distinction. In February  Freund, whose dissertation involved a sustained engagement with the work of Aron as well as Schmitt, wrote to his supervisor that ‘I have re-read your and Schmitt’s main works to compare the two conceptions [of the friendenemy principle]. It appeared to me that Carl Schmitt prioritises enmity and you prioritise friendship. If enmity is prioritised, it becomes practically impossible to resolve the problem of the ends of the political, which is obviously not the case when one prioritises friendship.’ Aron replied that ‘The purpose of politics is friendship. But in the state of nature, that is to say in external politics, the risk of enmity is the first consideration.’ If the political is understood as a preinstitutional phenomenon then the justification for this distinction between domestic and external politics is questionable. And if the ultimate purpose of politics was friendship, this did not disqualify Schmitt’s agonistic claims about the political conceived    

Julian Freund, ‘Raymond Aron directeur de thèse’, Commentaire, – (), –. Quoted in Ibid., . Julian Freund to Raymond Aron,  February . Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF(). Raymond Aron to Julian Freund,  February . Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF(). For more detailed historical accounts of Aron’s relationship with Freund and Schmitt see Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, ‘Why did Raymond Aron write that Carl Schmitt was not a Nazi? An alternative genealogy of French liberalism’, Modern Intellectual History,  (November ), –; Daniel Steinmatz-Jenkins, ‘Plettenburg not Paris: Julian Freund, the New Right, and France’s liberal moment’ in Stephen Sawyer and Iain Stewart (eds.), In Search of the Liberal Moment: Democracy, Anti-totalitarianism and Intellectual Politics in France since  (New York, ), –; Piet Tommissen, ‘Raymond Aron face à Carl Schmitt’, Schmittiana,  (), –. Freund’s thesis was published as Julien Freund, L’essence du politique (Paris, ). For Aron’s acceptance of a Schmittian friend-enemy distinction in relation to international relations see his ‘La définition libérale de la liberté’ [], in Études politiques, –,  and Paix et guerre, –. A more detailed account of Schmitt’s influence on Aron’s international relations theory is given in Jan-Werner Mu¨ller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven, ), –. On this issue see also Philippe Raynaud, ‘Raymond Aron et le droit international’, Cahiers de philosophie politique et juridique,  (), –.

Political Theory at the End of Ideology



as transcendental presupposition of the state. Indeed, Aron’s own conciliatory vision of the democratic state’s ultimate historical vocation was balanced against a frankly agonistic awareness of its origins that, while theoretically informed by Weber and Schmitt, was experientially reinforced by the violence of decolonisation. In light of this experience Aron could not but recognise that ‘All political unities . . . owe their origin to violence’. He nevertheless qualified his endorsement of Weber’s historical sociology of political communities so as to accommodate his conciliatory Kantian vision of the democratic state’s historical vocation, writing in  that ‘The state is not solely, but is at the very least and in any case, that agency which possesses the monopoly of legitimate violence.’ Aron never attempted to reconcile the agonistic and conciliatory tendencies in his political thought; his alternation between the two indicates that he considered neither of them individually to exhaust the significance of the political dimension of human existence. Holding the balance between these opposing inclinations, however, was a neo-Machiavellian understanding of regulated social conflict as the wellspring of political liberty. Although the depth of Aron’s interest in Machiavelli and modern Machiavellianism should not be exaggerated, it played a significant role in his comparative thinking about democracy and totalitarianism either side of the Second World War. Broadly speaking, if in the late s Aron had associated Machiavelli primarily with The Prince and modern Machiavellianism with fascism, by the late s he associated Machiavelli increasingly with the Discourses and embraced a modern Machiavellian tradition of elite theory in which Pareto and other neo-Machiavellians, whom Aron had previously understood as proto-fascists, were reinvented as ‘defenders of freedom’. Aron’s new understanding of neo-Machiavellian political thought derived in large part from James Burnham’s book The Machiavellians:  

 

Paix et guerre, . For further remarks along these lines, written against the backdrop of de Gaulle’s return to power during the Algerian War, see Démocratie et totalitarisme, –. Aron endorses Weber’s historical sociology of the state in Aron, ‘À propos de la théorie politique’, Revue française de science politique,  (March ), –, –. The quotation is from Aron, ‘The Promethean dream: society in search of itself’ in Britannica Perspectives, vol. II (London, ), –, . On this point see ‘À propos de la théorie politique’, ; Démocratie et totalitarisme, –. Aron’s pre-Second World War and some later works drawing on Machiavellian thought can be found in Aron, Machiavel et les tyrannies modernes (Paris, ). For the development of Aron’s interpretation of Vilfredo Pareto see Stuart L. Campbell, ‘The four Paretos of Raymond Aron’, Journal of the History of Ideas,  (April–June ), –.



The End of Ideology

Defenders of Freedom (). He had already drawn on Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution () in some of his writings for La France libre, but whereas that book had reinforced Aron’s belief in the historical necessity of technocracy, The Machiavellians offered a way of legitimating technocratic elitism with reference to democratic values. For Burnham, the critical lesson of the Machiavellian tradition was that democracy understood as self government is impossible and that to believe otherwise is to open the way for totalitarianism. This broadly confirmed Aron’s own view about the totalitarian potential of democratic ideology as first set out before the war. What allowed Aron substantially to elaborate on his earliest comparative theory of democracy and totalitarianism was Burnham’s presentation of the Machiavellian tradition’s positive contribution to democratic theory. According to Burnham, this was to have redefined democracy as a regime of political liberty, with the latter understood as ‘the resultant of unresolved conflicts among various sections of the elite’. Once democracy was understood in these terms, its basic difference from totalitarianism became clear: ‘Freedom, in the world as it is, is the product of conflict and difference, not of unity and harmony.’ This neo-Machiavellian conception of the relationship between democracy and totalitarianism would have a significant influence on the critique of totaliatarianism in France, beginning with Aron, who drew on it repeatedly in his comparative studies of elites in democratic and totalitarian regimes. Here he followed Burnham in arguing that mass societies are politically oligarchic of necessity because of the enhanced social and economic responsibilities of the modern bureaucratic state. For Aron, following Burnham, what matters when determining the democratic credentials of these states is not this inevitable oligarchy; it is the pluralistic or monolithic constitution of elites. Whereas the totalitarian elite is monolithic because accessible only via membership of the ruling party, liberal democracies are characterised by a plurality of elites. As such, they instantiate the democratic ideal, as reconceived within Burnham’s presentation of the Machiavellian tradition, more faithfully than their totalitarian rivals. 

    

For more detailed studies of Aron’s debt to Burnham see Serge Audier, Machiavel, conflit et liberté (Paris, ), –; Hugo Drochon, ‘Raymond Aron’s “Machiavellian” liberalism’, Journal of the History of Ideas,  (October ), –. See, e.g., ‘Bureaucratie et fanatisme’, –; ‘Destin des nationalités’, –. James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (New York, ), –.  Ibid., . Ibid., . Introduction à la philosophie politique, ; Démocratie et totalitarisme, . This argument is made in ‘Structure sociale et structure de l’élite’, ‘Classe sociale, classe politique, classe dirigeante’, ‘Catégories dirigeants ou classe dirigeante?’ and La lutte de classes.

Political Theory at the End of Ideology



Such arguments in defence of an authentically democratic elitism were increasingly challenged within and outside France over the course of the s and s. Foremost among these critiques in terms of the adversarial space that it occupied in Aron’s writings was that of C. Wright Mills, who in  had posited the de facto unity of the political, military, and economic elites of the United States. Responding to Mills in , Aron dismissed the idea of a unified power elite as a conspiracy theory arising from the fact that the plurality of elites in Western democracies made it difficult to pin down their political decision-making processes. ‘[The] real problem for the constitutional-pluralistic regimes of our time’, he added, ‘is not, or is not only, to attenuate the oligarchic character of government, but also and above all to attenuate the risk of a dispersion of power and the incapacity of the governing class.’ The diminished credibility of such a claim under the Fifth Republic did not prevent Aron making this argument well into the s, when he began explicitly to associate the prospect of a more socially diverse elite with the corrosion of the essential democratic principles of respect for legality and the sense of compromise. This increasingly conservative tendency within Aron’s political sociology points towards a significant division within the French tradition of antitotalitarian thought that he helped to establish. While Aron was working on his comparative studies of democratic and totalitarian elites, he supervised Claude Lefort’s doctoral dissertation on Machiavelli, who Lefort also presented as a philosopher of the conflictual origins of political liberty. On this basis Serge Audier has argued that Aron inaugurated a distinctive ‘Machiavellian moment’ in twentieth-century French intellectual history. Yet the conclusions that Aron and Lefort ultimately drew from their similar readings of Machiavelli and his modern descendants were not the same. For Aron, who hewed more closely to Burnham’s democratic elitism, the conflictual pluralism that set democratic regimes apart from their totalitarian counterparts was instantiated in the multiparty system and the relative plurality of democratic elites. While he retained Aron’s sense of the conflictual origins of political liberty, Lefort rejected Aron’s elitist and narrowly institutional vision for how conflict should be channelled and contained. As we shall see in Chapter , this important difference between Aron and Lefort would be exposed most spectacularly in their radical disagreement over the events and legay of May ‘.   

 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford, ) Démocratie et totalitarisme, –.  Ibid., . Les désillusions, , –, ; Essai sur les libertés, –.  Claude Lefort, Le travail de l’œuvre. Machiavel (Paris, ). Audier, Machiavel, –.



The End of Ideology

Conclusion Viewed from the vantage point of the late s, it can be hard to believe that the end of ideology doctrine was ever taken seriously. Indeed, by this point it had become an object of ridicule. The literary representation of Raymond Aron’s book Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society in George Perec’s novella A Man Asleep makes this clear. Published in , the year of the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s dissolution following the revelation of its ties to the CIA, Perec’s story contains a scene in which its protagonist, a sociology student, is overcome by lassitude while revising for his exams. Eighteen Lectures is the book he is reading when struck by this ennui. Perec’s use of this text adds a ring of authenticity to the scene because it was on the sociology curriculum at the time. But Aron’s book, whose central theme concerned the social benefits of economic modernisation and growth, had a larger emblematic value for Perec, who used it to launch the story of a student dropout whose pursuit of a decelerated existence symbolises a rejection of everything that Eighteen Lectures represented. Perec’s emblematic use of Aron’s book was especially effective – one reviewer remarked that from the moment it appears the protagonist ‘has all our sympathy’ – because by  the optimistic vision of economic growth that it symbolised was already discredited in the eyes of many on the French left. If Aron’s claims about the irrelevance of revolutionary politics under conditions of sustained economic growth had seemed premature in , they would appear delusional by the middle of , when student protests in the Latin Quarter precipitated the biggest strike in French history and briefly threatened to topple the Fifth Republic. Sociology students played a particularly prominent role in this revolt, in which the Sorbonne was re-imagined as Raymond Aron’s personal Bastille.  

 

Georges Perec, Un homme qui dort (Paris, ), . Its arguments would also have been familiar to a much broader audience due to its coverage on French television, where Aron discussed its themes at length. At the time this was an unusual privilege; indeed, it has been noted that it was Aron who in these years ‘introduced TV audiences to intellectuals as political actors.’ See Tamara Chaplin, Turning on the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (Chicago, ), –, . J.F. Rollin, ‘Georges Perec, Un homme qui dort’, Esprit,  (November ), –. Like most of his contemporaries, Aron did not see this coming. In  he wrote that ‘In France, where the revolutionary myth used to be particularly strong, many young students have been progressively converted to a reformist attitude . . . The situation in western Europe is less and less revolutionary. Rapid economic growth and increased chances of social promotion from one generation to another do not incite ordinary men to descend into the street.’ Les étapes, . For

Conclusion



At the end of the previous decade things had looked very different. In November , the German Social Democratic Party officially abandoned Marxist theory and all the revolutionary, anti-capitalist, and classbased political rhetoric that it inspired. Pierre Grémion has interpreted this pivotal moment in the history of European social democracy as a victory for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose reorientation towards the end of ideology was coupled with an extension of its involvement with reformist tendencies in European socialist parties. Yet, if Grémion is right, this was a pyrrhic victory nonetheless. Compounding the functional conservatism of European communism, the explicit rejection of revolutionary ideology by much of the old social democratic left created a political and ideological void that would be filled by the New Left in the s. Although France’s socialist party never underwent a similar conversion to its German counterpart, it was severely discredited by its role in the Algerian War during the Mollet administration. Anti-colonialism and the critique of the end of ideology were foundational commitments for the establishment of a new left-wing politics in the s. In a letter to the New Left Review in , C. Wright Mills railed against ‘the smug conservatives, tired liberals and disillusioned radicals’ that made up ‘the NATO intellectuals’ of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, asserting that ‘The end-of-ideology is in reality the ideology of an ending; the ending of political reflection itself as a public fact.’ In light of such comments and the subsequent development of the New Left, there is clearly much to be said for framing the end of ideology’s history as a rise and fall narrative beginning in  and ending in . But the end of ideology argument did not emerge from nowhere in the mid-s any more than the ideological explosion of the late s exhausts the historical significance of its failure. Raymond Aron typically defended liberal democracy not as the best political regime in the classical sense, but as the least bad of the known alternatives available in the twentieth century. His antitotalitarianism expressed a negative political morality grounded in natural law, but despite his sporadic concern with offering a positive normative justification for liberal democracy, Aron was more concerned with explaining the



sociology students in relation to May ‘ see the documentary evidence in Alain Schnapp and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (eds.), The French Student Uprising, November -June  (Boston, ), –, –. For the Sorbonne as Aron’s Bastille see Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Les Bastilles de Raymond Aron’, Le Nouvel observateur,  June  as reprinted in Sartre, Situations VIII: Autour de  (Paris, ), –.  Grémion, Intelligence de l’anticommunisme, , . Mills, ‘Letter to the New Left’, .



The End of Ideology

conditions necessary for the survival of such regimes than with explaining why people should want to live under them in the first place. Though he occasionally claimed that the liberal democratic state might be a vehicle for the fulfilment of a universal human vocation, this was a minor countercurrent in his political thought, where democracy appears much more as a problem to be contained than as a promise to be fulfilled. Aron’s stance on the main emancipatory political questions of his time makes this clear. The political enfranchisement of women was a nonissue in his writings before French women received the vote in ; he endorsed Algerian independence because the alternative threatened France’s post-Second World War economic recovery, not because he was a principled opponent of colonialism; and while he did not approve of American racial discrimination, Aron was hardly more interested in the political emancipation of African Americans than he had been in the democratic rights of French women. Although he recognised the legitimacy of such emancipatory causes, they were at best peripheral to Aron’s understanding of how political liberty grew out of regulated social conflict. It is striking that for Aron the survival of the political institutions by which animalistic man was to be made capable of reason and morality depended upon citizens exercising the very qualities that these institutions were supposed to inculcate. This added to his already heightened sense of liberal democracy’s permanent fragility and indicates how his liberalism differed from that of Friedrich von Hayek as much on political as on economic grounds. But Aron never followed Carl Schmitt to the extreme conclusion that liberalism and democracy were inherently incompatible. And while he recognised the role of violent enmity in forging political communities, he saw the political as potentially a terrain of reconciliation as well as conflict. In this respect, the significance of his writing on the end of ideology theme was that it identified state managed economic growth as a means of containing political divisions within tolerable limits, providing a basis for national reconciliation after two decades of more or less latent civil war. It was by interpreting this recurrent 



‘The ideal of a society in which everyone would choose his gods or his values cannot spread before individuals are educated in collective life. Hayek’s philosophy presupposes the achievement of results that past philosophers considered the primary objects of political action. In order to leave everyone a private sphere of decision and choice, it is necessary that all or most wish to live together and recognise the same system of ideas as true, the same principle of legitimacy as valid. Before society can be free it must be.’ See ‘La définition libérale de la liberté’, . For Schmitt’s view of the fundamentally antagonistic relationship between liberalism and democracy see Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Massachusetts, [, ] ), –.

Conclusion



experience of extreme political polarisation as the contemporary manifestation of a moral and political crisis originating in the revolution of  that Aron first identified himself as continuing a liberal tradition in French political thought. But it was not until the advent of the end of ideology debate in the mids that Aron began to draw systematically on French liberal predecessors for inspiration. Montesquieu and Tocqueville were his main points of reference here, and his interpretations of both authors were shapted by his wider preoccupations at the time. Serge Audier has shown, for instance, how Aron read Montesquieu and Tocqueville as theorists of a conflictual pluralism that aligned them with his understanding of the Machiavellian tradition discussed above. For Aron, both authors seemed to offer a way of mitigating the crisis of political philosophy as diagnosed by Leo Strauss. But the end of ideology debate was particularly significant in shaping Aron’s use of Tocqueville. Rather than emphasise the contemporary significance of Tocqueville’s theory of tutelary despotism, as Hayek had done in The Road to Serfdom, Aron began routinely to contrast Democracy in America’s predictions of the ‘equalisation of conditions’ with Marx’s opposite, catastrophic vision, suggesting that the postwar economic recovery vindicated Tocqueville over Marx. By the end of the s, however, the limitations of economic modernisation as an engine of social mobility were painfully apparent in France, where spectacular postwar economic growth was combined with the most extreme social inequality anywhere in the western world. Tocqueville took on a new significance in the face of rising leftist criticism of this inequality during the s, when Aron began to read him not only as a prophet of the equalisation of conditions but also as a critic of radical egalitarianism. Yet while Aron was not averse to adapting his readings of Montesquieu and Tocqueville to the demands of specific political conjunctures, he nevertheless retained a 

  



See Aron, ‘Introduction’ in L’âge des empires, –, ; Espoir et peur, –. For a more detailed account of Aron’s wartime engagement with French liberalism see Richard Gowan, ‘Raymond Aron, the history of ideas, and the idea of France’, European Journal of Political Theory : (), –. Serge Audier, Raymond Aron: la démocratie conflictuelle (Paris, ), –; Audier, Machiavel, –. Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, [] ), xli, , ; Dix-huit leçons, –; Essai sur les libertés, –; Trois essais, . As measured by share of national income. See OECD data given in Maurice Larkin, France since the Popular Front: Government and People, - (Oxford, ), . The ‘inegalitarian productivist growth model of the s and s’ is discussed in long-term historical context in Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge MA, ), –, . Les désillusions, –; Plaidoyer pour l’Europe décadente, –.



The End of Ideology

consistent overall understanding of the tradition of thought that he identified with their works. As we shall see in the following chapter, what these belatedly selected liberal predecessors most consistently represented for Aron was the possibility of establishing and legitimating a political sociology equidistant from positivism and Marxism without lapsing into the radical relativism of his doctoral thesis.

 

Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

The importance of Raymond Aron in the history of French liberalism is universally acknowledged, frequently celebrated, but seldom subjected to critical scrutiny. Whether as an intellectual heir to Montesquieu, Constant, and Tocqueville, the talisman for a new wave of French liberal intellectuals, or the inspiration for a revival of interest in France’s nineteenth-century liberal tradition, Aron’s canonical status is often taken for granted. While his importance within a French liberal tradition is widely recognised in scholarship on Aron, none of his commentators have engaged with the theoretical controversies surrounding the manifold evaluative and explanatory connotations of this concept. Yet much hinges on this issue. To describe a social practice as traditional is often to confer legitimacy upon it and sometimes to denigrate it, while historians commonly locate actions, works, and corpuses within the context of tradition to explain or interpret them, but continue to disagree about precisely what may be explained through tradition and how. If we take the view









Daniel J. Mahoney, The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron: A Critical Introduction (Lanham, ), , , ; Brian C. Anderson, Raymond Aron and the Recovery of the Political (Lanham, ), , , ; Reed M. Davis, A Politics of Understanding: The International Thought of Raymond Aron (Louisiana, ), . Rémy Rieffel, La tribu des clercs: les intellectuels sous la Ve République (Paris, ), –; Mark Lilla, ‘The other velvet revolution: continental liberalism and its discontents’, Daedalus,  (Spring ), –; Nicolas Baverez, Raymond Aron: un moraliste au temps des idéologies (Paris, ), ; Brian C. Anderson, ‘The Aronian Renewal’, First Things,  (March, ), –. Serge Audier, Tocqueville retrouvé: genèse et enjeux du renouveau tocquevillien français (Paris, ), –; Françoise Mélonio, Tocqueville et les Français (Paris, ), –; Baverez, Raymond Aron, ; Mark Lilla, ‘The legitimacy of the liberal age’ in Mark Lilla (ed.), New French Thought: Political Philosophy (Princeton, ), –, . Mark Bevir, ‘On Tradition’, Humanitas,  (), –, . More recent discussions on this theme are available in History and Theory  (December ), –. This special issue on the theme ‘Tradition and History’ was edited by Ethan Kleinberg.





Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

that ‘the role of traditions must be to explain why people set out with the beliefs and practices they did, not to explain why they went on to change these initial beliefs and practices’, then Aron’s relation to French liberal tradition appears compromised by the fact that he set out with beliefs and practices that were socialist. If we stress the importance of personal ties between members of a tradition defined as a ‘[body] of thought passed down from one intellectual generation to the next’, then the case for Aron as the embodiment of France’s liberal tradition can again appear weakened when we consider, for instance, that he never heard mention of Tocqueville throughout his years as a student at the École normale supérieure. This can be mitigated by considering traditions as chains of influence that do not depend on personal ties between the individuals constituting them, but such an approach does not overcome another serious problem: Aron’s repeated denial that either Montesquieu or Tocqueville had any substantial influence over his formative intellectual development. The problem here is that a simplified view of the traditionary relationship as a unidirectional chain of influence moving from the past to the present is inadequate for the purpose of understanding Aron’s retrospective relationship with French liberal tradition because the basic features of his political thought were well established by the time he began engaging with the thought of authors like Montesquieu and Tocqueville. A more flexible understanding of individuals’ relationships with the traditions in which they become situated is therefore required if we are to reach an informed historical understanding of Aron’s relationship with French liberal tradition. This is provided in the present chapter by the concept of traditionary action, which assumes that individuals’

   

Bevir, ‘On tradition’, . Neil Gross, ‘Becoming a pragmatist philosopher: status, self-concept and intellectual choice’, American Sociological Review,  (February ), –, . Aron, Le spectateur engagé: entretiens avec Jean-Louis Missika et Dominique Wolton (Paris, ), . ‘I owe nothing to the influence of Montesquieu and Tocqueville, whose works I have only seriously studied over the course of the last ten years’. Aron, Les étapes de la pensée sociologique (Paris, ), . See also Aron to Jesse R. Pitts on  October  in Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF (); Aron, ‘Tocqueville retrouvé’, The Tocqueville Review / La Revue Tocqueville,  (Fall ), –, ; Aron, ‘Discours de Raymond Aron lors de la réception du Prix Tocqueville’, The Tocqueville Review / La Revue Tocqueville,  (Winter ), –, .

Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition



relationships with tradition are often actively instrumental rather than passively receptive. Traditionary action, as it is conceived here, operates in two registers and therefore describes the instrumentalising of tradition in two ways. In its strongest sense, it takes the form of canonisation. This term refers to individuals aligning themselves with (more or less invented) traditions to confer cultural legitimacy upon their own work, the tradition itself, or both simultaneously. This pursuit of cultural legitimacy may often be combative and the canonisation of a particular tradition can serve the twin goals of promoting one’s own position while exposing the perceived shortcomings of that associated with another individual, group, or tradition. Such was the case, it will be argued, with Aron’s construction of what he termed ‘the French school of political sociology’ in his famous work on the history of sociological thought, Main Currents in Sociological Thought. The first section of this chapter is principally concerned with deconstructing Aron’s traditionary action in this regard by situating it within the context of a contemporary consensus gap that emerged within French sociology in the wake of the relative decline of Durkheimianism since the 







The term ‘traditionary action’ is borrowed from Peter L. Janssen, ‘Political thought as traditionary action: the critical response to Skinner and Pocock’, History and Theory,  (May ), –. As theorised here, it draws on several anti-essentialist approaches to tradition including the hermeneutical theory of Hans Georg Gadamer, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of knowledge, and the methodological writings of historians J.G.A. Pocock, Roger Chartier, and Dominick LaCapra. What these authors have in common is their shared attack on the authorial monopoly over textual meaning and their promotion of reader reception of texts as being itself generative of meaning. This anti-essentialist reorientation of the relationship between authors, readers and textual meaning is important from our point of view because it provides a means of accounting for Aron’s creative readings of Montesquieu and Tocqueville, which does not require him to have been their ‘descendant’ in the sense of having been influenced by them in a formative way. See, e.g., Gadamer: ‘Not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author . . . understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well’. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London & New York, ), . See also pages –,  of the same book. Chartier goes further, claiming that a given text ‘acquires meaning only through the strategies of interpretation that construct its significances’. See Roger Chartier, ‘Intellectual history or sociocultural history? The French trajectories’ in Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan (eds.), Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (London, ), –, . The notion of canonisation is adapted from LaCapra: ‘Canonization is a procedure not only of selection, but of selective interpretation, often in the direction of domestication’. See Dominick LaCapra, ‘Intellectual history and reading texts’, History and Theory,  (October ), –, . See also Claire Le Strat and Willy Pelletier, La canonisation libérale de Tocqueville (Paris, ). On invented traditions see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, ). The term ‘cultural legitimacy’ is adapted from its use by Pierre Bourdieu in ‘Intellectual field and creative project’, Social Science Information,  (April ), –. As with the terms ‘traditionary action’ and ‘canonisation’ the use of this term here does not entirely replicate its original authorial use. In particular, greater weight will be afforded to countercultural forms of cultural legitimacy than in Bourdieu’s application of the term. Les étapes, .



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

Second World War. This coincided with a period of rising popular and governmental influence for sociologists, which encouraged a struggle for influence over French academic sociology in which competing accounts of the discipline’s French history played a significant role. Aron’s canonisation of Montesquieu and Tocqueville as sociologists was, it is argued here, part of this broader competition for influence within the university. Traditionary action also describes the instrumentalising of tradition in a second, weaker sense, defined here as counter-innovation. The instrumental connotation of this term is weaker because it reflects the inevitability of individuals reading texts in the light of their contemporary political, social or methodological concerns. Aron himself was clearly sensitivite to the underlying issues informing this conceptualisation of traditionary action. In his Introduction to the Philosophy of History, he wrote that All intellectual activity is situated within a tradition in and through which the individual defines himself. There is no scientist or artist who does not begin from a body of acquired knowledge, nor is there any transmission of such knowledge that does not amount to a sort of recreation. . . . Every epoch chooses its own past. By drawing from the collective treasure, each new existence transfigures the heritage it has received by giving it another future and another signification.

Aron’s expository accounts of Montesquieu and Tocqueville in Main Currents in Sociological Thought deliberately execute this kind of transfiguration. In the second half of this chapter the concept of traditionary action as counter-innovation is applied in a close reading of Main Currents to show how its selective interpretation of these authors answered Aron’s specific epistemological and political concerns. There follows an account of how Aron adapted his analyses of modern democracy along Tocquevillian lines and how this affected his controversial interpretation of the events of May–June . As will become clear in the following chapter, these events would reinforce Aron’s commitment to a relatively conservative 



The term counter-innovation is borrowed from J.G.A. Pocock: ‘[I]t is easy to see how innovation by the author can be – as we have seen why it must be – met with counter-innovation by the respondent. There is even a sense in which the respondent – let us imagine him a disciple – cannot escape treating the text in this way, since not being the author he cannot use the author’s language exactly as the author did; and should the respondent be confronted with a text whose author has been dead for centuries, he inevitably acquires the freedom to interpret it in a historical context that the author did not imagine and a language context that includes idioms he never knew’. J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The state of the art’ in J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, ), –, –. Aron, Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire: essai sur les limites de l’objectivité historique (Paris, [] ), .

Deconstructing the ‘French School of Political Sociology’



interpretation of Tocqueville that would prove particularly influential within one strand of the larger broadening of interest in French liberal tradition that began in the s.

Deconstructing the ‘French School of Political Sociology’ The widespread perception of Aron’s pivotal importance within French liberal tradition springs in large part from his account of the history of sociological thought in Main Currents in Sociological Thought. This book, published in  but based upon a series of lectures that he delivered at the Sorbonne in –, is notable for its tripartite division of the early history of sociological thought. The contributions to sociological theory of two of the schools that Aron identified, the Marxist school and the positivist school of Comte and Durkheim, were undisputed; his addition of a third, ‘the French school of political sociology’, was more controversial. Aron acknowledged one obvious objection: neither Montesquieu, whom he identified as the school’s founder, nor Tocqueville, its nineteenth-century representative, described themselves as sociologists. The term sociology never existed in Montesquieu’s lifetime and, while Tocqueville might have been familiar with it, it would be a generation before the beginnings of any identifiable school of academic sociologists would appear in France under the tutelage of Émile Durkheim. Élie Halévy, the third individual that Aron assigned to the French school of political sociology, was a contemporary of Durkheim and the early, precarious rise of sociology within the French university, but at no point did he describe himself as a sociologist of any persuasion. Thus of the four individuals identified by Aron as constituting this sociological tradition, only one, himself, could properly be called a sociologist. A second problem with his account of the French school of political sociology was that the relations of influence between its four members were largely insubstantial. The least problematic join in the traditionary chain was the one connecting Tocqueville to Montesquieu; thereafter the links become rather more tenuous. Aron admitted that neither Montesquieu nor Tocqueville had formatively influenced his own thought and while Halévy was important in shaping his theory of totalitarianism, his influence on Aron’s reading of Montesquieu and Tocqueville has probably been exaggerated. Indeed, as  

Les étapes, . This objection could, however, have equally have been made regarding Marx. Nicolas Baverez, for instance, describes Halévy as the missing link between Aron and Tocqueville. See Baverez, Raymond Aron, .



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

will be shown in more detail later, Halévy’s own indebtedness to the works of Montesquieu and Tocqueville was somewhat less substantial than his identification as their descendent by Aron suggests. All of this indicates that the French school of political sociology was, to a significant extent, a figment of Aron’s imagination. This is not to suggest that there were not many important thematic and methodological parallels across the oeuvres of its various members. Aron was perhaps the first but by no means the last scholar of French liberalism to associate it with a distinctively sociological approach to political theory. But as a selfconscious tradition the French school of political sociology was nowhere near Marxism or the Comtean-Durkheimian lineage. What might have motivated Aron’s retrospective construction of this sociological tradition? To think through this problem, it is helpful to situate Main Currents in Socioloical Thought in the context of the disciplinary history of sociology in post-Second World War France, a period when the status of sociology had never been higher, but which was singularly lacking in consensus as to the discipline’s aims and methods. One of the key battlegrounds in the struggle created by this consensus gap was the history of French sociological thought. From this perspective Aron’s construction of the French school of political sociology appears as part of a wider competition among sociologists to redefine the discipline’s past so as to shape its future according to their political and methodological preferences. It was at once an attempt at legitimising his approach to sociology by rooting it in tradition and an undertaking to canonise a relatively underappreciated liberal tradition in French thought. As such it reflects a complex interplay of cultural legitimisation and de-legitimisation because his canonisation of the French school of political sociology was dependent upon the construction of a straw man representation of Durkheimian positivist tradition against which to define it. However, as is shown below, Aron’s engagement with the sociological aspects of Montesquieu and Tocqueville borrowed substantially from some of the alleged Durkheimian epigones against whom he sought to define himself as a sociologist.





In historical scholarship on French liberalism the classic interpretation along these lines is Larry Siedentop, ‘Two liberal traditions’, [] in Raf Geenens and Helena Rosenblatt (eds.), French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day (Cambridge, ), –. Aron himself recognised this in the introduction to Les étapes: ‘However, I fear that I have been unfair with regard to Emile Durkheim . . . I have insisted, probably more than would have been equitable, on what is most contestable in his oeuvre . . .’. Les étapes, .

Deconstructing the ‘French School of Political Sociology’



It is worth beginning this deconstruction of Aron’s traditionary action by reflecting on his definition of the first of the sociological schools considered in Main Currents: The first could be called the French school of political sociology, whose founders are Montesquieu and Tocqueville. Élie Halévy, in our time, belongs to this tradition. It is an undogmatic school of sociologists interested primarily in politics, which without underestimating the importance of social structures, emphasises the autonomy of the political order and is liberal. I am probably a belated descendant of this school.

Given that the other two schools are named according to their underlying doctrines, Marxism and positivism, it is perhaps significant that Aron should have named this a French rather than a liberal school. Hardly a neutral choice, this probably reflected an underlying concern with legitimising this particular tradition. Aron was writing at a time when liberalism tended to be associated with ‘Anglo-Saxon’ capitalism and therefore widely perceived as un-French. Furthermore, all of the authors he placed within this tradition were known Anglophiles. The choice of ‘French’ over ‘liberal’ may, then, be viewed as a compensatory measure; however, it should also be recognised that this was compensation at the expense of positivism, especially in its Durkheimian guise, which from the late nineteenth century up to the Second World War had effectively monopolised French academic sociology. Throughout Main Currents, Aron’s descriptions of Marxist and positivist sociological thought seem engineered to valorise the French school of political sociology by comparison. This works in two ways. First, the faults that he chooses to emphasise when discussing these traditions are conspicuously those of which his own liberal tradition of sociological thought is defined as avoiding. For instance, whereas positivism is repeatedly described as dogmatic with a tendency to exaggerate social determinism and dismiss claims for the autonomy of the political domain, the French school of political sociology, as may be seen from the quotation above, is defined by its superiority to positivism on precisely these points. It is   



Ibid., . Christian Stoffaës et Henri Lepage, ‘Présentation: les dynamiques libérales de l’histoire économique de la France’ in Alain Madelin (ed.), Aux sources du modèle libérale français (Paris, ), ix–xxxiv. On Durkheim’s dominance over French sociology see Geoffrey Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Social Theory (Cambridge, ), . See also in general Terry Nichols Clark, Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Cambridge MA, ). Les étapes, , , , –, , –, .



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

similarly defined in terms of its overcoming the dogmatic economic determinism of the Marxist school. But the second way in which Aron’s treatments of rival schools of sociological thought seem intended to valorise liberal political sociology was specific to his account of the positivist tradition whose academic hegemony he repeatedly exaggerated and contrasted with the relative outsider status of his own school. Aron’s description of Durkheimian positivism as the officially licensed sociology of the French academic establishment may have been intended to delegitimise it in the minds of his (initially) student audience. At the same time his emphasis on the ‘official’ character of this school implicitly addressed the preconceptions of an audience that, on the whole, would probably have regarded him as an archetypal ‘establishment’ figure. To contrast his own school of sociological thought with Durkheimian positivism in this way was effectively to create a mild sense of counter-cultural legitimacy around the school of political sociology in which Aron had situated himself. By defining it specifically as French, he further emphasised its credentials as a replacement-in-waiting for a dogmatic and outdated positivism. The foregoing analysis may be supported by submitting the situation of French academic sociology during the mid-twentieth century, and particularly Aron’s claims about Durkheimian hegemony, to closer examination. This would suggest that to a large extent Aron’s representation of Durkheimian positivism was somewhat overdrawn. Rather than a dominant hegemonic force within the university, the Durkheimian school had been on the wane for several decades prior to Aron’s election to the Sorbonne in . After the First World War and the death of Émile Durkheim in , it experienced a crisis of recruitment that was temporarily masked by the continuation of figures such as Maurice Halbwachs, Marcel Mauss, Célestin Bouglé and Paul Fauconnet in senior academic positions, but which became obvious in the immediate aftermath of World War Two when they were replaced by a new generation of sociologists. This succeeding generation, whose most prominent figures included men like 



Les étapes, . This point comes out especially strongly in the earlier, English version of the text, published in  and itself based upon the version of the lectures published by the Centre de documentation universitaire in . See Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought  (Harmondsworth, ), –. Clark, Prophets, –; John E. Craig, ‘Sociology and related disciplines between the wars: Maurice Halbwachs and the imperialism of the Durkheimians’ in Philippe Besnard (ed.), The Sociological Domain: The Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology (Cambridge, ), –, ; Victor Karady, ‘The Durkheimians in academe: a reconsideration’ in Besnard (ed.), The Sociological Domain, –.

Deconstructing the ‘French School of Political Sociology’



Aron, Georges Gurvitch, Jean Stoetzel and Georges Friedmann, consisted of ‘scholars who paid little more than lip service to their Durkheimian forbears’ and who were ‘mostly alien and sometimes hostile to Durkheimianism’. These individuals also shared a common background of having cut their sociological teeth during the s, not at the Sorbonne, but at the École normale supérieure’s Centre de documentation sociale under the tutelage of Célestin Bouglé, a man belonging to the older generation but who was himself an ‘ambivalent Durkheimian’ at best. However, while they had similar institutional backgrounds and a commonly critical view of Durkheim’s sociology, this new generation otherwise shared only a minimal core of beliefs regarding the practice of academic sociology. Therefore, while the transition between the interwar and post-Second World War periods was characterised by ‘intellectual discontinuity’ and ‘the end of Durkheimian dominance’, it also culminated in a manifest lack of intellectual consensus among the new bearers of France’s sociological tradition. This consensus gap emerged at a moment in the history of the social sciences in France when sociology was becoming popularised and institutionalised to an unprecedented extent. There were several reasons for this. First, sociology was becoming embedded within the French university on an ever-surer institutional footing, a process formalised with the initiation of the first degree in sociology in . Aron played an important role in establishing this qualification and fought successfully against Georges Gurvitch, who had been chosen over Aron for a Sorbonne professorship in sociology in  and organised the unsuccessful opposition to his appointment in , to ensure the compulsory study of a unit on political economy within this new degree course. Sociology itself subsequently became increasingly popular with the rapidly growing numbers of students entering the university, such that within ten years the number of sociology students equalled those studying philosophy.     

 

Karady, ‘The Durkheimians’ . W. Paul Vogt, ‘Un durkheimien ambivalent: Célestin Bouglé, –’, Revue française de sociologie,  (January–March ), –.   Clark, Prophets, . Karady, ‘The Durkheimians’, . Clark, Prophets, . Clark, Prophets, . Alain Drouard, ‘Réflexions sur une chronologie: le développement des sciences sociales en France de  à la fin des années soixante’, Revue française de sociologie,  (janvier – mars, ), –; Michel Lallement, Histoire des idées sociologiques de Parsons aux contemporains (Paris, ), –, –. Aron, Mémoires:  ans de réflexion politique (Paris, ), . Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, ‘Sociology and philosophy in France since : death and resurrection of a philosophy without subject’, Social Research,  (spring, ), –, .



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

This coincided with the popularisation of the social sciences among the French reading public in the s when paperback editions of works by sociologists became widely and affordably available for the first time. Finally, during the s and s, sociologists including Aron were increasingly entering into professional relationships with policy-makers as part of the state-led modernisation drive of this period. Thus at the same time that sociology was being bequeathed with an arguably unprecedented level of cultural and political legitimacy its leading academic representatives could not agree either about its methodological parameters or basic goals. The struggle over the contents of the new sociology degree was one of the major battlefields in this fight over the means and ends of French sociology; another was the history of French sociological thought. Here too the principal antagonists were Aron and Gurvitch. Of Russian origin, but a French citizen since being naturalised in , Georges Gurvitch (–) had a career that paralleled Aron’s in many respects. As the author of one of the earliest French accounts of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology and ontology with his Current Trends in German Philosophy (), his contribution to publicising new trends in German philosophy predated Aron’s Contemporary German Sociology by four years. Gurvitch also entered the orbit of Célestin Bouglé at the Centre de documentation sociale and Aron wrote a positive review of one of his books in . However, their relationship soured after Gurvitch was successfully elected to a Sorbonne professorship in sociology at Aron’s expense in . By this time their political priorities had already begun to diverge, although they continued to share common thematic interests. Both were preoccupied in the problem of technocracy, for instance, but they took opposing positions on the issue. While Aron valorised France’s post-Second World War technocratic elite and promoted the work of James Burnham for its insights into this problem, Gurvitch denounced 

 

The success of Aron’s Sorbonne trilogy offers a good early example of this popularisation trend. See Drouard, ‘Réflexions sur une chronologie’, –. The term ‘Sorbonne trilogy’ refers to Aron, Dixhuit leçons sur la société industrielle (Paris, ); Aron, La lutte de classes: nouvelles leçons sur les sociétés industrielles (Paris, ); and Aron, Démocratie et totalitarisme (Paris, ). These books were adapted from lectures delivered at the Sorbonne between  and . On the popularisation of the social sciences in France see also Michel Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels (Paris, ), –; Pierre Nora and Michael Taylor, ‘America and the French intellectuals’, Daedalus,  (Winter, ), –, . On the rise of the academic paperback more broadly see Ben Mercer, ‘The paperback revolution: mass circulation books and the cultural origins of  in western Europe’, Journal of the History of Ideas,  (October ), –. Drouard, ‘Réflexions sur une chronologie’, , , . Aron, ‘Gurvitch, G. L’Expérience juridique et la philosophie pluraliste du droit’, review, Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung,  (), –.

Deconstructing the ‘French School of Political Sociology’



Burnham and viewed technocracy as the thin end of a fascist wedge. Gurvitch also possessed an expertise on the early philosophical writings of Karl Marx to rival that of Aron, whom he later criticised for exaggerating the extent of the economic determinism at work in Marxism. Finally, Gurvitch was more radically opposed to Max Weber’s nominalist sociological epistemology than was his new colleague. Aron explicitly criticised Gurvitch during his Weberian critique of the monolithic Marxist understanding of social class in The Class Struggle, and Gurvitch responded in the second edition of his book, The Current Vocation of Sociology. Where Gurvitch and Aron most consistently opposed one another, however, was in their representations of the history of French sociological thought. Georges Balandier, one of Gurvitch’s protégés, has written of him that ‘His passion for socialism could not be separated from his passion for sociology’ and it has been claimed that the greater part of his work in the period from  up to his death from a heart attack in December  sought a revival of French sociology by reconnecting it to its socialist roots. This is confirmed by examining Gurvitch’s teaching and publishing interests during this period. From , the year of Aron’s election to the Sorbonne, to , he taught five courses on the history of sociological thought: ‘The Concept of Social Class from Marx to the Present’ (); ‘Saint-Simon, Sociologist’ (); ‘Proudhon, Sociologist’ (); ‘For the Centenary of Auguste Comte’ () and ‘The Sociology of Karl Marx’ (). The second volume of Gurvitch’s La vocation actuelle de la sociologie (The Current Vocation of Sociology), first published in , dealt primarily with the history of sociological thought, treating in turn the discipline’s Durkheimian and Marxist roots and arguing that ‘Marx remains the most important of the founders of contemporary sociology’. 

    



Aron, ‘Bureaucratie et fanatisme’ [] in L’homme contre les tyrans (New York, ), –, esp. –, –; Aron, ‘Destin des nationalités’ [] in L’homme, –, –; La lutte, –. For Gurvitch on technocracy see his La vocation actuelle de la sociologie. Tome II: antécédents et perspectives (Paris, [] ), –, esp. –. For Gurvitch’s negative reaction to Burnham see Georges Balandier, Gurvitch (Oxford, ), –. Gurvitch, La vocation, . Georges Gurvitch, ‘Objet et méthode de la sociologie’ in Georges Gurvitch (dir.), Traité de sociologie. Tome I (Paris, ), –, . Gurvitch, La vocation, . For Aron’s critique of Gurvitch see La lutte, –. Richard Swedberg, Sociology as Disenchantment: The Evolution of the Work of Georges Gurvitch (New Jersey, ), . These courses were published in limited amounts for students by the Centre de documentation universitaire in the years given. They are listed on the inside sleeve of the second volume of Gurvitch, La vocation. See Gurvitch, La vocation, –, – for his treatments of Durkheim and Marx respectively.



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

Finally, Gurvitch’s chapters in the large two-volume collection that he edited (and from whose thirty-one contributors Aron was conspicuously absent), Traité de sociologie (Treatise on Sociology), also sought to root French sociological thought in a socialist tradition stemming from SaintSimon and Proudhon. It is partly against the background of these sustained efforts by Gurvitch that Aron’s own attempt to redraw the history of sociological thought should be read.

The Effacement of Célestin Bouglé This context helps to explain Aron’s selection of Élie Halévy as the French school of political sociology’s main twentieth-century representative other than himself. The strangeness of this choice has never been adequately acknowledged, yet Aron himself admitted that Halévy was a far from obvious candidate for inclusion in the tradition that he had outlined in Main Currents in Sociological Thought. In a speech at a meeting of the Société française de philosophie held in November  on the occasion of Halévy’s centenary, he revisited his identification of a French school of political sociology and qualified Halévy’s inclusion. Acknowledging that Halévy had never demonstrated any substantial interest in sociology, Aron also suggested that his work’s explicit debts to Montesquieu and Tocqueville were minimal. First, he admitted that, while Halévy did refer to Montesquieu in his work on utilitarianism, he did so indirectly by referring only to his English reception. As for Tocqueville, Halévy had no doubt read him, but Aron acknowledged that there was little evidence of him having had a direct influence on Halévy’s work because it did not refer explicitly to him, even when approaching apparently Tocquevillian themes. Aron effectively admitted here that the twentieth-century continuation of the French school of political sociology was a product of his imagination rather than part of the lived experience of one of its major representatives, stating that ‘There is no proof . . . that Élie Halévy himself was conscious of the filiation or that he was influenced by Montesquieu or  

Gurvitch, ‘Objet et méthode de la sociologie’, – and ‘Brève esquisse de l’histoire de la sociologie’ in Gurvitch (ed.), Traité de sociologie. Tome I, –, esp. –. These efforts were not confined to the course that would go on to form the basis of Les étapes: Aron taught a year-long course on Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws in  and the comparison of Marx with Tocqueville and Montesquieu was prominent within his lectures on industrial society as well. See Dix-huit leçons, –; La lutte, –, –. See also Aron, Essai sur les libertés (Paris, ), –; Aron, Trois essais sur l’âge industriel (Paris, ), . On Aron’s difficult relationship with Gurvitch see Baverez, Raymond Aron, ; Mémoires, .

The Effacement of Célestin Bouglé



Tocqueville’. He repeated this claim ten years later in a speech during the presentation of the second Tocqueville Prize to the American sociologist David Riesman. Not only, then, did Montesquieu and Tocqueville have no formative influence on Aron’s thought, but the man that has been described as the missing link between Aron and Tocqueville was also at best an equivocal descendent of the French school of political sociology. In fact, the idea that Élie Halévy served as a bridge between Aron and the liberals whose thought he would later come to promote is probably inaccurate. While it is true that Aron’s antitotalitarianism evolved from a socialist towards an implicitly liberal position through a dialogue with Halévy, the older historian is unlikely to have introduced him to Tocqueville. Recent literature on the post-war reception of Tocqueville in France has denied Halévy’s role in introducing his work to Aron and suggested that it was rather the American sociologists Daniel Bell and Robert Dahl who first encouraged him to study Democracy in America in depth. However, while it may be that Aron was prompted to study Tocqueville in detail by these American associates, much of his earlier indirect knowledge of Tocqueville was probably derived from Célestin Bouglé. Bouglé’s importance as an early twentieth-century interpreter of Tocqueville has been acknowledged before, but it has always been denied that he had anything to do with Aron’s later attempts at reclaiming Tocqueville for French sociology. However, if we frame Aron’s discussion of the French school of political sociology within the context of the competing account of sociology’s socialist roots in France provided by Georges Gurvitch, then the likelihood that Aron deliberately omitted Bouglé from any of his discussions of this issue appears substantial. Previous failures to adequately explore the relationship between Bouglé and Aron are the product of Aron’s own omission of Bouglé from his selfacknowledged predecessors coupled with a tendency to consider the maturation of his thought from the mid-s as the product of a clean break with the philosophical and sociological traditions of the older Dreyfusard generation of which Bouglé was a prominent member. There are, however,  

 

Aron, ‘L’itinéraire intellectuel d’Élie Halévy’, Commentaire,  (February ), –, – (quotation on page ). ‘Between the two wars the only one of our great Tocquevillian minds, Élie Halévy, never claimed to have been influenced by him’. Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF  ().  Baverez, Raymond Aron, . Audier, Tocqueville retrouvé, ; Mélonio, Tocqueville, . Mélonio, Tocqueville, –; Audier, Tocqueville retrouvé, –.



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

significant parallels between the sociology of Bouglé and Aron. Like Aron, Bouglé’s first book, also the product of an extended stay in Germany, was an introduction to contemporary trends in sociology there. Both of these books conclude with comparisons of French and German sociological methodologies and both use approaches prevalent in Germany to criticise the methodological basis of Durkheimian sociology. The nature of the criticisms and the corrective prescriptions issuing from German sociological method are also strikingly similar in Aron and Bouglé’s work. Bouglé criticises Durkheim’s famous contention in The Rules of Sociological Method that the sociologist must treat social facts as things, arguing that such an approach leads to an overreliance on mechanistic causal explanation, which cannot account for the specifically human dimension to social phenomena. The phrasing of Bouglé’s critique anticipates Aron’s own anti-Durkheimianism in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History, where he insisted that mechanistic causal determination presupposes interpretative understanding: Social facts are, for Durkheim, irreducible to psychological facts. They have a reality independent of the individual consciousnesses in which they resound. They do not egress from these individual consciousness, since they dominate and impose themselves on them. The essential character of the social fact, which is to be a constraint, prevents us from reducing it to the facts of individual consciousnesses. Society is something other than a certain state of minds (état d’âmes). But then where, one will ask, does this society exist? . . . if there were no consciousnesses to know, to interpret, to love social things, it would be as if these things did not exist. . . . Without psychological life, there is no social life.

The methodological implication that both Aron and Bouglé drew from this critique was that French sociology would benefit from integrating intuitive teleological forms of explanation into its methodological arsenal alongside strictly mechanistic forms of causal determination borrowed from the natural sciences. The main difference between Bouglé and Aron was one of degree rather than essence: where Bouglé, whose early career coincided with the peak of Durkheim’s dominance of the social sciences in France, made a greater effort to reconcile German interpretative and    

Célestin Bouglé, Les sciences sociales en Allemagne: les méthodes actuelles (Paris, ). Aron, La sociologie allemande contemporaine (Paris, [] ), –; Bouglé, Les sciences sociales en Allemagne, –. For Bouglé’s critique of Durkheim see especially pages –. For Durkheim’s famous argument about treating social facts as things, see Émile Durkheim, Les règles de la méthode sociologique (Paris, [] ), –. Bouglé, Les sciences sociales en Allemagne, –. Emphasis added. Compare Introduction, .

The Effacement of Célestin Bouglé



French explanatory methods, Aron, writing in what were effectively the dying days of Durkheimian hegemony, adopted a more aggressively antipositivist approach. Bouglé’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century work did not just anticipate Aron’s subsequent borrowing of German methodological insight to criticise positivist sociology; it also foreshadowed Aron’s later attempt to integrate Alexis de Tocqueville into French sociological tradition. In his article on the ‘crisis of liberalism’ from , for instance, he situated Durkheim in the lineage of Constant and Tocqueville: Our greatest political theorists, from Benjamin Constant to Tocqueville, have said it to us: where the central power is met with no more than a dust of individuals, the way is free for despotism. A hypertrophic state before an inorganised mass of individuals, this, as Durkheim was more recently saying, is a veritable sociological monstrosity.

As far as Bouglé’s utility for Aron’s purposes of defining a French school of political sociology in opposition to Durkheimian positivism is concerned, his association of the thought of Constant, Tocqueville, and Durkheim is obviously problematic. However, Bouglé made numerous references to Tocqueville and other nineteenth-century liberals across several of his works and sometimes presented Tocqueville as a corrective supplement to Durkheim. His doctoral thesis, Les idées égalitaires (), provides a good example of this, which also shows his sociopolitical analysis anticipating Aron’s later work quite closely. In the second chapter of this book, Bouglé considers the effects of social heterogeneity and homogeneity on the rise of egalitarianism. He defines heterogeneity and homogeneity not, in economic terms, as referring to wealth, but politically as the presence or absence respectively of ‘dissidence’. The purpose of this chapter is to argue that both absolute heterogeneity (total dissidence) and absolute homogeneity (total consensus) are detrimental to the   



See here the final, more conciliatory pages of Bouglé’s Les sciences sociales en Allemagne, –. Célestin Bouglé, ‘La crise du libéralisme’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (September ), –, . Bouglé’s doctoral thesis, Les idées égalitaires: étude sociologique (Paris, ), contains, for example, references to the works of Benjamin Constant (pages , –), François Guizot (pages , , ), Paul Leroy Beaulieu (pages , , , , ), and Tocqueville (pages , , , , , –, , , , ). A new edition of this book was published in  with an introduction by Serge Audier that challenges the account of Bouglé recently given by Jean-Fabien Spitz. See Serge Audier, ‘Introduction aux Idées égalitaires de Célestin Bouglé’ in Célestin Bouglé, Les idées égalitaires (Paris, ), –; Jean-Fabien Spitz, Le moment républicain en France (Paris, ), –. Bouglé, Les idées égalitaires, –.



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

spreading of egalitarianism, which requires the maintenance of a somewhat precarious balance between the two. Aron also made this argument, both in his  course Introduction à la philosophie politique and in Democracy and Totalitarianism. But in Bouglé’s case what is more interesting is that he here used Tocqueville to correct what he perceived to be Durkheim’s limited consideration of this question only in terms of embryonic societies and his relative neglect of the continuous need for a political culture conducive to the maintenance of democratic egalitarianism. This clearly serves to draw Bouglé towards not only Tocqueville, but also Aron’s position on this issue. Given Tocqueville’s view of democracy as the ‘equalisation of conditions’, Les idées égalitaires obviously chimes with Tocquevillian concerns, but – and here the connection is much more tangible than in Halévy’s case – it also references him repeatedly. Bouglé’s secondary thesis on the caste system in India is also imbued with the spirit of Tocqueville. In this book, he takes India as an exemplary case from which to draw general conclusions about the nature of the caste system, citing Democracy in America as the basic model informing his approach. By doing this, Bouglé effectively presented his book as a kind of negative image of Tocqueville’s, using India as a case study of the institutionalised inequality of the caste system where Democracy in America drew general conclusions on the ‘equalisation of conditions’ from an American example. Where his relationship with Aron is concerned, however, what is especially significant about his secondary thesis is that we know from Aron’s memoirs both that he read it and that he held it in high esteem. On this basis, and given both Bouglé’s status as ‘one of the most important members of the Durkheimian team and one of its most famous’ and his close working relationship with Aron at the Centre de documentation sociale in the midto-late-s, it is reasonable to suggest that Aron drew his early, indirect knowledge of Tocqueville at least in part from Bouglé. Certainly the connection appears much more robust than the Halévian one advanced by Aron’s biographer. The question that remains, then, is to know why      

Aron, Introduction à la philosophie politique: démocratie et révolution (Paris, ), –; Démocratie et totalitarisme, –.  Bouglé, Les idées égalitaires, –. Compare Démocratie et totalitarisme, –. Bouglé, Les idées égalitaires, , , , , , –, , , , . Célestin Bouglé, Essais sur le régime des castes (Paris, ), –. ‘His book on castes in India, which specialists still value to this day, testifies to an analytical capacity that he did not always make the most of ’. Mémoires, . Baverez, Raymond Aron, .

The Effacement of Célestin Bouglé



Aron might have chosen to obscure both his intellectual debt to Bouglé and the latter’s importance as a French sociologist who had drawn quite extensively on Tocqueville. It should first be acknowledged that Aron’s sociological thought did differ in important respects from that of Bouglé, not least in terms of the importance he attributed to economics within sociology. Aron considered Bouglé to have been wilfully ignorant of economics, a fault he associated with the Durkheimian school in general, and one that he eventually sought to address through his input into the first sociology degree instituted in . Bouglé was also considerably more optimistic about both the objectivity of sociological knowledge and its potential moral applications than was Aron. But the elision of Bouglé in Aron’s construction of the French school of political sociology was probably due to the fact that his acknowledgement would have been counterproductive with regard to the aims of Aron’s traditionary action. Aron’s account of the history of sociological thought was in direct competition with the one being promoted around the same time by Georges Gurvitch, which sought to emphasise the socialist rather than liberal origins of the discipline in France. Bouglé’s inclusion within the French school of political sociology would have been problematic because of the prominent role that he had played in promoting the study of French sociology’s socialist roots during the interwar period. Here he served as the main precursor for Georges Gurvitch’s later efforts in this direction, publishing on Proudhon as a sociologist as well as overseeing the republication of Saint-Simon in the s. His work on socialist sociological thought was more substantial and more recent than were his interactions with Tocqueville, which were confined mainly to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It should also be kept in mind that Aron sought to define the French school of political sociology in opposition to Durkheimian positivism. However ambivalent Célestin Bouglé’s adherence to this tradition may have been, he was nevertheless perceived to be a prominent and powerful member of the late Durkheimian school. Furthermore, while he did treat Tocqueville as a sociologist and sometimes used his work to make criticisms of Durkheim,   

Mémoires, . See Célestin Bouglé, Qu’est-ce que la sociologie? (Paris, ), vii–xxiii; Célestin Bouglé, Bilan de la sociologie française contemporaine (Paris, ), –. Compare Dix-huit leçons, –, esp. . Célestin Bouglé, La sociologie de Proudhon (Paris, ); Célestin Bouglé, Proudhon (Paris, ). See also Célestin Bouglé Socialismes français: du socialisme utopique à la démocratie industrielle (Paris, ) and Doctrine de Saint-Simon: exposition, première année,  (ed.), Célestin Bouglé and Élie Halévy (Paris, ).



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

he equally sought to present him as a sociologist more or less within the Durkheimian tradition, as his article on ‘the crisis of liberalism’ shows. This meant that, even though he has been described as being ‘dedicated to political sociology . . . in the service of liberal ideals’, he could not effectively serve as part of a liberal French school of political sociology that Aron deliberately sought to define through its opposition to and surpassing of Durkheimian positivism. Élie Halévy, although his inclusion within this tradition was questionable, served the needs of Aron’s traditionary action much more effectively because he was known to be one of a group of senior French academics sceptical towards Durkheimian sociology. It ought finally to be noted that Bouglé’s substantial engagement with Tocqueville challenges the notion that the latter’s descent into relative obscurity in the twentieth century resulted primarily from the hegemony of Durkheimianism. This influential explanation derives in large part from the politically motivated argument put forward by Aron in Main Currents.

The Sociological Reception of Montesquieu from Comte to the Durkheimians Aron’s presentation of the history of sociological thought in Main Currents is illustrative of traditionary action in the form of canonisation because it contrasts an idealised and schematic account of one tradition (the French school of political sociology) with a schematic and de-idealised representation of another (sociological positivism) so as to valorise the preferred former tradition by comparison. One could speak here in terms of the canonisation of the French school of political sociology being dependent upon the denigration of Durkheimian positivism. An important part of this process, as has been touched upon above, was the setting up of this latter school as a straw man against which to define the benefits of the tradition that Aron sought to legitimise. One way in which Aron did this was to understate the links between the positivist school of Comte and Durkheim and the French school of political sociology. We have seen how this was manifested in the selection of Halévy as an immediate predecessor in the tradition rather than Bouglé. Further evidence may be found by   

This quotation comes from D.F. Pocock’s introduction to the English translation of Bouglé’s secondary thesis: Essays on the Caste System (Cambridge, ), vii–viii. That is, the editorial board of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. See Myrna Chase, Élie Halévy: an Intellectual Biography (New York, ), –. See, e.g., Mélonio, Tocqueville, –.

The Sociological Reception of Montesquieu



considering treatments of Montesquieu’s sociological thought from within the positivist tradition against which Aron sought in part to define the French school of political sociology. This shows that not only were ‘positivists’ more sympathetic towards Montesquieu than Aron’s account in Main Currents would suggest, but his own engagement with The Spirit of the Laws was probably triggered in part by the earlier interpretations put forward by rival sociologists, including Georges Gurvitch. In his Cours de philosophie positive (Course on Positive Philosophy), Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, discussed Montesquieu in the following terms: The first and most important series of works that appears directly destined to at last constitute social science is of course that of the great Montesquieu, first in his treatise on Roman politics, and especially next in his Spirit of the Laws. The principal strength, in my view, of this memorable work . . . is its preponderant tendancy . . . henceforth to conceive of political phenomena as just as necessarily subjected to invariable natural laws as a any other phenomena.

The positive side of Comte’s appraisal of Montesquieu is here tied to the latter’s application of the concept of ‘law’ (in an explanatory rather than juridical sense) to the study of society and particularly the political domain; however, he goes on to criticise Montesquieu for his ‘metaphysical’, rather than ‘scientific’ application of this concept which ‘appears entirely to reject any idea of a real scientific concatenation, usually leaving only a purely illusory link, founded on arbitrary metaphysical connections’. Here Comte anticipates Durkheim’s later argument that the sociologist must treat social facts as things, explaining them through a mechanistic, nonteleological form of causal explanation lifted from the natural sciences: Comte’s criticism of Montesquieu relates to his failure to do just that. It was because of this perceived failure that Comte concluded that Montesquieu could be categorised only as a precursor of sociological thought, rather than as its founder, a status he reserved for himself. Émile Durkheim wrote about Montesquieu at greater length than Comte did, most notably in his Latin thesis, a comparative study of Montesquieu and Rousseau’s contributions to the early development of





Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, tome IV (Paris, ), . The most recent (abridged) English translation is in Stanislav Andreski (ed.), The Essential Comte: Selected from Cours de Philosophie Positive (London, ).  Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, –. Ibid., .



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

sociological thought. His analysis of Montesquieu follows Comte’s very closely. It was, Durkheim argues, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws that established the principles of the new social science, preparing the basis upon which it would develop by furnishing it with the sociological concepts of ‘law’ and ‘type’. However, according to Durkheim, Montesquieu was mistaken in believing that different social forms resulted from different forms of sovereignty. For Durkheim, this priority attributed to the political domain in shaping social relations revealed Montesquieu’s erroneous understanding of how sociological laws functioned: Montesquieu . . . maintains that there exists a fixed and necessary order in social things . . . he takes it as given that there exist laws governing this domain of the world. But he conceives of them in a confused way. According to him, they do not express how the nature of a society begets social institutions, but what the institutions are which the nature of a society requires, as if their efficient cause should be sought only in the will of the legislator.

The reference to the will of the legislator at the end of this passage foreshadows the argument that Durkheim would make three years later in The Rules of Sociological Method when he enjoined sociologists to treat social facts as things. To afford any influence over fundamental social relations to individual will was to adopt a form of explanation whose sociological validity he would categorically deny in this book. This view also indicates Durkheim’s intellectual debt to Auguste Comte, whose conclusions about Montesquieu’s status as a precursor rather than founder of sociological thought he replicated in claiming that the new science ‘was actually unable to progress any further so long as it had not been established that the laws of societies are no different than those governing the rest of nature and that the method which allows them to be discovered is no different than that of the other sciences. This would be the contribution of Auguste Comte to this science’. These early interpretations of Montesquieu as a precursor rather than founder of sociological thought show that Aron’s later definition of the French school of political sociology in opposition to the social determinism of the positivist school was neither arbitrary nor unfounded. Nevertheless, both Comte and Durkheim did acknowledge Montesquieu’s importance 



Émile Durkheim, Montesquieu et Rousseau: précurseurs de la sociologie (Paris, [] ). The additional thesis in Latin was, at the time, a mandatory requirement for all French doctoral students.    Ibid., –, . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., .

The Sociological Reception of Montesquieu



to the development of sociology in France, even if they were not prepared to grant him a status other than that of a precursor. The reception of Montesquieu by ‘positivist’ sociologists after Durkheim suggests that Aron’s extension of this already equivocal bifurcation in French sociological thought was indicative of a desire to establish a somewhat caricatural vision of rival French sociologists as dull Durkheimian epigones so as to present his own approach to sociology as a countercultural alternative. Indeed, not only did some of his ‘positivist’ contemporaries proffer analyses of Montesquieu that were oriented against those of Comte and Durkheim, but Aron’s own studies of Montesquieu were certainly informed and perhaps even triggered by these earlier accounts. In his memoirs, Aron describes Georges Davy (–) as a Durkheimian epigone, but, in a series of works published between  and , this specialist in juridical sociology presented an account of Montesquieu’s place in the history of sociological thought that questioned the interpretations of Comte and Durkheim, suggesting that The Spirit of the Laws amounted to more than mere pre-sociology and that its author was a genuinely sociological thinker in his own right. The first of these articles appeared in one of two issues of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale to include commemorative pieces marking two hundred and fifty years since Montesquieu’s birth in . Two other articles presenting different accounts of The Spirit of the Laws from those of Comte and Durkheim also appeard in these issues of the journal. One of these criticised Comte’s view that Montesquieu’s sociological method was deficient because it was not based, as was his own, upon an underlying awareness of the causal laws determining the historical progression between different forms of society. The author, René Hubert, suggested that this was rather in Montesquieu’s favour, noting that The Spirit of the Laws did in fact contain a theory of historical development, yet that it did not amount to a theory of continuous progress, but rather to a pluralist philosophy of history, more pessimistic in nature than Comte’s. The other article was by another sociologist  



Mémoires, . Davy had been decisive in determining the success of Georges Gurvitch’s candidature to the Sorbonne over Aron’s in . See Baverez, Raymond Aron, . Georges Davy, ‘Sur la méthode de Montesquieu’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (July ), –; ‘Note introductive’ in Durkheim, Montesquieu et Rousseau, –. This introductory note was derived from a paper titled ‘Montesquieu et le science politique’ delivered by Davy in  at a conference in Bordeaux marking the bicentenary of The Spirit of the Laws. René Hubert, ‘Le notion du devenir historique dans la philosophie de Montesquieu’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (October ), –, esp. –. Hubert is described as a ‘para-durkheimien’ in Johan Heilbron, ‘Les métamorphoses du durkheimisme’, Revue française de sociologie,  (April–June ), –, –.



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

repeatedly described by Aron as a dyed-in-the-wool Durkheimian: Georges Gurvitch. In it Gurvitch agreed with Comte and Durkheim about the sociological status of Montesquieu’s thought, but also repeated Bouglé’s critique of Durkheim regarding the supplementary value of interpretative understanding in relation to positivist causal explanation. In doing so, he described Montesquieu as having effectively initiated this methodological innovation, which reached its apex in the interpretative sociology of Max Weber. This is significant not only because it somewhat undermines his earlier downplaying of the sociological importance of The Spirit of the Laws, but above all because Gurvitch explicitly linked Weber and Montesquieu, not only in terms of their general contributions to sociology, but specifically in relation to their status as supplements to Durkheimian positivism: All of his oeuvre shows that the empirical observation of the social reality of Law requires the study of ‘motivations’, of ‘principles’, that is, of the internal significations inspiring actual behaviour. He was the first to conceive of juridical sociology as both a positive science pronouncing exclusively judgements of reality, and as a kind of Sociology of the Mind [esprit] founded on an interpretative understanding (verstehen) and allowing only the establishment of ideal types [types qualitatifs] . . . Montesquieu’s views on juridical sociology are closer to recent conceptions, which admit no unilinear evolution and take account of the diversity of types . . . The juridical sociologies of Durkheim, Hauriou and Max Weber, by bringing out in different ways the characteristics of this discipline as a kind of Sociology of the Mind, founded on the methods of interpretative understanding and the search for ideal types [types qualitatifs], are all beholden . . . to the profound views of Montesquieu.

These contemporaries of Aron writing on Montesquieu either distanced themselves from or added significantly to the views expressed by Comte and Durkheim. In doing so, all of them anticipated Aron’s later presentation of Montesquieu in different ways. In the case of Georges Davy, this was to suggest that the label of ‘precursor’ did not do full justice to his contribution to early sociological thought, the argument upon which a large part of the distinctiveness of Main Currents was based. René 

 

Georges Gurvitch, ‘La sociologie juridique de Montesquieu’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (October ), –. On Gurvitch as Durkheimian see Baverez, Raymond Aron, , –, , . For Aron’s often negative descriptions of Gurvitch see Mémoires, –, –. Gurvitch, ‘La sociologie juridique de Montesquieu’, , –. Aron never claimed that his interpretation of Montesquieu was original in this respect and referred to Léon Brunschvicg having made such an argument before him. The choice of Brunschvicg here is, however, arguably significant since he was renowned for his scepticism with regard to Durkheimian sociology whereas Davy was, rightly or wrongly, closely associated with it. Acknowledging

The Sociological Reception of Montesquieu



Hubert’s article presented Montesquieu in terms that both criticised Comte and Durkheim’s interpretations and, by emphasising his pluralist philosophy of history, aligned him with the philosophical concerns preoccupying Aron in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History. His positive appraisal of Montesquieu’s rejection of simplistic notions of progress was also repeated by Aron in both Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society and in Main Currents. Finally, Georges Gurvitch, even more than Hubert, gave an account that effectively demonstrated Montesquieu’s thematic significance to Aron’s work by showing how his method anticipated the development of German sociology in general and Max Weber in particular. Such thematic and interpretative similarities obviously raise the question of whether Aron had been influenced by these readings of Montesquieu in his own later accounts. Given that he listed this special issue of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale in his bibliography for Main Currents, it is safe to assume that Aron had read the contributions of Gurvitch, Davy and Hubert and reasonable to suggest that their various anticipations of Aron’s later accounts of Montesquieu as a sociological thinker were not entirely coincidental. Of course, Aron read other works on Montesquieu in preparation for his various treatments of his thought in the s and s, but the special significance of these, and especially of Gurvitch’s account, was that they presented the author of The Spirit of the Laws in terms that made him appear to be of clear and immediate relevance to Aron at a time when he was critically reappraising his earlier epistemological writings and the Weberian influence within them.





Brunschvicg was therefore clearly not damaging to Aron’s overall project of presenting the French school of political sociology as an alternative to Durkheimian positivism in the same way that direct reference to Davy could have been. For Aron’s references to Brunschvicg on this point see Dix-huit leçons,  and Les étapes, . For Brunschvicg’s account of Montesquieu as sociologist see Léon Brunschvicg, Le progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale (Paris, ), –, esp. : ‘[O]ne can say of The Spirit of the Laws that it is the masterpiece of pure sociology’. Dix-huit leçons, ; Les étapes, . See also the English version, which appeared two years prior to the final French text of Les étapes. Here Aron’s attack on the ‘ideology of progress’ as the sine qua non of other French sociologists is more overtly polemical: Main Currents, . Les étapes, . This assumption is reinforced by both the status of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale as arguably the Third Republic’s most prestigious philosophy journal and Aron’s own personal and professional connections to it as an author and friend of one of its founding editors, Élie Halévy. Taking all this into account, we can be almost certain that Aron had read this special issue. The question of exactly when he did so is less clear cut: this issue did not appear until October , by which point war had broken out in Europe and Aron had been mobilised into the French army. He may therefore not have been able to access these texts until after the war.



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

Aron’s Interpretation of Montesquieu Discussions of Aron’s status in relation to the ‘French school of political sociology’ typically refer to Main Currents of Sociological Thought, but it was actually in Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society that Aron first praised Montesquieu and Tocqueville as practitioners of a political sociology that avoided the economic and social determinisms of Marx and Durkheim. Significantly, Aron’s embrace of these French liberal forbears in the opening chapters of Eighteen Lectures follows a critique of the Weberian sociology that he had promoted as an alternative to Marx and Durkheim in the s. Here Aron claimed that although in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History he had ‘entirely accepted’ Weber’s relativist epistemology he now considered Weberian relativism to be ‘hardly less dangerous’ than mono-causal determinism. The radical separation of facts and values, he now recognised, produced not a provisional objectivity but a distortion of social reality. And while it was true that no sociological theory possessed a total explanatory power, Weber, Aron argued, had been wrong to suppose that no coherent social reality existed independently of the sociologist’s conceptualisations. ‘Social reality is neither incoherent nor total’, he insisted, so ‘the sociologist does not arbitrarily create the logic of the social behaviours that he analyses’ but rather ‘brings to light orders and regularities that exist in the object’ of his research. Aron concluded that the sociologist should therefore strive to avoid two opposing forms of ‘dogmatism’, that of ‘the true universal system’, which he identified with the Marxist and Durkheimian schools, and that of ‘the complete relativity of sociological interpretations’, which he associated with Weber. Although these remarks exaggerated the extent to which Aron had previously embraced Weber’s epistemological and moral relativism, it is true that some passages in the Introduction could be read as implicitly endorsing Weber’s nominalist social epistemology and radical distinction between facts and values. Aron never explained why the book’s ambivalence on these matters had come to seem problematic by the mid-s, but two general considerations are worth noting in this regard. The first is a profound epistemic shift that had occurred across the human sciences in France since the Second World War. While Aron had not considered the Introduction’s account of the ‘dissolution of the object’ problematic during the fragile hegemony of positivist objectivism in the s, this was no  

Dix-huit leçons, –, –, –. Ibid., –.



Ibid., –.



Ibid., –.

Aron’s Interpretation of Montesquieu



longer the case by the mid-s, when the notion of a social world transparent to human understanding was being abandoned across a broad spectrum of academic disciplines. Aron’s critical reevaluation of his doctoral thesis probably also stemmed from his contemporary preoccupation with the need for a stronger normative justification for liberal democracy than its ability to combine economic growth with respect for negative liberties. From the mid-s to the early s he played a sporadic but underappreciated role in efforts to reopen philosophical inquiry into the ends of political life and the regime forms best suited to their fulfilment. Since the Introduction had not provided a secure epistemological footing from which to address such questions, it is not surprising that Aron should have come to find its moral epistemological ambivalence more problematic in the mid-s than he had in the late s. Besides the general contextual pertinence of the postwar epistemic break and rising concerns about a crisis of normative political theory, a more specific influence on Aron’s efforts towards consolidating the moral and epistemological foundations of his political thought was the philosopher Leo Strauss. In his book Natural Right and History, Strauss, a leading voice in the emergent debate over the ‘death of political philosophy’, argued that the rise of modern historical consciousness since the nineteenth century had resulted in a nihilism that could be overcome only through a revival of classical natural right theory. Having previously been France’s leading advocate of the same German tradition of historical thought that Strauss blamed for contemporary nihilism, Aron’s sympathy for Strauss’s argument in Natural Right and History is remarkable. Not only was he closely involved in the French translation and publication of this book in , Aron drew repeatedly and substantially on this text across a series of writings between the mid-s and early s. Without entering into a detailed discussion of the debate over the extent of Aron’s agreement 

 

 

Stefanos Geroulanos, Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present (Stanford, ), –. Aron’s notion of the ‘dissolution of the object’ is discussed on pages –, – above. This subject is discussed at greater length on pages – above. Leo Strauss, ‘What is political philosophy?’ in Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Chicago, []), –; Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, ), –. Aron, La philosophie critique de l’histoire: essai sur une théorie allemande de l’histoire (Paris, [] ). Aron’s discussion of the fact-value distinction on pages – of Dix-huit leçons draws implicitly on Strauss. Aron’s first substantive and explicit engagement with Strauss is in ‘Le fanatisme, la prudence et la foi’ from . This is followed by Aron, ‘Introduction’ in Max Weber, Le savant et le politique (Paris, ), –, – and Aron, ‘Science et conscience de la société’ [] in



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

with Strauss it is clear that he was generally sympathetic to Strauss’s concern with the death (and necessary resurrection) of political philosophy and that he specifically agreed with Strauss about the nihilism of Weber’s moral epistemology. But while he agreed with much of Strauss’s critique of Weber’s fact/value distinction, Aron never embraced Strauss’s transhistorical universalism. Nor did he heed Strauss’s call for a return to the classical political philosophy of ancient Greece. His promotion of Montesquieu into the canon of sociological thought can, however, be understood partly as a means of meeting Strauss halfway. While sharing much of Weber’s sensitivity to a plurality of values, interpretations, and causes, Montesquieu’s bounded pluralism did not extend to Weberian extremes of moral and epistemological relativism. Beyond exemplifying a political sociology free from the social and economic determinism that he attributed to Durkheim and Marx, what was appealing to Aron about Montesquieu was that he could be understood as combining a kind of protoWeberian historical sociology with classical Aristotelian political philosophy. Although he began to sketch out such an interpretation of The Spirit of the Laws in his industrial society lectures in , it was not until the appearance of Main Currents in Sociological Thought that Aron published his most fully developed interpretation of Montesquieu. Aron’s discussion of Montesquieu in Main Currents begins by justifying the claim that he ‘is not . . . a precursor, but one of the great theorists of sociology’. He initially does this by arguing that Montesquieu’s aim of imposing a conceptual order upon the apparently limitless diversity of morals, customs, ideas, laws and institutions constituting human social reality was exactly the goal characteristic of sociology. Aron illustrates this Aron Études politiques (Paris, ), –. On Aron’s involvement in the translation of Natural Right and History see Tzvetan Todorov, The Morals of History (Minneapolis, ), .  For the debate over the extent of Aron’s agreement with Strauss compare Ibid., – and Anderson, Raymond Aron, , note . Here Anderson contends that ‘Todorov overestimates Aron’s Kantianism and underestimates his basic agreement with Strauss’s Aristotelian critique of Weber’. On the rival neo-Kantian and Aristotelian readings of Aron more broadly see Gwendal Châton, Introduction à Raymond Aron (Paris, ), –. For Aron’s agreement with Strauss regarding Weber’s nihilism, see, e.g., page  of his introduction to Weber, Le savant et le politique.  The proto-Weberian aspect of Aron’s interpretation of Montesquieu is discussed below. Aron’s remarks concerning Montesquieu and Aristotle can be found in Dix-huit leçons, –; Démocratie et totalitarisme, –; Les étapes, , –.  Aron’s earlier account of Montesquieu as sociologist can be found in Dix-huit leçons, –. In the introduction to Les étapes Aron remarks on having previously taught a year-long course on Montesquieu at the Sorbonne but this was never published and is not listed in the catalogue of Aron’s archive. See Les étapes, ; Élisabeth Dutartre, Fonds Raymond Aron: Inventaire (Paris, ), –.  Les étapes, .

Aron’s Interpretation of Montesquieu



point by presenting Montesquieu more specifically as a methodological predecessor of Max Weber, whose concern with making social reality intelligible via the interpretative elaboration of concepts, or ‘ideal types’ is anticipated by Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws. The significance of this claim is not simply that it supports Aron’s interpretation of Montesquieu as an authentically sociological thinker. Aron’s protoWeberian reading of The Spirit of the Laws positions Montesquieu more specifically as having inaugurated a sociological methodology quite different from that of the later positivist school inaugurated by Comte and developed by Durkheim. Aron’s interpretation begins in tacit agreement with those of Comte and Durkheim by recognising that Montesquieu’s first truly sociological idea is that ‘behind the apparently accidental succession of events it is necessary to grasp the underlying causes that account for them’. It is this concern with the causal explanation of social phenomena that makes Montesquieu a precursor of nineteenth-century sociological positivism. But for Aron ‘The interpretation of sociology implicit in The Spirit of the Laws is actually more “modern” in certain respects than that of Auguste Comte’. This is because of the second element of Montesquieu’s sociological methodology: the conceptual elaboration of social types. Tellingly, Aron describes this proto-Weberian element, which is based on the application of interpretative understanding, as being more interesting and consequential than the proto-Comtean element, which is based on the use of causal explanation. But he also emphasises that the two methodologies at work in The Spirit of the Laws ‘are not contradictory’ but rather ‘two stages of one process’. Here Aron reads into Montesquieu the same Weberian account of the relationship between explanation and understanding that he had applied in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History where, against Durkheimian orthodoxy, he had argued that causal explanation presupposes interpretative understanding. Yet in the process of transposing Weberian methodology onto The Spirit of the Laws Aron detaches that methodology from some of its underlying epistemological assumptions. Montesquieu may be ‘exactly like Max Weber’ from a methodological standpoint, but the social reality that he seeks to elucidate through the deployment of concepts is only ‘apparently incoherent’. Furthermore, his sensitivity to cultural diversity and the plurality of sociological   

   Ibid., , . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . This point is made at greater length and with reference to Weber in Dix-huit leçons, –.   Les étapes, . Introduction, , . Les étapes, . Emphasis added.



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

causes explaining it is moderated by Montesquieu’s belief in ‘truths of universal justice’ rooted in a supra-historical human nature. Aron’s presentation of Montesquieu thus enables him to use The Spirit of the Laws to restage some of the central arguments of his doctoral thesis while avoiding that book’s occasional lapses into extreme relativism. This can first be seen in Aron’s discussion of the structure of The Spirit of the Laws, which serves partly to demonstrate his claim about the interdependence of causal explanation and interpretative understanding in Montesquieu’s sociological methodology. Claiming that previous interpretations – Aron has in mind here those of Comte and Durkheim – had tended to emphasise the apparent discontinuity between its initial description of the different types of government and the causal analysis in the later parts of The Spirit of the Laws, he aims instead to present it as a cohesive whole. He does this by first identifying an apparent dividing line in the work’s structure between the political philosophy of Books I–XIII and the sociology of Books XIV–XXVI. Aron then makes his first move to expose this as a false division by highlighting how Montesquieu’s typology of regimes differed from classical tradition through his use of the concept of a regime’s principle as one of its defining characteristics. In Montesquieu, principle – the sentiment indispensable to the functioning of a certain form of regime – supplements the classical criterion of ‘nature’, defined by the number of people in whom sovereign power is invested, in the process of establishing a typology of regimes. The significance of this for Aron is that principle is a sociologically conditioned concept at the heart of Montesquieu’s political philosophy. In order to make this argument he presents principle as a manifestation within this first part of The Spirit of the Laws of the concept of the general spirit of nations found in Book XIX. Aron describes the notion of the general spirit as ‘the true culmination of Montesquieu’s sociology’. His discussion of this phenomenon takes place during a summary of the main sociological causes identified by Montesquieu in which Aron changes the order from how these causes originally appear in The Spirit of the Laws so as to emphasise the central  



Dix-huit leçons, –. Aron applied the notion of principle to his own comparative study of modern political regimes where he identified constitutional-pluralistic regimes resting on a principle of respect for legality and the spirit of compromise and single party regimes based on a principle of fear and faith. See Démocratie et totalitarisme, –. It has recently been suggested that Montesquieu inspired Aron’s methodology across the whole of his Sorbonne trilogy – see Davis, Politics of Understanding, .  Les étapes, –. Ibid., .

Aron’s Interpretation of Montesquieu



importance of the general spirit. In the original work the causes identified by Montesquieu are divided into what Aron terms physical and moral categories. Books XIV–XVIII are concerned with physical causes such as soil and climate; Books XX–XXVI deal with moral causes including trade, currency, population, and religion; Book IXX containing Montesquieu’s discussion of the general spirit of nations is situated between the first series of Books on physical causes and the second series on moral causes. Thus the order of causes as they appear in the original text is: . geographical milieu (comprising soil and climate); . the general spirit of nations; . trade and currency; . population; . religion. Aron rearranges these in order to emphasise the status of the general spirit as the product of the other moral and physical causes. The order of sociological causes in The Spirit of the Laws as he presents it is: . geographical milieu; . population; . religion; . trade and currency; . the general spirit of nations. Aron’s definition of the general spirit reflects its re-situating by him as the culmination of other physical and moral causes. He calls it ‘a certain style of life and of relations in common, which is less a cause than a result – a result of the entirety of physical and moral influences which, over time, have shaped the collectivity’. The concept of the general spirit of nations is central to Aron’s reading of Montesquieu partly because it serves to bridge the apparent gap between the political philosophy of the earlier Books and the sociology of the later ones. This is because Aron links it directly to the notion of principle, which he sees as a manifestation of the general spirit. As such, principle becomes the means by which political regimes are defined by Montesquieu not simply in political terms by reference to the organisation of sovereignty, but also in sociological terms such that ‘the distinction between different types of government . . . is at the same time a distinction between social organisations and structures’. But Aron’s interpretation of the general spirit of nations does not only serve to justify his argument, directed against the earlier interpretations of Comte and Durkheim, about the coherence of the sociological and political philosophical aspects of The Spirit of the Laws. Beyond its importance as the conceptual keystone assuring the structural integrity of Montesquieu’s masterpiece, what is remarkable about Aron’s interpretation of the general spirit is how closely it resembles his description of the ‘objective spirit’ in the Introduction to the



Ibid., –.



Ibid., .



Ibid., .



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

Philosophy of History. There is a functional equivalence between the two concepts, which, for Aron, each serve to identify the existence of a social reality that is irreducible to the individual consciousnesses and behaviours that it conditions. Both concepts are discussed with reference to a distinction between analytic sociology, which explores specific causal relations between particular social phenomena, and synthetic sociology, which is directed towards whole societies viewed as total entities. The objective spirit and the general spirit are both presented as describing synthetic social realities that are total without being totalising in the Marxist sense. But while both concepts establish the possibility of a synthetic sociology, the total social realities that they describe are not understood to be ultimate causes determining an epiphenomenal reality at the level of politics or economy. According to Aron, a synthetic sociology oriented by these concepts will therefore not fall into the Durkheimian error of confusing sociology with ‘sociologism’, the tendency to see all phenomena as socially determined. But neither will it commit the Weberian error of assuming the total incoherence of unconceptualised social reality. Aron’s discussion of the objective spirit in his Introduction to the Philosophy of History contradicts his later claim to have ‘entirely accepted’ Weberian epistemology in his doctoral thesis. But it is true that his remarks about the ‘dissolution of the object’ elsewhere in this book appeared to endorse Weber’s extreme epistemological relativism. A few months before his explicitly critical remarks in the first of the industrial society lectures, Aron had implicitly revised his position in a section of The Opium of the Intellectuals devoted to a vulgarisation of the historical epistemology originally set out in his doctoral thesis. Whereas the Introduction had described the plurality of interpretations leading to ‘the dissolution of the object’, Aron now wrote that this plurality was ‘inscribed on the object’ of sociohistorical knowledge, a claim that he would repeat a few months later during the critique of Weber in his first Sorbonne lecture. The emphasis that Aron placed on Montesquieu’s   





Compare Introduction, – and Les étapes, , , –. The role of the esprit objectif is discussed on pages – above. Introduction, ; Les étapes, –, , . Introduction, ; Les étapes, –. On Marxist understandings of totality and totalisation see Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley, ). Introduction, –; Les étapes, . For Aron’s clearest definition of sociologism see Dix-huit leçons, . Aron writes here that ‘Nothing has been as dangerous for the development of sociology in France as the tendency to confuse sociology and sociologism’.   Introduction, . Ibid., . L’opium, .

Aron’s Interpretation of Montesquieu



concept of the general spirit of nations was probably informed by the same concern with epistemological consolidation that had prompted these earlier changes. For here was a concept that united a plurality of partial causes into an overall interpretation without being ‘a dominant, allpowerful cause that would efface the others’. Aside from confirming Montesquieu’s credentials as an authentically sociological thinker and ensuring the overall cohesion of The Spirit of the Laws, the general spirit is central to Aron’s account because it is seen to contain the plurality interpretations without negating it. One of the conclusions that Aron had drawn from the epistemological pluralism identified in his thesis was the rejection of mono-conceptual forms of explanation such as vulgar Marxist economic determinism and their substitution with the notion of probabilistic determinism, the idea that the sociologist could only identify relations of probability between social causes and effects. This was another theme from the Introduction that Aron would identify in The Spirit of the Laws, particularly in its consideration of the influence of climate on social relations where he argued that Montesquieu had been much less an advocate of climatic determinism than had previously been supposed. This argument rested on his interpretation of the following passage from The Spirit of the Laws: There are countries where the heat enervates the body and weakens the courage so much that men are brought to perform an arduous duty only by fear of chastisement. Slavery there is thus less offensive to reason. And the master being as cowardly with regard to his prince as his slave is with regard to him, civil slavery there is again accompanied by political slavery.

The crucial phrase here for Aron is ‘less offensive to reason’ because it implies that slavery is offensive to reason even while the rest of the passage seems to promote a deterministic explanation based on the influence of climate. This indicates to Aron that Montesquieu’s explanation is probabilistic since if it were characterised by the strict scientific determinism attributed to him by Comte then the implicit moral judgement in this passage would be logically inadmissible because slavery would be conceived as an inevitable product of climate and hence free of human control. Aron further emphasises the moral significance of Montesquieu’s probabilism as   

  Les étapes, , –. Introduction, –. Les étapes, –. Quoted in Ibid., . The implicit moral judgement on which Aron’s interpretation rests is lost in the standard English translation, which renders ‘choque moins la raison’ as ‘runs less counter to reason’. See Montesquieu, in Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller and Harold S. Stone (ed. and trans.), The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge, ), .



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

he develops his interpretation. Pointing to the argument in the fifth chapter of Book XIV that good legislators work to counteract the negative social and political effects of climate, he highlights the margin of opportunity for free human action maintained within the account of the various social causes treated in The Spirit of the Laws. Later, in comparing the different significances attributed to the notion of law by Montesquieu, Aron returns again to the fundamental moral significance of his probabilism, arguing that it implies the existence of a universal natural law prior to both positive and causal-scientific law. Opposing Comte’s dismissive interpretation of this as a metaphysical residue, he argues that Montesquieu’s sociology represents instead an original attempt at marrying sociology to a classical philosophy of natural law. For Aron, then, Montesquieu appears to occupy a position mid-way between Straussian neoclassicism and the value-free political science of Max Weber. This interpretation was conditioned by Aron’s contemporary concern with consolidating the moral and epistemological bases of his own political sociology. And this preoccupation led him to read some of the main themes of his doctoral thesis into The Spirit of the Laws. Of course, Aron could never have solved epistemological problems raised in fin-desiècle Germany by transposing them onto a masterpiece of the French Enlightenment. Reading Montesquieu in this way was more a means of detaching Weberian methodology from its troubling epistemological foundations than a way of substantially reengaging with the epistemological reflection of the Introduction to the Philosophy of History. In this respect, Aron’s turn from German historicism to French liberalism might be seen as a kind of retreat. It would nevertheless have some influence over subsequent attempts to situate Montesquieu within a tradition of natural law philosophy. But while this aspect of Aron’s interpretation was  



 Les étapes, ,  (note ). Ibid., –. See also Dix-huit leçons, –. Les étapes, –. Here Aron also rejects Friedrich Meinecke’s view of The Spirit of the Laws as an unsatisfactory compromise between rationalism and historicism, describing the book instead as ‘a legitimate, if imperfect, attempt to combine two sorts of considerations, neither of which can be entirely eliminated’. Les étapes, –. For Meinecke’s view see his Historism: The Rise of a New Outlook (London, [] ), –. Mark Waddicor, for instance, presents his own attempt to situate Montesquieu within a natural law tradition as an extension of Aron’s reading in Main Currents in Sociological Thought. See Mark Waddicor, Montesquieu and the Philosophy of Natural Law (The Hague, ), –. Though he rejects the interpretation of Montesquieu as sociologist, Thomas L. Pangle, who is a devotee of Leo Strauss, follows Aron in praising The Spirit of the Laws because it at once ‘opens the door to the historical consciousness’ and ‘denies the necessity for a complete surrender to that perspective’. See Thomas L. Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism: A Commentary on The Spirit of the Laws (Chicago, ), .

Aron’s Interpretation of Tocqueville



partially inspired by his contemporaneous engagement with the work of Leo Strauss, Strauss himself was dismissive of Aron’s attempts to reconcile rationalism and historicism. The same year that Main Currents in Sociological Thought was published in English, he began teaching a series of seminars on Montesquieu at the University of Chicago. Insofar as Strauss recognised the partial validity of the sociological interpretation of The Spirit of the Laws and also situated Montesquieu within a natural law tradition there was a superficial thematic similarity between his and Aron’s presentations of Montesquieu. But whereas Aron understood Montesquieu’s natural law to be grounded in universal human reason, for Strauss Montesquieu belonged to a specifically modern tradition in which the idea of natural law had migrated from the realm of human reason to the principle of individual self-preservation. This reading of Montesquieu was fundamentally incompatible with Aron’s Webero-Aristotelian interpretation of The Spirit of the Laws. In the long run it would also prove more influential, even among some of Aron’s most admiring disciples.

Aron’s Interpretation of Tocqueville Similar concerns also informed Aron’s reading of Tocqueville, but they did not directly orient his interpretation to the same extent because they provided but one of several uses that he found for the author of Democracy in America. While Tocqueville’s work arguably had more thematic parallels with Weber’s than did Montesquieu’s, its use by Aron as a corrective to Weber’s relativist and nihilist tendencies is identifiable initially only insofar as he is presented as a sociologist who repeats the qualities of Montesquieu 





After receiving a copy of Dimensions de la conscience historique from Aron, Strauss’s only response was to say that ‘In a word, I am somewhat more doubtful than you are regarding “the historical consciousness” as a whole’. He was much more enthusiastic, however, about Paix et guerre entre les nations, which Aron had also sent him. See the letter from Strauss to Aron dated  June  in Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF(). Aron expresses his profound admiration for Strauss, whom he recalls having met in Berlin in , in Mémoires, . On this point compare Les étapes,  and pages , ,  of Leo Strauss, ‘Montesquieu ()’, ed. Thomas L. Pangle, https://wslamp.s.amazonaws.com/leostrauss/sfs-public/Montesquieu %.pdf [accessed  November ]. For a detailed discussion of Strauss’s seminars on Montesquieu see Céline Spector, ‘Montesquieu et la crise du droit naturel moderne. L’exégèse straussienne’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (), –. According to Guillaume Barrera, Strauss’s interpretation of Montesquieu has ultimately proven to be more influential than that of Aron, including among ‘Aroninans’. See Guillaume Barrera, Les lois du monde: enquête sur le dessein politique de Montesquieu (Paris, ), . The ‘Aronian’ to whom Barrera refers is probably Pierre Manent, who offers a broadly Straussian interpretation of Montesquieu in his La cité de l’homme (Paris, ), –.



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

as discussed above. Thus Tocqueville is presented as a ‘sociologist in the style of Montesquieu’ in that his methodology displays a similarly tempered form of interpretative pluralism, allowing for a diversity of sociological causes but regrouping these to form a synthetic portrait of a given type of society. As with Montesquieu, his interpretative pluralism leads into a probabilistic form of sociological explanation, both because no individual cause operates a unilateral determinism and because the action of individuals is seen to be conditioned but not determined by these underlying causes. Tocqueville’s philosophy of history is therefore also pluralist and probabilist and thus differentiated from Marxist and Comtean determinism. His probabilism similarly points to a moral core at the heart of his sociology, again aligning him with Montesquieu as ‘a sociologist who never ceases to judge at the same time that he describes’. Here Aron alluded to the partial Straussian inspiration for his turn towards liberal tradition: because he is a sociologist that does not refrain from making moral judgements, Tocqueville remains ‘very close to classical philosophy as interpreted by Leo Strauss’. Aron’s treatment of Tocqueville in Main Currents in Sociological Thought further aligns him with Montesquieu by identifying the similarity between the hierarchies of social causes described in The Spirit of the Laws and Democracy in America, emphasising the prevailing importance attributed in both works to customs, manners and religion in shaping political culture. This, however, was also an area where Tocqueville appeared to go beyond Montesquieu in anticipating some of Aron’s specific contributions to twentieth-century political thought. Four of these areas are commented on in Main Currents in Sociological Thought: the notions of political religion and the end of ideology, the critique of the sometimes pernicious influence of intellectuals on political culture, and the idea that ‘disputatious satisfaction’ was a primary characteristic of democratic societies. This latter dimension to the commonality between Tocqueville and Aron is especially important because here Aron not only referred to Tocqueville to confirm a theory that he had earlier arrived at independently, he would also subsequently adapt his work on this theme along explicitly Tocquevillian lines. This initially becomes apparent in his analysis of the rising discontent with the authoritarian and hierarchical

 

 Les étapes, –, . Ibid., . Ibid., –, , –, .



Ibid., .



Ibid., .

Aron’s Interpretation of Tocqueville



characteristics of industrial civilisation in his book Progress and Disillusion. Against the influential neo-Marxism of Herbert Marcuse, whose One Dimensional Man had become a standard text of the New Left, Aron argued that the alienation and anomie that had accompanied the postwar rise in prosperity was less a product of capitalism than inherent within the insatiable egalitarian appetite of modern democracy. This impulse was at once stimulated and frustrated by an industrial civilisation that provided rising material prosperity but whose inevitably hierarchical character obstructed the same egalitarian desires that its growing productivity helped to create. This was what Aron termed the dialectic of equality. Although rising postwar prosperity served in part to lessen the appeal of revolutionary political ideologies, it could not provide reasons for living; thus while it in one sense engendered social conservatism, at the same time it fed a spiritual revolt whose privileged expression during the s Aron identified as a rise in demands for enhanced participation and self-management in the workplace, and a critique of hierarchical bureaucracies that was especially keenly felt in the Gaullist Fifth Republic. Tocqueville resonated with these concerns in two contradictory ways: on the one hand, as a theorist of the benefits of decentralisation and association, he could be mobilised in support of rising claims for direct democracy and selfmanagement; on the other hand, Tocqueville could be cited in support of the view that agitation in this direction simply expressed a fundamentally insatiable egalitarian impulse that must be tamed through the exercise of social discipline. Aron’s interpretation fell firmly into the latter camp. The following passages from Main Currents in Sociological Thought contains the main Tocquevillian themes that Aron would subsequently adapt in Progress and Disillusion and then develop polemically in his controversial account of the ‘elusive revolution’ of May : In a democratic society a reigning passion for equality will necessarily prevail over the taste for liberty. The society will be more concerned with removing inequalities between individiuals and groups than with maintaining respect for legality and personal independence. It will be motivated by a 

 

This work was published in French in  but was based upon a piece first published in English in the  edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It contains a preface written after and touching upon the events of May , which also explains the origin of the main text. See Aron, Les désillusions du progrès (Paris, ), vii–xxiii. For the original English version see Aron, ‘The Promethean dream: society in search of itself’ in Britannica Perspectives, vol. II (London, ), –. The later English version is Raymond Aron, Progress and Disillusion: The Dialectics of Modern Society (Harmondsworth, ). Les désillusions, –. See Serge Audier, La pensée anti-: essai sur une restauration intellectuelle (Paris, ), –.



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition concern for material wellbeing and tormented by a sort of permanent disquiet due to this same obsession with material wellbeing. Material wellbeing and equality indeed cannot create a tranquil and satisfied society, since everyone compares themselves with each other and prosperity is never assured. . . . But from time to time explosions of exalted spirituality . . . occur in reaction to this ambient materialism. This eruptive spiritualism is contemporary with a normalised and habitual materialism. These contrary phenomena both constitute the essence of a democratic society.

The first passage describes the overwhelming power of the egalitarian impulse within democracy specifically in relation to the secondary appetite for political liberty. As suggested above, this basic presupposition informed Aron’s abstract analysis of the disputatious satisfaction of modern democracies in Progress and Disillusion. With the events of May , however, he saw it taking on a more immediate concrete significance with the collapse of established authority within the university and the emergence of various revolutionary student-teacher committees seeking to institute a radically new and, for Aron, fundamentally illegitimate forms of authority determined by introducing direct democracy into the organisation of French higher education. Aron considered this explosion of demands for radical participatory democracy within the university to express the insatiable egalitarian appetite that Tocqueville had identified in Democracy in America, but rather than simply representing an extreme case of the clash between the hierarchical and egalitarian impulses of modern democracy, it also pointed to a profound moral crisis. Here too Aron’s analysis was informed by Tocqueville, who saw America having successfully combined political liberty and social equality because of the strong influence of religion acting as a moral restraint upon the egalitarian impulse. On Aron’s view, by  the moral bases of a necessary minimum respect for authority in France had been undermined not only by a long term decline in the influence of religion over social mores, but especially by the more

 



Les étapes, , . La révolution introuvable, –. For the subsequent development of Aron’s views on May ‘ see his ‘Student rebellion: vision of the future of echo from the past?’, Political Science Quarterly,  (June ), –; ‘Liberté, libérale ou libertaire?’ [] in Études politiques, – ; ‘Remarques sur le nouvel âge idéologique’, Contrepoint,  (), –; Plaidoyer pour l’Europe décadente (Paris, ), –. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America (London, [/] ), –, .

Aron’s Interpretation of Tocqueville



recent erosion of atheistic humanism as an alternative source of fundamental moral principles that might restrain the excesses of radical egalitarianism. In this latter regard he criticised anti-humanist intellectuals such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Louis Althusser for the corrosive moral effect of their aggressive relativism, which he considered not only as undermining respect for authority among their students but also as feeding a wider cultural malaise that risked creating in future a ruling class that would be uncertain of itself and, as such, condemned to death in advance. The second passage summarises Tocqueville’s views concerning the strange mixture of social conservatism and perpetual restlessness characteristic of democracy. Here too Aron’s expository reading of Tocqueville anticipates his subsequent use of this idea in Progress and Disillusion, but again the events of May  seemed to concretise the previously abstract analysis. Aron interpreted them as an instantiation of the eruptive spiritualism referred to in this passage. As such they amounted to an outbreak of mass delirium or collective madness reflecting a profound moral crisis both in terms of the breakdown of established authority and in a wider sense related to the failure of Western democracies to convincingly articulate the values that they stood for other than the pursuit of economic growth and material prosperity. At the same time, however,



 



La révolution introuvable, –. See too pages –, . See also similar attacks in Plaidoyer pour l’Europe décadente, –. It is worth noting that Les étapes de la pensée sociologique was published at the same time and in the same series, Gallimard’s Bibliothèque des sciences humaines, as Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, a book whose approach to intellectual history could not be further removed from Aron’s in Les étapes. Foucault and Aron appeared together on French radio to discuss their books and the transcript of this discussion has been published as Dialogue: Raymond Aron et Michel Foucault (Paris, ). For Foucault’s critique of the history of ideas see Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris, ), , ; Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir (Paris, ), –, –, –, –. On the other hand, Foucault would later appear, partially and secondhand via the work of Paul Veyne, to embrace Aron’s critique of causal explanation as set out in his doctoral thesis. See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, - (New York, ), –, , n. . Les désillusions, xix–xxii, –. ‘[I]ndividuals are apparently reduced to the condition of private persons, belonging to no community of religious faith or political belief, then, suddenly, these isolated individuals smitten with comfort and prosperity are gripped by passion. This bout of fever may have definite objectives that lead to political and social upheavals or it may have no defined objectives, and such is the present case. Lacking a social model to satisy our aspirations, such bouts of fever have an essentially negative, nihilist, or destructive character’. La révolution introuvable, . See especially Aron’s preface to the English translation: The Elusive Revolution: Anatomy of a Student Revolt (London, ), xvii.



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

Aron refused to take the actions of students and intellectuals during the crisis seriously; he was convinced that they were indulging in pseudorevolutionary agitation against a consumer society of whose material benefits they were among the principal beneficiaries. His infamous description of the student unrest as a psychodrama thus represented in part a polemical extension of Tocqueville’s analysis of the democratic tendency towards superficial, eruptive spiritualism. But not only did Aron draw on this analysis of democracy to inform his critique indirectly, he also positioned himself explicitly as a modern-day Tocqueville, reacting to the revolutionary upheaval of  as Tocqueville had to that of : Psychodrama. I would not still use this expression without qualification. But all the same, over the course of this period we were all role playing. Starting with myself, as I said, I played Tocqueville, which is somewhat ridiculous. But others played Saint-Just, Robespierre or Lenin, which, all things considered, is even more ridiculous.

Aron’s role-playing reached its fullest extent in an article published in Le Figaro on  May , which consisted almost entirely of quotations from Tocqueville’s Souvenirs. These included a critique of Louis-Philippe’s complacency in the years prior to , which Aron presented as an implicit indictment of Charles de Gaulle along the same lines, as well as other passages that served to attack the political naivety of French intellectuals and their propensity towards an abstract or literary approach to politics. Speaking through Tocqueville, Aron also denounced the opportunism of politicians and academics that sought to capitalise on the unrest to further their own interests.

Conclusion In December  Raymond Aron was awarded the inaugural Tocqueville Prize in a ceremony attended by president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Shortly afterwards, he received a letter from the son of one of his old lycée  

  

La révolution introuvable, –. Ibid., . Aron’s characterisation of the unrest of May  as a psychodrama was a conscious repetition of Tocqueville’s remark concerning  that ‘The luke warm passions of the day were thus spoken of in the inflammatory language of [] and at every moment the names of illustrious villains were cited without there being the energy or even the desire really to imitate them’. Quoted in La révolution introuvable, –. Aron, ‘Immuable et changeante’ [ May ] in La révolution introuvable, –. For Aron’s criticism of De Gaulle and Gaullism in relation to the events of May  see La révolution introuvable, –. ‘Immuable et changeante’, . It is likely that Aron had in mind here Pierre Mendès-France. See Mémoires, –.

Conclusion



teachers. The letter was humorously addressed to ‘Cher Tocqueville’ whom it went on to congratulate for winning the Aron Prize. This note cheerily touched on a certain truth, which was that the Tocqueville Prize was as much concerned with raising the domestic profile of the author of Democracy in America as it was with recognising the achievements of the author of The Opium of the Intellectuals. Yet by the time the prize was established, interest in Tocqueville was already on the rise among French intellectuals. Aron had played an important role in this. Published in , Aron’s history of sociological thought was the precursor to a wider renewal of interest in French liberalism that would become one of the defining features of Parisian intellectual life in the second half of the s. More often than not, this liberal turn in French thought was driven by a growing sense of Marxism’s limitations and a correlative concern with rethinking ‘the political’ as something autonomous from underlying social or economic forces. These were the terms in which Aron had been promoting the works of Montesquieu and Tocqueville since the mid-s, and most of the leading participants in the ‘French liberal revival’ would acknowledge his contribution to bringing it about. It should be remembered, however, that Aron did not singlehandedly resurrect interest in French liberalism, and particularly in Tocqueville, whose complete works were in the process of being published under state subsidy prior to his initial engagement with some of them in the mids. In fact, as this example suggests, it is problematic to speak of the revival of a previously forgotten French liberal tradition during the s. Instead, this decade witnessed a broadening of interest in authors like Constant and Tocqueville that was particularly notable because of the role played by parts of the intellectual left that had previously shown little interest in such figures. While it is true that Aron presented Montesquieu and Tocqueville in terms that would come to seem particularly relevant to French intellectuals increasingly preoccupied with critiquing Marxism and  

 

This letter is available in Aron’s correspondence concerning the Tocqueville Prize in Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF(). Aron acknowledged as much when, while participating in the deliberations over whom to award the second Tocqueville Prize in , he argued unsuccessfully in favour of Isaiah Berlin over the eventual winner, the American sociologist David Riesman, because of Berlin’s international renown and its potential for further raising the profile of the award and hence Tocqueville himself. See Aron’s letter to Alain Peyrefitte on  September  in Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF(). On the twentieth-century French reception of Tocqueville prior to Aron see Mélonio, Tocqueville, –; Audier, Tocqueville retrouvé, –. Stephen W. Sawyer and Iain Stewart (eds.), In Search of the Liberal Moment: Democracy, Antitotalitarianism and Intellectual Politics in France since  (New York, ).



Raymond Aron and the French Liberal Tradition

rediscovering ‘the political’ during the s, the interpretations of French liberalism that would be advanced from within the French intellectual left in these years often bore little resemblance to that offered by Aron. In Main Currents in Sociological Thought, Aron interpreted Montesquieu and Tocqueville as proponents of a tempered, humanist relativism, overcoming the dogmatic tendencies of positivism and Marxism without lapsing into nihilism. He later came to lean primarily on Tocqueville as a support for his moral critique of the excesses of contemporary egalitarian demands, first in Progress and Disillusion and later in his response to the events of May–June . Aron’s reading of Tocqueville as a proponent of social discipline against a morally corrosive, nihilistic anti-humanism became highly influential, representing the first instance of what has since become a major trope of liberal and conservative criticisms of the May events and the pernicious influence of an amoral, relativist ‘pensée ’. Two of the most important sites for the subsequent development of this critique of the legacy of May  were the journals Contrepoint and Commentaire. These publications were founded in the s by intellectuals who had gravitated towards Aron after his call to arms to form an intellectual resistance to the movements that had almost brought down the Fifth Republic in . Both continued Aron’s work of combining the critique of May  with the promotion of a French liberal tradition of political thought. The return of the French Communist Party as a potential party of government in  led the ‘Aronians’ of Contrepoint and Commentaire into an informal antitotalitarian alliance with elements of the anti-communist intellectual left; however, while this context helped to encourage increasing interest in French liberalism, it did not produce a politically homogeneous liberal revival. 



Luc Ferry and Alain Renault, La pensée  (Paris, ). See especially the admiring account of Aron’s view of the May events on pages –. There is also a broad thematic parallel here with Allan Bloom, the American conservative philosopher and student of Leo Strauss whose bestselling book, The Closing of the American Mind, is an attack on the influence of relativism within American higher education, which also references Tocqueville repeatedly. See in general Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York, ). See also Allan Bloom, ‘Raymond Aron: The Last of the Liberals’ in Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, - (New York, ), –, esp. –. For the influence of Tocqueville within The Closing of the American Mind see S.J.D. Green, ‘The Closing of the American Mind revisited’, The Antioch Review,  (Spring ), –, esp. –. On the same book in its larger historical context see Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge MA, ), –. Gwendal Châton, ‘Désaccord parfait: le Contrepoint libéral dans les configurations intellectuels des années soixante-dix’ in Jean Baudouin et François Hournant (dir.), Les revues et la dynamique des ruptures (Rennes, ), –, esp. –. For a first hand account see Alain Besançon, ‘Souvenirs et réflexions sur mai ’, Commentaire,  (Summer ), –.

 

Raymond Aron and the Liberal Moment in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought

It is by now well known that between the mid-s and the late s a major ideological reorientation occurred in French intellectual life. The main features of this sea change are usually taken to be a collapse in the credibility of revolutionary politics inspired by Marxist theory and communist practice coupled with a significant expansion of interest in various forms of liberalism. Until recently, scholarship on this subject has tended to polarise between accounts of intellectual betrayal and redemption, but historians on either side of the barricade usually saw the reorientation of French intellectual politics as beginning in , when the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago triggered a collective antitotalitarian epiphany that ultimately resulted in the eclipse of Marxism and a resurgence of interest in liberalism. Raymond Aron was widely recognised to have played a significant role in this process, to the extent that the entire phenomenon has been described as an ‘Aronian renewal’. Since the mid-s, a new generation of intellectual historians, less invested in the Cold War politics that still informed much of the scholarship produced in the s, has begun to challenge aspects of this narrative. The work of Michael Scott Christofferson was particularly important in downplaying the importance of the ‘Solzhenitsyn effect’ and emphasising the rhetorical function of antitotalitarianism at a time when the French Communist Party had become once more a potential 

 

On intellectual betrayal, see, e.g., Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London, ), ; Daniel Lindenberg, Le rappel à l’ordre: enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires (Paris, ); Kristin Ross, May’ and its Afterlives (Chicago, ). The redemption narrative is set out in, e.g., Mark Lilla, ‘The other velvet revolution: continental liberalism and its discontents’, Daedalus,  (Spring ), –; Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago, ), . Brian C. Anderson, ‘The Aronian renewal’, First Things,  (March ), –. On this ‘new historiographical and generational sensibility’ see Julian Bourg, ‘Introduction’ in Julian Bourg (ed.), After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France (Oxford, ), –, .



 Raymond Aron and the Liberal Moment in Late 20th-Century party of government, thanks to the signing of the Common Programme with Mitterrand’s socialists in . More recently, Julian Bourg has rewritten the intellectual history of this period as a transition ‘from revolution to ethics’. It is now clear that the ideological reorientation of French intellectual life cannot be summarised as a straightforward transition from Marxism to liberalism. And those intellectuals who did participate in the broadening of interest in liberalism during this period did so in different ways and for different reasons. The significance of antitotalitarianism in this respect has perhaps still not been fully understood. It is true that the rhetoric of antitotalitarianism served an important polemical purpose in the efforts of anti-communist intellectuals from the left and the right to discredit the Union of the Left; however, the critique of totalitarianism cannot be reduced to this, since, as Dick Howard, Andrew Jainchill, and Samuel Moyn have shown, it also contributed to the development of some innovative work on the history and theory of modern democracy. It was this project of rethinking democracy that led intellectuals from a wide variety of political backgrounds to begin engaging with French liberal authors such as Tocqueville and Constant. Yet the importance of this antitotalitarian engagement with French liberalism has often been either downplayed or, especially where the role of Raymond Aron is concerned, exaggerated. While Aron’s influence on France’s late twentieth century ‘liberal moment’ was substantial, the antitotalitarian return to French liberal tradition cannot be adequately summarised as an ‘Aronian renewal’ because it was inspired by the critique as much as by the emulation of Aron. By recognising this it is possible to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of what was at stake  

 



Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the s (New York, ). Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May  and Contemporary French Thought (London, ). For the legacy of May  on the French right see Serge Audier, La pensée anti-: essai sur les origines d’une restauration intellectuelle (Paris, ). Stephen W. Sawyer and Iain Stewart (eds.), In Search of the Liberal Moment: Democracy, Antitotalitarianism and Intellectual Politics in France since  (New York, ). Dick Howard, The Specter of Democracy (New York, ); Andrew Jainchill and Samuel Moyn, ‘French democracy between totalitarianism and solidarity: Pierre Rosanvallon and revisionist historiography’, The Journal of Modern History,  (March ), –; Samuel Moyn, ‘On the intellectual origins of François Furet’s masterpiece’, The Tocqueville Review,  (), –. Thus, for instance, Samuel Moyn writes that ‘above all, it is a mistake to interpret the antitotalitarian moment as a “liberal moment”’. See Samuel Moyn, ‘Introduction: anti-totalitarianism and after’ in Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future (New York, ), –, . Emile Chabal, on the other hand, has written that Aron ‘has defined what it has meant to be a liberal in France in the last thirty years’. See Emile Chabal, A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge, ), .

Antitotalitarianism and the Return of ‘the Political’



in French intellectuals’ varying engagements with their country’s liberal heritage in the s and early s.

Antitotalitarianism and the Return of ‘the Political’ Serious French reflection on totalitarianism in the s and s was not methodologically uniform and its practitioners drew different conclusions from their work. Nevertheless, to the extent that it is possible to speak of a coherent French school of thought in this area, this is because the philosophers and historians belonging to that school shared the view that totalitarianism was an irreducibly political phenomenon and only secondarily a product of the social or economic contradictions of modernity. Consequently, French reflection on totalitarianism was typically as concerned with rethinking modern democracy as it was with understanding the workings of ‘totalitarian’ regimes. A common preoccupation with the primacy of ‘the political’, a concept first theorised by Raymond Aron in Democracy and Totalitarianism, led antitotalitarian theorists of democracy to participate in a renewal of interest in political philosophy, not least with reference to the work of Machiavelli, and more specifically towards a return to the works of nineteenth-century French liberals such as Benjamin Constant, François Guizot, and Alexis de Tocqueville. Much of the leading work in this field was published in three journals that helped to constitute an ‘anti-totalitarian front’ in France during the late s and early s. These were the left-Catholic journal Esprit, the journal Commentaire founded by Aron in , and Le Débat, established in . Most of the intellectuals who contributed to the antitotalitarian turn towards the political continued their work in the s under the 

 

For the purposes of this discussion the works of the nouveaux philosophes will not be discussed at length. By excluding them from the category of ‘serious’ antitotalitarianism I am adopting the position of ‘Aronian’ and ‘Lefortian’ theorists who were generally critical or dismissive of the nouveaux philosophes. This is not an unproblematic stance to take, of course, and readers may judge for themselves the merits of the nouveaux philosophes by consulting their most influential works in this field. These are André Glucksmann, La cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes: essai sur les rapports entre l’État, le marxisme et les camps de concentration (Paris, ) and Bernard-Henri Lévy, La barbarie à visage humain (Paris, ). The ‘Aronian’ critique of these authors is discussed below. For Claude Lefort’s views see his Un homme en trop: réflexions sur ‘l’Archipel du goulag’ (Paris, ), –; Éléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie, second edition (Paris, ), , –; L’invention démocratique: les limites de la domination totalitaire (Paris, ), vi–vii. On this point see Claude Lefort, ‘Réflexions sur le présent’, [] in his Écrire: à l’épreuve du politique (Paris, ), –. Kevin Duong, ‘Does democracy end in terror? Transformations of antitotalitarianism in postwar France’, Modern Intellectual History,  (August ), –.

 Raymond Aron and the Liberal Moment in Late 20th-Century auspices of the Institut Raymond Aron, established at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales by the historian François Furet in November . Aron was thus clearly an important point of reference for France’s antitotalitarian turn and the ‘liberal revival’ that accompanied it. This should come as no surprise. As we have seen, he had long held the view that totalitarianism was primarily a political phenomenon whose existence necessitated a rethinking of modern democracy. Aron’s shift from a broadly Marxist towards a primarily political interpretation of totalitarianism coincided with the writing of an unfinished manuscript on ‘Machiavelli and the modern tyrannies’ in the late s. It was here that he first observed that National Socialism’s claim to political legitimacy was ‘originally and essentially democratic’. Aron’s redefinition of democracy in the face of the totalitarian threat began in , when, contrasting ‘revolutionary’ totalitarianism with ‘conservative’ democracy, he identified democratic regimes with constitutionality and the protection of personal liberties. This explicitly entailed rejecting popular sovereignty as an essentially democratic value on the grounds that this concept could just as easily be used to legitimate totalitarianism as it could democracy. At the end of the war Aron added a new element to his account of democracy, writing that such regimes were also defined by their pluralism. Although in its original personalist usage this term had alluded to grass roots civil society activism outside of mainstream politics, for Aron the institutional embodiment of democratic pluralism was confined to the multiparty system. He reinforced this point in his lecture course on political philosophy at the École nationale d’administration in . Reprising the dichotomy of ‘democracy and revolution’ that he had first posited in , Aron here emphasised the importance of defining political democracy not by ideas like liberty, equality, or popular sovereignty, but as ‘an institutional system’ serving to organise ‘peaceful competition for the exercise of power’. Here again the rule of law and a multiparty system were identified as the essential institutional features of modern democratic regimes. This anticipated the argument of Democracy and Totalitarianism where, synthesising his prior reflection on this theme, Aron defined the rival political systems of East and West as constitutional-pluralistic and monopolistic party regimes.

 

Christophe Prochasson, François Furet: les chemins de la mélancolie (Paris, ), –. Aron, Introduction à la philosophie politique: démocratie et révolution (Paris, ), –.

Antitotalitarianism and the Return of ‘the Political’



What was most significant about Democracy and Totalitarianism in terms of its subsequent influence was the conceptual distinction that Aron made in it between ‘politics’ understood as a specific domain of social reality and ‘the political’ understood as ‘the social whole itself, observed from a certain point of view’. It is here that Aron occupies a foundational position in the intellectual history of French reflection on totalitarianism. But the nature of Aron’s influence should not be misunderstood. While his conceptualisation of ‘the political’ provided a foundation on which subsequent French theorists of totalitarianism would build, it was a short passage in a book that otherwise focused predominantly on the empirical comparison of political institutions and the attitudes and behaviours necessary for them to function. In building on the foundation laid by Aron, subsequent theorists of totalitarianism often substantially modified his notion of ‘the political’, rejected his empirical method entirely, and drew quite different conclusions about the implications of totalitarianism for modern democracy. The most influential of these other theorists was the philosopher Claude Lefort, who completed a doctoral thesis on Machiavelli under Aron’s supervision between  and . In  Lefort had broken with Socialisme ou Barbarie, the libertarian socialist journal he founded with Cornelius Castoriadis nine years earlier. In the autobiographical preface to the second edition of his book Elements of a Critique of Bureaucracy [], Lefort equates this break with Socialisme ou Barbarie with an abandonment of Marxism, which he now rejected because of its deficient understanding of ‘the political’. It may not be a coincidence that this abandonment of Marxism occurred while Lefort was attending the lectures that Raymond Aron would later publish as Democracy and Totalitarianism. Although he made no mention of Aron in this preface, a text in which he is keen to emphasise that his break with Marxism did not entail an abandonment but an intensification of his political radicalism, Lefort did later acknowledge the importance of Aron’s book. Yet if Democracy and Totalitarianism’s brief theorisation of the political provided Lefort with the basis for a  

  

Aron, Démocratie et totalitarisme (Paris, ), . Samuel Moyn, ‘Concepts of the political in twentieth-century European thought’ in Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (Oxford, ), –, –. See Lefort’s preface to the second edition of his Éléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie, –, , . Ibid., –. Lefort, Écrire, –; Claude Lefort, La complication: retour sur le communisme (Paris, ), –, –, –, –.

 Raymond Aron and the Liberal Moment in Late 20th-Century conceptual framework that would orient his own critique of totalitarianism, his theorisation of ‘the political’ entailed a thoroughgoing critique of Aron’s method and ultimate political conclusions. While Aron considered that democracy should be defined ‘by institutions and not by ideas’, Lefort never tired of insisting that democracy could not be reduced to its institutional manifestations. He made this point forcefully in his book Un homme en trop (One Man Too Many, ), an analysis of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Although Lefort does situate this text with reference to contemporary debates over the Communist party’s alliance with Mitterrand’s Parti Socialiste, the ultimate significance of the book’s analysis of totalitarianism is that it provides the basis for a highly original theory of modern democracy. Fundamental to this theory is Lefort’s rejection of empiricist political sociology of the kind practiced by Aron in the main body of Democracy and Totalitarianism. This is not immediately apparent in Un homme en trop because Lefort, explicitly aiming his argument at France’s marxisant intelligentsia, mainly presents it as a critique of Marx. For Lefort, the problem with Marx’s critique of formal democracy is that it sees this democracy primarily as a ‘political regime, as an ensemble of institutions assigned with special functions: those of peacefully arranging the reign of the bourgeoisie’. As such, he writes, this analysis masks the rupture that takes place with the advent of democracy in modern Europe and that cannot be measured only by its effects, identifiable at the institutional level, to the advantage of a class. Such a rupture is indeed much more than political in today’s narrow, conventional sense of the term; it is only by recognising the symbolic dimension of the social that it is possible to appreciate this.

Here Lefort alludes to a distinction between politics and the political whose theoretical and political implications are quite different to those deriving from Aron’s remarks on this theme in Democracy and 

 

 

According to Samuel Moyn, ‘Lefort is best understood as a sophisticated elaborator of Aron’s attempt to shift to a foundational understanding of the political’. See Moyn, ‘Concepts of the political’, . Introduction à la philosophie politique, . Elsewhere Lefort would make it clear that to theorise the political requires a critique not only of Marxism but also of contemporary political sociology. See Claude Lefort, ‘La question de la démocratie’ [] in Essais sur le politique (Paris, ), –, . That Lefort was here referring at least in part to Aron would become clear in some of his later writings on this theme. See, e.g., Lefort, Écrire, . Claude Lefort, Un homme en trop: réflexions sur ‘l’Archipel du Goulag’ (Paris, [] ), . Ibid., .

Antitotalitarianism and the Return of ‘the Political’



Totalitarianism. Aron’s definition of the political as ‘the social whole itself, observed from a certain point of view’ was based on the observation that ‘politics is the major feature of the entire community because it conditions any cooperation between men’. For Aron, then, the political was concerned with ‘the way authority is exercised’ across social relations in general rather than with politics at the formal institutional level. Lefort’s adaptation of Aron’s notion of the political decentred this focus on relations of authority and instead argued that the function of the political was to enact the symbolic constitution of society. This powerful symbolic dimension to Lefort’s understanding of the political originated not from Aron’s influence but from his engagement with the works of Marcel Mauss, Jacques Lacan, and above all Maurice Merleau-Ponty. An indication of its significance can be gained by noting that Lefort would have been unlikely to have accepted Aron’s description of the political as ‘the social whole itself, observed from a certain point of view’ [emphasis added] because, for him, the social whole could only come into view as a result of its symbolic constitution by the political. That Lefort’s symbolic account of the political had far reaching implications for his understanding of the origins and interrelation of democracy and totalitarianism becomes clearer in an article on ‘The logic of totalitarianism’ published in : We should above all recognise the symbolic character of power rather than reducing it to the function of an organ, an instrument in the service of social forces that pre-exist it. Without such a perspective, we cannot see that the delimitation of a sphere of the political is accompanied by a new mode of legitimation, not only of power, but of social relations as such. The legitimation of power is based on the people; but to the image of popular sovereignty is joined that of an empty space, impossible to occupy, such that those who exercise public authority cannot claim to appropriate it. Democracy mixes these two apparently contradictory principles: one, that power emanates from the people; the other, that it belongs to nobody.

Here we begin to see how Lefort considers that the advent of modern democracy entailed a mutation in the symbolic order of the political, a  



 Démocratie et totalitarisme, –. Ibid., . Warren Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy (New York, ), –; Samuel Moyn, ‘Marxism and alterity: Claude Lefort and the critique of totality’ in Warren Breckman et al. (eds.), The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory. Essays in Honour of Martin Jay (New York, ), –. Claude Lefort, ‘La logique totalitaire’ [] in Lefort, L’invention démocratique (Paris, ), –, .

 Raymond Aron and the Liberal Moment in Late 20th-Century theme he would go on to develop in an influential article on ‘The question of democracy’ in . The details of this symbolic mutation are too complex to summarise here, but a crucial insight deriving from it was that it was this symbolic mutation which made it possible to conceive of the articulation of society in distinct political, economic, religious, cultural, and juridical sectors. The implications of this for Lefort’s understanding of the relationship between democracy and totalitarianism become apparent in another passage of his article on ‘The logic of totalitarianism’: if the image of the people actualises itself, if a party claims to identify itself with it and to seize power under the cover of this identification, . . . it is the principle of the distinction between State and society itself, the principle of the difference in norms that govern the various types of relations between men, but also their modes of life, beliefs and opinions that is denied – and, more profoundly, the very principle of a distinction between that which comes under the order of power, the order of the law and the order of knowledge. Thus a sort of imbrication of politics, the economic, the juridical, the cultural takes place. This phenomenon is precisely characteristic of totalitarianism.

There is at first a surface resemblance with Aron’s understanding of the origins of totalitarianism here. As we have seen, Aron had traced this origin to the millenarian ideologies of totalitarian parties, coupled with their claims to incarnate an undivided popular will. The root cause of totalitarianism was thus not only political but more precisely ideological in nature. In this respect, the origins of totalitarianism were to be found not in the immediate historical conjuncture from which bolshevism, fascism, or national socialism emerged but in the advent of the doctrine of an infallible general will. Like Aron, Lefort traced the origins of totalitarianism back to the late eighteenth century; however, he rejected any attempt to reduce totalitarianism to a narrowly ideological cause and was particularly sceptical of Aron’s account of ‘the vestiges of the democratic spirit in communist ideology’. Indeed, on Lefort’s view, the only way that democracy could be successfully defended against totalitarianism was by ‘reawakening

  



Claude Lefort, ‘La question de la démocratie’ [] in Lefort, Essais sur le politique, –. Lefort, ‘La logique totalitaire’, . Introduction à la philosophie politique, –. In the s Aron would draw on Solzhenitsyn to support his ideologically focused interpretation of Soviet totalitarianism. See Aron, Plaidoyer pour l’Europe décadente (Paris, ), –. Lefort, La complication, .

Antitotalitarianism and the Return of ‘the Political’



and reinventing the spirit of the democratic revolution and not by conserving the status quo [l’acquis]’. Lefort’s theoretical departure from Aron thus carried significant political implications. While Aron’s observation concerning the totalitarian potential of popular sovereignty led him to reformulate democracy along liberalconservative lines, Lefort proffered a distinctly libertarian vision, favouring a ‘démocratie sauvage’ over the ‘démocratie domestiquée’ that he probably associated with Aron. Midway through his critique of Marx in the fifth chapter of Un homme en trop, Lefort digresses into a critique of unnamed ‘conservative’ theorists of democracy that can be read as a caricatural rendering of Aron’s overall argument in Democracy and Totalitarianism: The attitude of a certain number of our modern conservatives is remarkable; they say what in Marx’s time they would have been careful not to admit, something that they borrow from Marx himself . . .: yes, bourgeois democracy feeds on inequality, injustice, the domination of a rich minority and power over the mass, but ultimately look at the alternative: workers gagged, placed under house arrest, millions of men in prisons or camps, political judges, no press freedom, an uncontrolled, unchecked power. Let us therefore learn to love our own vices. Thus . . . bourgeois democracy is made the object of a cynical defence which condemns all movements likely to undermine the established order in our societies, whatever sector it might develop in, whether industry, justice or education.

This passage drew the attention of Paul Thibaud in a very favourable review of Un homme en trop published by Esprit in the summer of . What most impressed Thibaud, was that ‘Lefort . . . does not stop, as is often the case, with a critique of Marxism; he outlines . . . a positive theory of democracy capable of taking contemporary political reflection out of its morose defeatism’. In other words, what Lefort showed was that ‘The alternative is not between playing into the hands of totalitarianism . . . and succumbing to cynical conservatism. There is a theory of democracy that can give meaning back to social struggles.’ This review appeared in a special issue on the  

 

Claude Lefort, ‘Avant-Propos’ in L’invention démocratique, –, –. Shortly before making this distinction between ‘wild’ and ‘domesticated’ democracy, Lefort summarises a series of views on totalitarianism against which he defines his own position. Among these he identifies the view that totalitarianism necessitated ‘defending the values of the West, democratic regimes as they are, [and] the established liberties for which they are the rampart’. For both quotes see Lefort, ‘Préface’, –. This appears to be a caricatural rendering of the argument set out two years earlier in Plaidoyer pour l’Europe décadente. Lefort, Un homme en trop, . Paul Thibaud, ‘Une lecture politique du “Goulag”’, Esprit,  (July–August ), –, .

 Raymond Aron and the Liberal Moment in Late 20th-Century theme ‘Return of the political’ that was an important milestone in Esprit’s antitotalitarian reorientation. Another article that appeared in this issue gives further indication of the contemporary significance that would be attributed to Lefort’s concept of the political on the antitotalitarian left. In his piece ‘The political in question’, Olivier Mongin remarked that the work of Lefort and acolytes like Marcel Gauchet and Pierre Rosanvallon had achieved ‘a veritable Copernican revolution in the political field’ by showing that it was no longer necessary ‘to think the political in terms of the State’; indeed, ‘the more the political is reduced excessively to the question of the State apparatus . . . the less political is the analysis’. Authentically political reflection, Mongin suggested, would henceforth dedicate itself to rethinking social hierarchies and the relationship between political and civil society. By interpreting Lefort’s theory of the political in these terms, Mongin and Thibaud identified it with a critique of statist socialism that was especially pertinent given the Parti Socialiste’s commitment to the highly statist Common Programme. When Paul Thibaud took over the directorship of Esprit in December  he published a position piece which aligned the journal with the anti-statist ‘second left’ associated with the Rocardien wing of the French socialist party and the Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT). This was the political milieu in which Lefort’s work would prove most influential during the late s, most notably through the writings of the CFDT’s house intellectual Pierre Rosanvallon. The antistatist ‘second left’ has since come to be seen as the ‘liberal’ wing of the French left, but this is not how its theorists understood themselves at the time. Although both Lefort and Rosanvallon engaged substantially with nineteenth-century French liberal authors in their work, this did not entail any bid to identify themselves with a liberal tradition. And when Paul Thibaud set out Esprit’s new priorities in the light of its antitotalitarian turn, he defined the journal’s position against both ‘totalitarianism and modern liberalism’ and claimed the heritage of May ’ as an inspiration. This    

  

Olivier Mongin, ‘Le politique en question’, Esprit,  (July–August ), –, . For an account of France’s antitotalitarian turn as primarily a response to the signing of the Common Programme see Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left. Paul Thibaud, ‘Aujourd’hui’, Esprit,  (December ), –. Moyn, ‘Anti-totalitarianism and after’, , . Most relevant in this context are Pierre Rosanvallon, L’âge de l’autogestion ou la politique au poste de commande (Paris, ); Pierre Rosanvallon and Patrick Vivaret, Pour une nouvelle culture politique (Paris, ). Chabal, A Divided Republic, –. On this point see Stephen W. Sawyer and Iain Stewart, ‘The search continues’, Politics, Religion & Ideology,  (), –. Thibaud, ‘Aujourd’hui’, .

Contrepoint, Commentaire, and Anti- Liberalism



contrasted with another journal belonging to the antitotalitarian front of the late s, Raymond Aron’s Commentaire, which was proud of its liberal heritage and whose origins lay in the intellectual reaction against May ‘ led by Aron.

Contrepoint, Commentaire, and Anti- Liberalism The events of May–June  brought the political differences between Raymond Aron and Claude Lefort into stark relief: the two men had adopted diametrically opposing positions, with Lefort welcoming the events while Aron recoiled in horror. In recent years an attempt has been made to downplay the extent of Aron’s hostility to May ’ by emphasising the criticisms of Gaullism and the sclerotic tendencies of the French university contained within his commentary; it is also true that Aron was later more willing to acknowledge the legitimacy of some elements of students’ and workers’ critiques of authoritarianism on campus and in the workplace. Yet Aron’s correspondence with Lefort in the aftermath of May ’ indicates that at the time both men considered their positions to be radically incompatible. They were apparently out of contact entirely until eighteen months after the crisis, when Lefort explained that his opposition to Aron’s stance was so profound that any discussion of the issue was pointless. Aron agreed that it was ‘preferable not to discuss the contemporary problems over which we took positions that were as resolute as they were incompatible’, adding that ‘I feel incapable of understanding how a man like you can see in the student revolts either the start of a political revolution or an instrument for the renovation of the University.’ While it is true that Aron softened his stance somewhat in the s, this eventual nuancing of his position was historically inconsequential compared with the influence that his leadership of the anti- intellectual reaction had on the development of a distinctive brand of liberal and antitotalitarian politics during that decade. It was initially through the journal Contrepoint that this new wave of liberal antitotalitarian thought began to emerge. The first journal  

 

Claude Lefort et al., Mai , la brèche: réflexions sur les événements (Paris, ); Raymond Aron, La révolution introuvable: réflexions sur les événements de mai (Paris, ). Audier, La pensée anti-, –; Gwendal Châton, Introduction à Raymond Aron (Paris, ), –, –. The source on which this revisionist view of Aron in relation to  is based is Aron, ‘Liberté, libérale ou libertaire?’ [] in Aron, Études politiques (Paris, ), –. Claude Lefort to Raymond Aron,  November ; Aron to Lefort,  November , Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF(). Gwendal Châton, ‘Taking anti-totalitarianism seriously: the emergence of the Aronian circle in the s’ in Sawyer and Stewart (eds.), In Search of the Liberal Moment, –.

 Raymond Aron and the Liberal Moment in Late 20th-Century explicitly committed to a revival of France’s liberal tradition of political thought, Contrepoint was established in May , but its origins can be traced to the crisis of May–June . On  June that year Aron had used his column in Le Figaro to announce the formation of a ‘Committee for the Defence and Renovation of the French University’. Although this committee proved ephemeral, the group of intellectuals that rallied to Aron’s appeal continued to interact through his weekly seminar at the École pratique des hautes études. It was through the network established here that the group of intellectuals who founded Contrepoint came into contact. Timing the launch to coincide with the second anniversary of May ‘ was a deliberate move, and the journal, which carried a different quotation from Tocqueville on each of its mastheads, regularly published articles devoted to studying aspects of the moral crisis that Aron had diagnosed in The Elusive Revolution. Thus, for instance, the editorial in the first issue of Contrepoint claimed that it was committed to combating ‘the nihilist anarchism of the dominant group of intellectuals’ and the radically egalitarian, anti-authoritarian ideologies espoused by the various leftist groups that had sprung up in the wake of . Its early editions were special issues treating such themes as ‘liberty and authority’, ‘the state of the youth’, ‘the origins of the malaise’, and ‘the situation of the intellectuals’. Contrepoint was particularly critical of those intellectuals – most prominently, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – whose relativist anti-humanism it regarded as the philosophical basis for the nihilistic libertarianism it attributed to the soixantehuitard radicals. 

 

 

‘Contrepoint was really founded in reaction to May ’ – Jean Baechler quoted in Gwendal Châton, ‘La liberté retrouvée. Une histoire du libéralisme politique en France à travers les revues Aroniennes Contrepoint et Commentaire’ (PhD diss., University of Rennes , ), . Raymond Aron, ‘La crise de l’Université: une mise en garde et un appel de Raymond Aron’ in Révolution introuvable, –. Contrepoint has been described by one of its regular contributors as a direct response to Aron’s appeal for a committee in defence of the university in Le Figaro two years earlier. See Gwendal Châton, ‘Désaccord parfait: le Contrepoint libéral dans les configurations intellectuels des années soixante-dix’ in Jean Baudouin et al. (eds.), Les revues et la dynamique des ruptures (Rennes, ), . On the links between Aron’s seminar and Contrepoint see Châton, ‘Désaccord parfait’, – and Rémy Rieffel, La tribu des clercs: les intellectuels sous la Ve République (Paris, ), –. For a more recent account that presents Contrepoint as part of a tradition of liberal antitotalitarian journals initiated by the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s Preuves magazine see Châton, ‘Taking anti-totalitarianism seriously’. Anon, ‘Éditorial’, Contrepoint  (May ), . Châton, ‘Liberté retrouvée’, –, –. This proved to be an influential, if highly problematic, interpretation of May ‘. The most famous later example of this line of analysis is Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry’s controversial La pensée : essai sur l’anti-humanisme contemporaine (Paris, ). The best critique of this argument remains Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The movements of the sixties’

Contrepoint, Commentaire, and Anti- Liberalism



Contrepoint was an antitotalitarian journal, but its antitotalitarianism was expansively defined in response to the post- landscape of left-wing politics in France. A significant feature of this landscape was the crystallisation of radical left-wing forms of anti-communism. Groups such as the Gauche Prolétarienne existed to the left of (and in opposition to) the French Communist Party, often espousing a ‘third worldist’ ideology inspired by the examples of communist China, Vietnam, or Cuba rather than the Soviet Union. Contrepoint’s antitotalitarianism therefore extended beyond the PCF and USSR to embrace communist regimes in the developing world and revolutionary leftism in France which, notwithstanding its own opposition to the PCF, was accused of opening the door to communist subversion by destabilising the liberal order. These concerns intensified from  with the signing of the Common Programme between the PCF and Mitterrand’s Parti Socialiste, which established the prospect of communists entering government in France for the first time since the start of the Cold War. As Michael Scott Christofferson has demonstrated, the wider antitotalitarian turn in France developed following the scandal surrounding Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and media coverage of atrocities and humanitarian crises in Cambodia and Vietnam, but was itself in large part a response to the reemergence of the PCF as a potential party of government. Contrepoint, however, was unable fully to take advantage of the more propitious intellectual environment that began to develop in  because personal differences between the journal’s directors, Georges Liébert and Patrick Devedjian, led to the former’s resignation, the withdrawal of Raymond Aron’s support for the project and shortly thereafter the journal’s termination at the end of . While Contrepoint never achieved a circulation that would enable it to compete with more established publications like Esprit, it nevertheless carried a degree of influence in the entourage of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who admired the journal and wanted it to operate as a kind of think tank

  

[] in Castoriadis, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis and the Imagination (Stanford, ), –. Châton, ‘Liberté retrouvée’, . Here again Contrepoint’s analysis continues in the direction set out by Aron in his Révolution introuvable, –. This is a main argument of Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left. See also Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (London, ), –. In , Liébert went on to develop the collection ‘Pluriel’ at the French publishing house Hachette, producing new paperback editions of classic texts from the liberal tradition as well as numerous works by contemporary liberals that had been affiliated with Contrepoint. He also maintained a place on the editorial board of Commentaire. See Rieffel, La tribu, .

 Raymond Aron and the Liberal Moment in Late 20th-Century for the development of his brand of ‘advanced liberalism’. Although this invitation was declined, both Contrepoint and its successor Commentaire retained close links to Giscard d’Estaing and the governments that served under his presidency between  and . Jean-Claude Casanova, a key figure in the running of both journals, served as an advisor to Raymond Barre during the latter’s time in office as prime minister between  and . Raymond Aron served as an informal advisor during the election campaigns of  and  and had previously taught Giscard d’Estaing, Raymond Barre, and Alain Peyrefitte, Minister of Justice between  and , at the École nationale d’administration and Sciences Po. The close ties that existed between Contrepoint, Commentaire, and Sciences Po were significant from an ideological as well as a sociological point of view. The latter institution originated from the École libre des sciences politiques founded in  to train France’s new political and administrative elite following the Franco-Prussian War. Its name had changed following its part nationalisation after the Second World War, when Raymond Aron joined its teaching staff, but across its different incarnations Sciences Po was closely associated with the preservation of France’s liberal tradition of political thought. The variety of liberalism with which this institution tended to be associated was one that was more or less elitist and for which the value of democracy was secondary to that of liberty. The journal Commentaire was founded in March  and its editorial team was largely composed from the group that had coalesced under Aron’s tutelage ten years earlier. Liébert and Devedjian, the younger alumni of Sciences Po that had driven the establishment of Contrepoint, were replaced by the more experienced and well-connected Jean-Claude   

 

See Châton, ‘Désaccord parfait’, –. Rémy Rieffel implies that Commentaire was ‘un club barriste’. See his La tribu, –. Aron, Mémoires (Paris, ), –; Nicolas Baverez, Raymond Aron: un moraliste au temps des idéologies (Paris, ), –, . Aron’s support for Giscard d’Estaing offers another point of contrast with Claude Lefort, who was highly critical of Giscard’s administration. See Lefort, L’invention démocratique, –, , . H.S. Jones, ‘French liberalism and the legacy of the Revolution’ in Tim Blanning et al. (eds.), Historicising the French Revolution (Newcastle, ), . In both of its incarnations this institution was founded amidst the theorisation by some of its most respected teaching staff of elite renewal in response to national humiliation. See in the first instance Ernest Renan, La réforme intellectuelle et morale (Paris, ) and in the second the trilogy of works by Raymond Aron: L’homme contre les tyrans (New York, ), De l’armistice à l’insurrection nationale (Paris, ) and L’âge des empires et l’avenir de la France (Paris, ). All three of these books were reissued in a single volume as Aron, Chroniques de guerre: ‘La France Libre’, - (Paris, ). On criticism of Sciences Po as elitist and undemocratic see Philip Nord, France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton, ), –, –, –.

Contrepoint, Commentaire, and Anti- Liberalism



Casanova, alongside the young political philosopher Pierre Manent and the historian Marc Fumaroli. Unlike at Contrepoint, where he played a fairly inconspicuous role, Raymond Aron was presented as the public face of Commentaire. The journal was advertised to prospective subscribers as an initiative taken by Aron with the aim of contributing to the intellectual and political reform of France. The means by which this reform would be pursued were the promotion of liberal pluralism and the rejection of dogmatic intellectual conformism. The latter had been a prominent and recurrent theme in Contrepoint, which was more overtly combative than its successor and placed less of an emphasis on its intellectual pluralism. This tonal shift was a reflection of the newly emerging intellectual landscape in France at the time. Still, there were limits to Commentaire’s embrace of alternative ideological outlooks. Although it positioned itself as an antitotalitarian journal, its inaugural editorial was scornful of the ‘telegenic’ and ‘lightweight’ New Philosophers, former leftists such as Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann who had become famous following their antitotalitarian conversions. It is significant in this regard that Commentaire did not position itself merely as an antitotalitarian journal; it was opposed to what it identified as the two major threats to liberal democracy: ‘the inarticulate cry of pure revolt on one side; the absolute knowledge of total ideology on the other’. In railing against the first of these enemies of liberty, it picked up from where Contrepoint’s condemnation of nihilistic libertarianism had left off in . Thus while its opposition to ‘total ideology’ situated Commentaire within a wider field of intellectual antitotalitarianism, its conservative anti-libertarianism distinguished it from other antitotalitarian journals like Esprit. The most significant direction in which Commentaire explicitly opened itself to outside collaboration was the anti-communist, autogestionnaire current within the Parti Socialiste and the CFDT. This section of the French left was praised in its inaugural editorial for having ‘rediscovered civil society’ and being ready to ‘break the fatal equation of socialism and state control’. This olive branch proffered to a section of the left was, however, conditional upon it ‘demonstrat[ing] that it can be    

Advance promotional flyer for Commentaire () Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, NAF(). Anon, ‘Éditorial’, Contrepoint,  (May ), –. On the theme of intellectual nonconformism see Châton, ‘Liberté retrouvée’, –. Anon, ‘Commentaire’, Commentaire,  (Spring ), . See also Raymond Aron, ‘Pour le progrès: après la chute des idoles’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –. Anon, ‘Commentaire’, .

 Raymond Aron and the Liberal Moment in Late 20th-Century something other than the impotent libertarian counterpoint to the statist left’.

Anti- Liberal Revivalism in Comparative Perspective As we have seen, the liberal revivalism of the intellectuals at Contrepoint and Commentaire originated primarily in their hostility to the events and legacy of May  rather than in the critique of totalitarianism. However, this did not prevent them from applying the vocabulary of antitotalitarianism to their readings of the French liberal tradition. Articles in Commentaire’s ‘Classics of Liberty’ section, which was devoted to the rediscovery of predominantly French liberal authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are littered with references to ‘Jacobin totalitarianism’, the ‘pre-totalitarian experience’ of the First Empire, or the sensitivity to the totalitarian menace of authors such as Hippolyte Taine or Benjamin Constant (who ‘somehow foresaw Hitler through Napoleon’). This anachronistic tendency was a feature of the wider expansion of interest in French liberalism that accompanied the antitotalitarian turn; it was not specific to authors associated with Commentaire. An explicitly antitotalitarian interpretation of Constant by the philosopher Marcel Gauchet was praised in the pages of ‘Classics of Liberty’ by Pierre Manent in , for instance. Gauchet’s mentor, Claude Lefort, was another philosopher of the antitotalitarian left whose work was praised by Manent in Commentaire. Yet closer comparison of Manent and Lefort indicates that, despite converging upon the language of antitotalitarianism, they otherwise offered quite different interpretations of the French liberal tradition’s contemporary significance.

 

 



Ibid., . Jean-Thomas Nordmann, ‘Taine libéral’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), ; Alfred Fabre-Luce, ‘Benjamin Constant et ses partenaires’, Commentaire,  (Summer ), . See also Patrice Rolland, ‘Équivoques du libéralisme: à propos de Benjamin Constant’, Commentaire,  (Winter ), ; René Pomeau, ‘Montesquieu: le vécu d’une politique’, Commentaire,  (Spring ), –; Pierre Rétat, ‘La notion du principe chez Montesquieu’, Commentaire,  (Spring , ; Jean-François Revel, ‘Pour lire Jouffroy’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –; etc. On this wider tendency see Helena Rosenblatt, ‘Why Constant? A critical overview of the Constant revival’, Modern Intellectual History,  (November ), –. Pierre Manent, ‘Aux origines du libéralisme: Benjamin Constant’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –. Manent was commenting here on Marchel Gauchet’s, introductory essay in Benjamin Constant, De la liberté chez les modernes (Paris, ), –. Pierre Manent, ‘Démocratie et totalitarisme: à propos de Claude Lefort’, Commentaire  (Winter ), –.

Anti- Liberal Revivalism in Comparative Perspective



Pierre Manent was working as Raymond Aron’s assistant at the Collège de France when he helped to establish Commentaire in . He had first met Aron ten years earlier, when he was a philosophy student at the École normale supérieure. Unimpressed by the leftist radicalism of his peers, many of whom participated enthusiastically in the événements, he would later describe Aron’s seminar as a ‘refuge from the Ship of Fools’ at the rue d’Ulm. This was an allusion to Michel Foucault, whose work Manent critiqued polemically in the pages of Commentaire in . Reflecting back on the events of May–June  in , Manent attributed them partly to a crisis in the teaching of political philosophy in France at the time. At the same time, he retrospectively defined his own intellectual project as an attempt at rehabilitating an ‘authentic political science’, reconnected to its classical philosophical roots and liberated from postmodernist relativism. The first major source of inspiration in this enterprise was the work of Raymond Aron, and it was Aron who introduced Manent to his second main intellectual influence, Leo Strauss. Strauss and Aron were also influential on the development of Claude Lefort’s political philosophy in these years, and, like Manent, Lefort shared Aron’s view that totalitarianism existed as a permanent possibility within democracy itself rather than something opposite and external to democracy. What is more, both Lefort and Manent viewed France’s liberal tradition, in particular the work of Tocqueville, with the primacy that it afforded to the political domain, as a rich source of inspiration from which to approach this issue. Yet they each drew quite different conclusions from their work on this theme. Continuing the line of interpretation increasingly prioritised by Raymond Aron since , Manent emphasised Tocqueville’s status as a critic of radical egalitarianism; on this reading, the lesson to be taken from Tocqueville was that ‘To love democracy well, one must love it moderately’. Lefort too was sensitive to the selfdestructive potential of modern democracy, but his reading of Tocqueville  

 

 

Pierre Manent, Le regard politique: entretiens avec Bénédicte Delorme-Montini (Paris, ), . For Foucault’s famous discussion of the ‘Ship of Fools’ see Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris, ), –. For Manent’s critique see Pierre Manent, ‘Lire Michel Foucault’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –.   Manent, Le regard politique, . Ibid., –. Ibid., –. On Lefort and Strauss see Claudia Hilb, ‘Claude Lefort as reader of Leo Strauss’ in Martin Plot (ed.), Claude Lefort: Thinker of the Political (Basingstoke, ), –. For Lefort on his relationship with Aron see Claude Lefort, ‘Raymond Aron et le phénomène totalitaire’ in Christian Bachelier et al. (eds.), Raymond Aron et la liberté politique (Paris, ), –, . See Manent, ‘Démocratie et Totalitarisme’, . This is the closing sentence of Pierre Manent, Tocqueville et la nature de la démocratie (Paris, ), .

 Raymond Aron and the Liberal Moment in Late 20th-Century was much less concerned with the issue of radical egalitarianism. Indeed, by endorsing the claims, increasingly formulated in the language of human rights, of the growing variety of radical civil society associations that emerged during the s, Lefort leant his support to a phenomenon that, on Manent’s view, undermined rather than reinforced French democracy. This difference between Lefort and Manent became apparent in an article by Manent dedicated to Lefort’s writing on democracy and totalitarianism, published in the winter of . In this otherwise positive assessment of Lefort’s work, Manent took exception to his sympathetic evaluation of the contribution made by new social movements committed to women’s and gay liberation, ecology, and the causes of the Lip factory workers and the farmers of the Larzac. Whereas Lefort saw such movements in a positive light as having helped to reinforce the rights of individuals in the face of the state, Manent regarded them as ultimately reinforcing the power of the state, as the final guarantor of these rights, and eroding those traditional relations of authority – ‘employer over employee, man over woman and children’ – belonging to civil society. A year earlier, Manent had expressed his views on this issue in more polemical terms: All that is needed to make the water diviners of the rue du Mail feel civil society bubbling up beneath their feet is for three ecologists, two feminists,  



Lefort’s reading of Tocqueville is discussed at length in Serge Audier, Tocqueville retrouvé: genèse et enjeux du renouveau tocquevillien français (Paris, ), –. Lefort distanced his support for the cause of human rights from that of the nouveaux philosophes, but in doing so adopted a position very different to that of Manent: ‘Those who call on us to mobilise behind the cause of human rights [les droits de l’homme] are right. But they should remember that these rights were won in struggles that had a social and political meaning, that the workers’ movement contributed in a decisive way to giving them the form that we presently know. It would be good to hear them say that the rights proclaimed will only take root [s’inscrire] in the life of a society on the condition that they cross class frontiers, that they degrade as soon as inequality blocks them [leur faire écran], in the school, in the workplace, in the domain of justice . . . We would like it, moreover, if human rights were not reduced to rights already acquired, if it were recognised that their defence is indissociable from the demand for new rights that would protect minorities from arbitrary power and that would guarantee in each sector the involvement of all interested parties in the affairs which concern them’. Lefort, ‘Préface’, . Lefort’s most substantial discussion of human rights can be found in Claude Lefort, ‘Droits de l’homme et politique’, Libre,  (), – and may be compared with that of Marcel Gauchet in ‘Les droits de l’homme ne sont pas une politique’, Le Débat  (July–August ), –. On Lefort and Gauchet’s different approaches to this issue see Samuel Moyn, ‘The politics of individual rights: Marcel Gauchet and Claude Lefort’ in Raf Geenens and Rosenblatt, French Liberalism, –. On the history of human rights with reference to the wider ideological reorientation of the s see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, ). Manent, ‘Démocratie et totalitarisme’, .

Anti- Liberal Revivalism in Comparative Perspective



a community organiser and a pirate radio presenter to meet up somewhere. There is something more urgent than liberating civil society from the grip of the State: liberating minds from the sterilising grip of the conceptual comfort blanket of civil society.

The concept of civil society makes for a useful point of comparison from which to develop a more specific sense of the ways in which Contrepoint and Commentaire instrumentalised antitotalitarianism and the French liberal tradition to intervene in contemporary social and political debate. That antitotalitarianism was necessarily a pro-civil society position was made obvious by the foundation in  of the independent Solidarity trade union in Poland. Yet while this development received significant positive coverage in Commentaire, the journal’s regular contributors were at best ambivalent towards recent developments in French civil society. Whether such developments were regarded with friendly scepticism or open hostility depended on an implicit distinction at work in ‘Aronian’ liberal commentary between ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ ideal types of French civil society movements. The landslide Gaullist victory in the elections of June  marked the immediate political failure of  radicalism. In the wake of this failure, however, the generalised libertarian contestation of  was channelled into a wide variety of different single-issue protest organisations, which for the purposes of the following analysis can be collectively defined as the emergence of a new radical civil society in France. Two movements emblematic of this radical civil society were anti-psychiatry and the campaign for greater transparency in the running of France’s prison system. Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze were among the most prominent intellectuals to become involved in these movements, theorising a new   



Manent, ‘Aux origines du libéralisme’, . Rue du Mail was home to the offices of the left-wing weekly news magazine Le Nouvel observateur. See, e.g., Marcin Krol, ‘Pologne: une révolution différente’, Commentaire,  (Winter ), –. A binary distinction between radical and moderate forms of civil society movements simplifies a more complex reality; it is used here simply as a means of clarifying the anti- liberals’ different responses to various kinds of civil society movement, and corresponds with a similar distinction made by authors contributing to Contrepoint and Commentaire. For an example of this distinction see Jean Baechler, ‘Libéralisme et autogestion’, Commentaire  (Spring ), –. It should be noted, however, that this was not a term that ‘radical civil society’ activists and intellectuals generally used, although, as Michael Behrent has shown, Michel Foucault, one of the main intellectual driving forces of radical civil society in the s, was sympathetic to Pierre Rosanvallon’s work on this theme. See Michael Behrent, ‘Foucault and France’s liberal moment’ in Sawyer and Stewart (eds.), In Search of the Liberal Moment, –. On these movements see Bourg, Revolution to Ethics, –.

 Raymond Aron and the Liberal Moment in Late 20th-Century form of ‘specific’ intellectual engagement in the process. By enabling marginalised groups to speak for themselves, the engagement of intellectuals like Foucault and Deleuze in these movements was intended to be highly practical, but at the same time the anti-psychiatry and prisons movements were informed by Foucault and Deleuze’s complex poststructuralist theories of power and desire. The anti- liberal critique of radical civil society often collapsed the critique of new social movements into an attack on structuralist and poststructuralist anti-humanism and its alleged propensity for irresponsible, libertarian nihilism. Tocqueville was again an important point of reference here, as he had been in  and before, with Raymond Aron revisiting the nineteenth century liberal to critique the anti-psychiatry and prisons movements along with the theories of their intellectual advocates. ‘By what aberration or ignorance of history’, Aron asked ‘do so many intellectuals denounce as ‘repressive’ the societies that legalise abortion, that tolerate homosexual relationships, that give consideration to unions in the armed forces?’ From the perspective of Deleuze’s definition of men as ‘desiring machines’, he argued, all known forms of society must appear oppressive, but for Aron ‘what threatens liberal Europe is not excessive repression, but license’. In order to explain what he described as ‘[t]he conjunction of paraded license . . . and denounced repression’ he drew upon Tocqueville’s account of the origins of the French Revolution. In The Old Regime and the French Revolution Tocqueville had underlined the paradoxical nature of the Revolution given the extent of the social liberalisation that had occurred under the absolute monarchy compared to in France’s continental European neighbours. His counterintuitive explanation for this was that ‘the very destruction of some of the institutions of the Middle Ages made those





  

See here ‘Intellectuals and power: a conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’ [], libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gillesdeleuze [last accessed  July ]. See Michel Crozier, ‘Les angoisses existentielles des intellectuels français’, Commentaire,  (Summer ), –; François Bourricaud, ‘La crise de l’autorité professionnelle: avocats, magistrats, médecins et professeurs’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –; François Bourricaud, ‘De la psychanalyse à la révolution’, Commentaire,  (Winter ), –. See also the positive reception afforded to Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry’s controversial La pensée  in Raymond Boudon, ‘Éloge du conformisme intellectuel’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –; Marc Beigbeder, ‘La bouteille à la mer: l’heure des comptes?’, Commentaire,  (Spring ), –. Plaidoyer pour l’Europe décadente, . Ibid., –. On ‘desiring machines’ see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London, ). Plaidoyer pour l’Europe décadente, .

Anti- Liberal Revivalism in Comparative Perspective



which survived seem all the more detestable’. Aron turned this specific argument into a general principle, explaining the anti-psychiatry and prisons movements as illustrative of what he called ‘Tocqueville’s Law’. Writing the year before legislative elections, which the united Socialist and Communist parties were widely expected to win, the application of ‘Tocqueville’s Law’ to France’s radical civil society reprised Aron’s previous theoretical critiques of insatiable egalitarianism while linking it to the practical possibility of a partially communist government in France. Aron was not the only liberal revivalist associated with Commentaire to draw upon the French liberal tradition to critique egalitarian ideology, its intellectual defenders and its influence on radical civil society. In his bestselling book Le Mal français (roughly, The French Disease), published in , the Gaullist politician Alain Peyrefitte proposed an ‘intellectual and moral reform’ inspired by Ernest Renan, stressing the importance of intellectual and political ‘responsibility’ while lamenting French intellectuals’ tendencies towards its opposite. Peyrefitte, like Aron who had advised him during the preparation of the book, called upon Tocqueville to explain and critique the intensification of radical egalitarianism in the s. Rather than celebrate the growth of associational life in this decade, Peyrefitte bemoaned its negativity and the preponderance of ‘anti-associations’. In other texts published in Commentaire Peyrefitte also used Tocqueville’s writings on the penal systems in France and the United States to argue against the ‘philanthropic illusions’ of both moderate and radical promoters of prison reform. François Bourricaud, who had been Peyrefitte’s advisor during the latter’s ill-fated tenure as Minister of Education in , was another prominent liberal revivalist at Commentaire. A sociologist claiming the lineage set out by Aron in Main Currents in Sociological Thought, Bourricaud was a defender of meritocratic elitism. He was worried by a ‘crisis of professional authority’ whose origins he traced to May ‘ and the influence of thinkers like Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, ‘sophists’ who paled in comparison with the great Tocqueville.       

Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (New York, ), –. Plaidoyer pour l’Europe décadente, –.  Alain Peyrefitte, Le Mal français (Paris, ), , –. Ibid., iv. Ibid., , . Alain Peyrefitte, ‘Les paradoxes de Tocqueville’, Commentaire,  (Summer ), –; Alain Peyrefitte, ‘Tocqueville et les illusions pénitentiaires’, Commentaire,  (Summer ), –. Alain Peyrefitte, ‘Un intellectuel responsable’, Commentaire,  (Summer ), –. Bourricaud, ‘La crise’; Bourricaud, ‘De la psychanalyse à la révolution’; Raymond Bourricaud, ‘L’avenir de l’institution universitaire en France’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –;

 Raymond Aron and the Liberal Moment in Late 20th-Century If the anti- liberal revivalists who wrote in the pages of Commentaire were hostile towards the sort of radical civil society represented by the antipsychiatry and prisons movements, they were somewhat more open towards the ‘moderate’ developments occurring within the noncommunist trade union the CFDT and the autogestionnaire tendency led by Michel Rocard within the Parti Socialiste. As we have seen, this ‘second left’ differentiated itself from the socialist mainstream by its decentralising, anti-statist leanings and critique of the radical nationalising agenda set out in the Common Programme. Its chief theorist was Pierre Rosanvallon. Although Rosanvallon would go on to play an important part in the rediscovery of nineteenth-century French liberalism, most notably in his pioneering study Le moment Guizot (), he never self-identified with this liberal tradition in the same way that the intellectuals belonging to the Commentaire circle did. Insofar as he was prepared to advocate political liberalism in the s, Rosanvallon was careful to present this as being entirely congruent with his own activist background. As he put it in , ‘The original liberal project was to develop an authentic civil society against the project of a totalitarian State . . . Liberalism is thus above all a theory of the separation of powers and of the limitation of the power of the State, but in the framework of an egalitarian society.’ The reference to totalitarianism in this passage from Rosanvallon’s book L’âge de l’autogestion () situates it in within the general context of France’s antitotalitarian turn, but its egalitarian emphasis sets it apart from the anti- liberal revivalists of Commentaire and aligns Rosanvallon with the radical democratic critique of Claude Lefort. After meeting Lefort and studying his work in the early s, Rosanvallon was persuaded that the best way to theorise autogestion would be to do so in the light of reflection on the nature of totalitarianism and the latter’s democratic origins. Whereas anti- liberal revivalists like Aron and Manent were preoccupied with tempering an insatiable egalitarian impulse inherent to modern democratic societies, Rosanvallon’s theory of autogestion represented an attempt to harness this impulse in the service of a new, radical democratic politics.

Raymond Boudon and François Bourricaud, ‘La sociologie aujourd’hui’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –, .  The following discussion of Rosanvallon draws on Jainchill and Moyn, ‘French Democracy’.  Pierre Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot (Paris, ). For a summary of Rosanvallon’s career that emphasises his anti-liberalism, see Moyn, ‘Anti-totalitarianism and after’, –.  Pierre Rosanvallon, L’âge de l’autogestion (Paris, ), –.

Conclusion



As we have seen, Commentaire’s attitude towards the second left was ambivalent: insofar as it was anti-communist and sceptical of the statist socialism of the Common Programme, this was a section of the left to be welcomed into the journal’s pluralist embrace. But its egalitarian and direct democratic leanings also made it an object of suspicion; hence the suggestion in the journal’s inaugural editorial that the second left must abandon irresponsible libertarianism and stop ‘hoping eternally for vague things’. The latter point was a reference to the theory of autogestion, which was subjected to a detailed philosophical critique by Jean Baechler in the same issue. Although respectful of Rosanvallon, whom he identified as one of the few ‘serious’ theorists of autogestion, Baechler ultimately concluded that his attempt to define autogestion as a new form of radical political liberalism failed. Whereas the absolute evil for liberals was tyranny, for the theorist of autogestion, Baechler claimed, this was capitalism. The source of this difference originated not in their respective political or economic theories, but in their attitudes to modernity, which the authentic liberal stoically accepted with all its opportunities and constraints, while autogestionnaire socialism rationalised its ultimate rejection of modernity in the name of anti-capitalism.

Conclusion As Baechler and Manent’s critiques of Rosanvallon and Lefort show, there was significant disagreement between those intellectuals who participated in the ‘French liberal revival’ of the late s. Yet there was convergence on some key issues. A mutual preoccupation with the critique of totalitarianism conceived as the product of a failing democratic political culture was one such point of convergence; a shared sense that France’s liberal tradition of political thought offered a superior means of engaging with this issue was another. Common to the authors discussed in this chapter was a sense that an important advantage of this liberal tradition was its 

 



See for instance Pierre Rosanvallon, ‘Marx et la société civile’, Commentaire,  (Winter ), –; Michel Rocard, ‘La social-démocratie et la liberté’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –. Anon, ‘Commentaire’, . Jean Baechler, ‘Libéralisme et autogestion’, Commentaire,  (Spring ), –. For a more sympathetic analysis of this subject see Guillaume Guindey, ‘L’autogestion de l’économie’, Commentaire,  (Winter ), –. Baechler was one of Raymond Aron’s earliest acolytes. See Châton, ‘Liberté retrouvée’, –; Jean Baechler, ‘Maître et disciple’, Commentaire,  (Winter ), –. Baechler, ‘Libéralisme et autogestion’, .

 Raymond Aron and the Liberal Moment in Late 20th-Century recognition of the primacy of the political; studying its authors therefore offered a means of exploring the phenomena of democracy and totalitarianism without reducing them to products of structural economic forces. This rejection of economic reductionism not only distanced these intellectuals from positivistic forms of Marxism, it also informed their common, if uneven, scepticism towards more doctrinaire forms of economic liberalism. Between the authors covered in this chapter there existed sufficient common ground on which to develop institutional forms of collaboration that would have a lasting impact on the French intellectual landscape. In  the historian François Furet established a seminar at the École pratiques des hautes études en sciences sociales dedicated to political philosophy, largely as incarnated in the French liberal tradition. This seminar was a forerunner of the Institut Raymond Aron, founded in November , which played an important role in consolidating France’s liberal revival and the related reinterpretation of the French Revolution promoted by Furet and his colleagues; more broadly, it also helped briefly to revive the previously moribund discipline of the history of political ideas in France. Through this institute the name of Raymond Aron has come to be associated with an expansive, pluralist French liberal revival encompassing the work, not only of his close collaborators at Commentaire, but also of individuals whose intellectual trajectories included taking positions on the events of  that were opposed, sometimes radically so, to his own. As we have seen, Claude Lefort acknowledged Aron as an important influence on his intellectual development despite their differences over 





For a positive French perspective on economic liberalism see Alain Madelin, Aux sources du modèle libéral français (Paris, ). For a critical perpective that mistakenly conflates French and AngloAmerican neo-liberalism see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Neither an accident nor a mistake’, Critical Enquiry,  (Winter ), –. In October , Gilles Anquetil, writing in the left-wing weekly Le Nouvel observateur, referred disparagingly to an ‘arono-hayekian consensus’ in French economics. See Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, ‘Droits-libertés et droits-créances: Raymond Aron critique de Friedrich von Hayek’, Droits,  (January ), –. On French neo-liberalism more broadly see François Denord, Néo-libéralisme version française: histoire d’une idéologie politique (Paris, ). Pierre Manent remembers this seminar as having been dedicated to the recovery of France’s liberal tradition, whereas Rosanvallon has described it as a seminar in political philosophy. This confusion is significant in itself in indicating the politically oriented approach to the liberal tradition prevalent at the time. Among the regular attenders of this seminar were Pierre Rosanvallon, Pierre Manent, Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet, Cornelius Castoriadis, Bernard Manin, Philippe Raynaud, and Krzysztof Pomian. See Manent, Regard politique, –; Jainchill and Moyn, ‘French Democracy’, . Jeremy Jennings, ‘Le retour des émigrés? The study of the history of political ideas in contemporary France’ in Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk (eds.), The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge, ), –.

Conclusion



May ; similarly, François Furet cited Aron as an influence but did not share his views on the événements. Does it, then, make sense to speak of a specific anti- form of liberal revivalism inspired by Aron’s example? The example of Furet complicates this narrative and suggests that the notion of two distinct strands of engagement with French liberal tradition, independently modelled on the works of Aron and Lefort, should not be pushed too far. As Samuel Moyn has shown, Furet’s epochal historiographical intervention Interpreting the French Revolution drew extensively on Lefort, but this does not foreclose the presence of a parallel Aronian influence, hinted at, perhaps, in the fact that one of that book’s most important chapters originally appeared in a Festschrift for the author of Opium of the Intellectuals, a text that had an important influence on Furet’s post-communist politics. While Furet did not share Aron’s horror at the events of May–June , in the s and s this did not prevent him from eventually advancing a reading of Tocqueville that was virtually indistinguishable from Aron’s. Claude Lefort never had much sympathy for this sort of conservative, neo-Tocquevillian politics, but it is far from clear that his understanding of ‘the political’ necessarily precluded it. As we have seen, Lefort’s symbolic theory of the political was received as validating a new kind of radical democratic politics; however, it is debatable that there was any necessary connection between his abstract reflection on the

  



François Furet, ‘La rencontre’. For a recent biography see Christophe Prochasson, François Furet: Les chemins de la mélancolie (Paris, ). Samuel Moyn, ‘On the intellectual origins of François Furet’s masterpiece’, The Tocqueville Review  (), –. François Furet, ‘La rencontre d’une idée et d’une vie’, Commentaire, – (), –; François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris, ), –; François Furet, ‘Tocqueville et le problème de la Révolution française’ in Jean-Claude Casanova (ed.), Science et conscience de la société: mélanges en l’honneur de Raymond Aron, volume I (Paris, ), –. Françoise Mélonio writes that ‘By abandonning communism and renouncing the Jacobin heritage, Furet ended up doubting that the Revolution was the foundation of a universal history. And this breaking of the link between the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution allowed for comparison with other revolutions, the English and then the American ones, which in contrast highlighted the singularity of the French tradition’s obsession with the general will. Reflection on totalitarianism, beginning with Aron, thus extended into historical reflection on the French exception’. See Mélonio, Tocqueville et les français, . On this theme see too Audier, Tocqueville retrouvé, –. Furet, ‘La rencontre’. On Furet’s reading of Tocqueville see Michael Scott Christofferson, ‘“The best help I could find to understand our present”: François Furet’s anti-revolutionary reading of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America’ in Sawyer and Stewart (eds.), In Search of the Liberal Moment, –.

 Raymond Aron and the Liberal Moment in Late 20th-Century political and the practical implications for contemporary politics that were drawn from it by Esprit or, indeed, by Lefort himself. Taking these points of qualification into account, the notion of a specific, anti- strand of French liberal revivalism remains persuasive. The most obvious thing to acknowledge here is the origin of the two journals, Contrepoint and Commentaire in the milieu that developed around Aron following his appeal for the formation of a Committee for the Defence and Renovation of the French University in the summer of . Within the pages of these journals in the s and s a specific reading of France’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal authors predominated. This interpretation of France’s liberal heritage was linked to a project aimed at reforming the political and intellectual culture of late-twentieth century France through the interrelated critiques of radical egalitarianism, relativist ‘anti-humanism’, and intellectual ‘irresponsibility’. These critiques were substantially inspired by Raymond Aron’s Tocquevillian analyses of the ‘dialectic of equality’ and May ‘. The antitotalitarianism of these journals shared common characteristics with the wider antitotalitarian turn that developed in France from the mid-s, including an anachronistic tendency to apply the language of totalitarianism to the analysis of authors writing in the nineteenth century and earlier. They also tended to regard totalitarianism as the product of a malfunctioning democratic political culture. But, while other liberal revivalists promoted the benefits of an effervescent associational life to counteract this, the regular contributors to Commentaire and Contrepoint emphasised 



For James D. Ingram Lefort is thus ‘an ambiguous figure’. He writes that ‘On the one hand, Lefort’s work has been highly fruitful for radical-democratic, post-Marxist, and deconstructive political theory . . . On the other hand, his work can be read as participating in the attack on radical politics that led the French intellectual left on its deflationary course from May ’ to a depoliticised ‘republic of the centre’. . . . Lefort’s ideas . . . can be associated with radicalisation or restoration, the deepening or limiting of democracy, awakening from an old ideological slumber or falling into a new one’. See James D. Ingram, ‘The politics of Claude Lefort’s political: between liberalism and radical democracy’, Thesis Eleven,  (November ), –, –. In his commentary on one of Lefort’s comparatively rare discussions of democracy at the institutional level, Greg Conti goes so far as to remark that the tradition of thought to which Lefort is closest is ‘a certain nineteenth-century British (especially Victorian) liberalism’. Greg Conti, ‘Representative institutions and the question of Lefortian democracy’, unpublished paper originally given at the American Political Science Association conference in Philadelphia, September . Warren Breckman, who is critical of Ingram’s portrayal of Lefort as politically ambiguous, situates him within the history of the radical democratic left. See Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, –. This is not to suggest that alternative readings did not find their way into Commentaire in particular. See here Jean-Pierre Cot, ‘Actualité et ambiguïtés du libéralisme’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –. That Commentaire did have a specific vision of the French liberal tradition is confirmed by the fact that this piece was preceded by an editorial note highlighting that Cot’s vision of French liberalism differed from that of the journal in which it was published.

Conclusion



the need to inculcate the right kinds of social and political mœurs, which typically entailed shunning radical egalitarianism as socially and politically pernicious. The positive side of this equation was the need for intellectuals to embrace an attitude of ‘responsibility’. For anti- liberals this meant rejecting not only Marxism but also the radical relativism of ‘French theory’ in favour of a form of centrist ‘realism’ aimed at France’s cultured political and administrative elite. The French anti- liberal revival has had specific intellectual and political legacies in France and through its reception in the United States. Thanks in large part to Pierre Manent, Commentaire became an important transmission belt for the introduction of American neoconservative thought into France during the s, particularly that of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom. The anti-egalitarian, anti-postmodernist leanings of the anti- liberal revival chimed with Straussians and other antipostmodernist intellectuals in the United States, who tried, with limited success, to import it in the s. In the autumn of  the publication in Commentaire of the first French translation of Francis Fukuyama’s famous article ‘The End of History?’ signalled a post-Cold War revival of a more conservative, pro-market variant of end of ideology theory. Debating an apparently post-ideological age actually predated the end of the Cold War in French domestic politics, and was linked to the electoral decline of the PCF, the influence of Furetian revisionism in French revolutionary historiography, and the experience of political ‘cohabitation’ between  and . Following the collapse of communism abroad and the revival of mass social protest at home, however, France’s heterogeneous liberal intellectual alliance became increasingly fragmented during the s. This process reached a low point in  when a scandal broke out over the publication in a series edited by Pierre Rosanvallon of a book

 

 

 Note here the title of Judt, Burden of Responsibility. Audier, La pensée anti-, –. François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (Minneapolis, ), ; Martin Jay, ‘Lafayette’s children: the American reception of French liberalism’, SubStance,  (), –. Raymond Aron has been promoted sympathetically in the United States as the originator of neoconservatism. See Anderson, ‘The Aronian renewal’. Authors from the wider liberal moment were also included in the ‘New French Thought’ series, edited by Mark Lilla, through which late twentieth-century French liberal thought was imported into the United States. Francis Fukuyama, ‘La fin de l’histoire?’, Commentaire  (Autumn), –. See here François Furet, Jacques Julliard and Pierre Rosanvallon, La République du centre: la fin de l’exception française (Paris, ).

 Raymond Aron and the Liberal Moment in Late 20th-Century by Daniel Lindenberg attacking Pierre Manent as an intellectual reactionary. The involvement of Nicolas Baverez, Raymond Aron’s biographer and a regular contributor to Commentaire, in Nicolas Sarkozy’s infamous campaign speech on the need to ‘liquidate the legacy of ’ again highlighted the specificity of the journal’s liberal vision.  

Lindenberg, Rappel à l’ordre. On this scandal see Jeremy Jennings, Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France since the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, ), –. Audier, Pensée Anti-, –.

Conclusion

Raymond Aron’s significance in the history of liberal thought appears differently depending on the angle from which it is observed. Viewed in relation to the Dreyfusard, republican liberalism of his earliest political and philosophical mentors, Aron appears primarily as a critic. But this point should not be exaggerated. Although he belonged to a generation of French intellectuals that defined itself to a large extent in opposition to its teachers, it would be a mistake to take such claims entirely at face value. The influence of Célestin Bouglé on Aron’s intellectual development has arguably been underappreciated, for instance, and while it is true that Aron arrived at what he considered to be his ‘mature’ politics partly through a critique of Alain’s pacifism and notion of the citoyen contre les pouvoirs, by the s he had favourably revised his opinion of Alain’s liberalism in the light of the early Cold War. Nor were all the liberal republicans of the older generation equally prone to the kind of Manichean, neo-Jacobin tendencies that Aron considered to have had such a pernicious influence on the political culture of French democracy. Albert Thibaudet, for instance, famously criticised Dreyfusard liberalism in the name of an intellectual pluralism that sought to overcome the left/right divide. Yet 



Aron, ‘Alain et la politique’, Nouvelle revue française (September ), –. In his course on political philosophy at the École nationale d’administration in  Aron began by using Alain as an exemplar of the Jacobinism that he rejected; however, towards the end of the course he referred favourably to Alain’s notion of the citoyen contre les pouvoirs (citizen against the powers that be) as exemplifying an essential feature of the authentically democratic philosophy. See Aron, Introduction à la philosophie politique: démocratie et révolution (Paris, ), –, . Despite his criticisms of Alain, Aron apparently kept a portrait of his mentor in his office until his death in . On this see Thomas Ferenczi, ‘La mort de Raymond Aron’, Le Monde,  October . Thibaudet considered that the Dreyfus Affair had produced ‘a democracy of teachers’ whose ‘eternal Dreyfusism’ exacerbated the Manicheanism of French political culture. He described himself as ‘a little Paris, with its left bank and its right bank, defending the left bank when I am on the right bank and vice versa, a facilitator if not of collaboration then at least of dialogue’. For Thibaudet’s critique of the Dreyfusard intelligentsia see Albert Thibaudet, La république des professeurs (Paris, ), , –, –. The quote concerning his own intellectual ethic is on page . On Thibaudet see





Conclusion

insofar as ‘liberalism’ referred to an individualist, rationalist, optimist and progressive philosophy that viewed democracy in a purely benign light, it is true that Raymond Aron was and remained, if not an aggressively antiliberal thinker, at least one who was extremely skeptical of liberalism’s ability to make sense of the new world that emerged in the aftermath of the Great War. Viewed in relation to Cold War liberalism, however, Aron’s position looks very different. His importance in that history is quite well established in part because of the close correspondence between the ideological components variously attributed to Cold War liberalism and the contents of his published work. It is also due to Aron’s exceptional status as a militantly anti-communist French intellectual of world renown at a time, during the early Cold War, when the great majority of his peers were highly reluctant publically to criticise either the French Communist Party or the Soviet Union. Yet if Aron’s status in the history of Cold War liberalism seems clear, the implications of his work for our understanding of this phenomenon have perhaps not been fully understood. The best existing accounts of Cold War liberalism rightly question its overall theoretical coherence and tend to emphasise its status as a political sensibility rather than as a fully articulated ideology in the positive sense of this term. Aron’s example can be used in support of such an approach, but it also highlights the problem of retrospectively applying the concept of Cold War liberalism to individuals who never explicitly identified with it. As Jan-Werner Mu¨ller has remarked, ‘there is no single coherent, theoretical statement of anything called “Cold War liberalism”.’ The case of Raymond Aron shows that this may be because, in France at least, the origins of this sensibility precede the Cold War and its main exemplar was often reticent about identifying his position as a liberal one. The end of ideology doctrine, for instance, has understandably come to be viewed as a product of the ‘golden age of capitalism’; however, the arguments that constituted it were developed in the interwar years. The cultural context from which these arguments emerged in France may be broadly defined as that of interwar non-conformism. This is a contested and nebulous concept, but most historians would agree that anti-liberalism

 

Michel Leymarie, Albert Thibaudet: l’outsider du dedans (Villeneuve-d’Asq, ). For an account of his influence on Aron see Richard Gowan, ‘Raymond Aron, the history of ideas and the idea of France’ in European Journal of Political Theory,  (October ), –. Jan-Werner Mu¨ller, ‘Fear and freedom: On ‘Cold War liberalism’’, European Journal of Political Theory,  (January ), –, , . Ibid., .

Conclusion



is one of the main characteristics of the phenomenon it describes. Yet there are nevertheless a variety of ways in which Aron may plausibly be seen to have embraced liberalism before the war. The first of these concerns his participation in early neo-liberal networks such as the Lippmann colloquium and X-Crise. Aron’s involvement in these circles was peripheral, but its influence can be traced through his wartime writings up to the reorientation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom towards the end of ideology. By critiquing ‘doctrinaire’ economic liberalism and Marxian socialism to stake out a capacious new middle ground that was neither left nor right, delegates at the CCF’s Milan conference continued an enterprise that had been initiated in the overlapping peripheries of liberal and socialist revisionism before the war. In this respect, studying the prehistory of Cold War liberalism entails a reevaluation of its legacy. The end of ideology doctrine was formulated partly as a critique of radical free market liberalism and was rejected by Friedrich von Hayek in the strongest possible terms at the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s Milan conference in . This problematises the idea that Cold War liberalism paved the way for the neoliberal revolution initiated during the s. A second way in which Aron can plausibly be seen to have embraced liberalism before the war concerns the redefinition of democratic values offered in his paper on ‘Democratic States and Totalitarian States’. As we have seen, however, Aron went out of his way not to identify this position as a liberal one in , even though it had all the characteristics of political liberalism as he would later come to define it. This reticence reflected a desire to redefine core democratic values in terms that would have the broadest possible appeal at a time when the national community was dangerously divided in the face of the German threat. A similar logic informed Aron’s post-Second World War reticence on this issue. Although he did sometimes self-define as a liberal during this period, Aron was often hesitant about categorising his thought in these terms and defended the democratic polities of the West not as liberal democracies but as



 

See, e.g., Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années : une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris, ), –; Jean Touchard, ‘L’esprit des années : une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française’ in Guy Michaud (ed.), Tendances politiques dans la vie française depuis  (Paris, ), –, ; Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, – (Oxford, ), ; Philip Nord, France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton, ), , . The argument that Cold War liberalism paved the way for neoliberalism is advanced by Catherine Audard in her Qu’est-ce que le libéralisme? Éthique, politique, société (Paris, ), . Introduction à la philosophie politique, .



Conclusion

‘constitutional-pluralistic’ regimes. The end of ideology doctrine may have been retrospectively identified as a component of ‘Cold War liberalism’, but its appeal at the time was intimately connected to its argument that economic liberalism had been just as much discredited as Marxism by the postwar development of western industrial societies. Given its origins in the revisionist liberal networks of the s, the end of ideology could plausibly have been presented under the banner of ‘neo-liberalism’, especially since the meaning of this term was still to be fixed in the mid-s. But if Aron’s refusal to claim the mantle of liberalism in  was motivated by a desire to appeal to anti-liberal political Catholicism, the end of ideology doctrine was presented as being outside or beyond liberalism in part because the audience it sought to persuade was situated on the non-communist left. While the contents of Cold War liberalism may have changed over time, it thus remained consistent in its aim of redefining postwar democracy in terms that could appeal to a range of noncommunist political constituencies that had previously been either sceptical or hostile towards it. During the early Cold War, the cause of antitotalitarianism was similarly conceived as a means of consensus building between political and intellectual constituencies that had not previously seen themselves as natural bedfellows. That Paris had been the ‘capital of European antifascism’ since the s made it both a priority target of organised antitotalitarian activism, hence the establishment of the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s headquarters in the city, and an especially tough nut for such activism to crack. Although Aron’s originality as a theorist of totalitarianism can be overstated, especially where his notions of political or secular religion are concerned, he was prophetic in his recognition that for the politics of antitotalitarianism to gain traction in France would require not only the erosion of communism’s anti-fascist legitimacy but also an historical critique of the political culture that enabled the PCF to present itself as the embodiment of France’s democratic tradition. Antitotalitarianism had little influence on the French intellectual left until the s, but when France’s antitotalitarian moment eventually came it went far beyond denunciation of the PCF or the Soviet Union to encompass a   

Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, - (Berkeley, ), ; Aron, Démocratie et totalitarisme (Paris, ), –. On this theme see Anson Rabinbach, ‘Moments of totalitarianism’, History and Theory,  (February ), –. Anson Rabinbach, ‘Paris, capital of anti-fascism’ in Warren Breckman et al. (eds.), The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory (New York, ), –.

Conclusion



wide-ranging reappraisal of the past, present and future of republican democracy. Although much of the work in contemporary democratic theory that emerged during this moment was conducted in partial reaction against the conservative, elitist democratic vision that Aron had defended since , it was Aron who first systematically raised questions about the relationship between democracy, liberalism, and totalitarianism that increasingly preoccupied French intellectuals in the s and s, even if their answers to these questions were as often at odds with Aron’s as they were in agreement. Comparison of the Lefortian and Aronian strands of late twentiethcentury French antitotalitarian thought suggests that while a broadening engagement with liberalism, variously conceived, was a significant feature of the ideological reorientation underway in these years, it does not make sense to think of this period as witnessing a monolithic ‘French liberal revival’. This notion is not only problematic because it obscures the political heterogeneity of the phenomenon it purports to describe. It also overlooks French intellectuals’ diverse modes of engagement with texts and themes that they understood as ‘liberal’. On this question, the distinction outlined in Chapter  between two registers of traditionary action, canonisation and counter-innovation, could have a wider application, because it was mainly within the orbit of the Aronian circle that a deliberate and sustained attempt to define a clear tradition of canonical French liberal texts was made. Future research in this field may show that, as Duncan Bell has argued in relation to Anglo-American understandings of liberalism’s history, the idea of a distinct ‘French liberal tradition’ only became common currency during the postwar decades. Although intellectuals closer to the ‘second left’, such as Lefort and Rosanvallon, were much less concerned with identifying themselves as descendants of a venerable liberal tradition, their engagement with authors like Constant and Tocqueville might be seen to have performed a sort of functional canonisation. The fact that these men did not self-identify as liberals does not disqualify them from inclusion within a late twentieth century liberal moment if this is understood to mean a period in which French intellectuals from diverse political backgrounds engaged with texts and themes 

Duncan Bell, ‘What is liberalism?’ in Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, ), –. Bell’s view that liberalism should be taken to include ‘only those positions affirmed at some point in time by groups of self-proclaimed liberals should be included’ (page ) is, however, problematic in the context of France’s late twentieth-century liberal moment as defined here. For a further discussion of this issue see Stephen W. Sawyer and Iain Stewart, ‘The search continues’, Politics, Religion & Ideology, : (), –.



Conclusion

that they recognised as ‘liberal’, even if they did not identify themselves as such. Finally, the notion of a French liberal revival is problematic because it implies that liberalism was absent from French politics before its rediscovery in the mid-to-late s. As Michael Behrent has observed, the history of French liberalism often presents itself as a series of crises and revivals. But this self-presentation should not automatically be taken at face value. Although in the s and s it became almost an article of faith that the political culture of French republicanism had previously been endemically illiberal, this view had not always been so widely held. At the start of the twentieth-century this was an argument that tended to be made either by those Catholics who had rallied to republican democracy in the s but opposed the anticlerical agenda of the first Radical governments or by diehard opponents of republican democracy on the nationalist far right. After the Second World War, writers tainted by fascist entanglements in the s or by intellectual collaborationism in the early s rebuilt their careers by means of liberal revivalism, whether by engaging in transnational bodies like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Mont Pèlerin Society, or by publishing in journals like La Table ronde or, later, Contrepoint and Commentaire. Such activities cannot be explained simply as cases of political reinvention based on opportunistic exploitation of the causes of economic liberalism, cultural freedom or ‘liberté d’esprit’, because some of the intellectuals concerned had identified with liberalism before the war and had not necessarily regarded their turns to fascism as radical political conversions. The inaugural contribution to Commentaire’s ‘Classics of Liberty’ section, for instance, was a piece on Benjamin Constant written by Alfred Fabre-Luce, who had published his first book on Constant in , three years after he joined the fascist Parti Populaire Français. Cases like this might help to explain why many of those intellectuals who participated in the liberal moment were reluctant to self-identify as liberals and exaggerated the extent to which they were rediscovering 





Michael C. Behrent, ‘Justifying capitalism in an age of uncertainty: l’Association pour la liberté économique et le progrès social, –’ in Emile Chabal (ed.), France since the s: History, Politics and Memory in an Age of Uncertainty (London, ), –, . For a critical account of this new consensus see Jean-Fabien Spitz, Le moment républicain en France (Paris, ), –. On the novelty of this view in relation to the historiography of the Third Republic see Jean-Pierre Machelon, La république contre les libertés? (Paris, ), . Alfred Fabre-Luce, ‘Benjamin Constant et ses partenaires’, Commentaire,  (Summer ), –; Alfred Fabre-Luce, Benjamin Constant (Paris, ).

Conclusion



authors whose work had previously been forgotten. When Bertrand de Jouvenel sued the historian Zeev Sternhell for defamation after Sternhell described him as a fascist in the s and a collaborator during the Occupation, Raymond Aron was the only intellectual associated with the antitotalitarian turn who testified in support of de Jouvenel. This was not the first time that Aron had sought to protect his friend’s reputation: in fact, he had played a decisive role in the rehabilitation of both de Jouvenel and Fabre-Luce since the late s. But too much should not be read into this. After all, the Aronian circle of French intellectuals that developed in the late s included more former communists than it did ex-fascists. And while the anti-communist imperative certainly informed Aron’s willingness to support the political reintegration of individuals whose past commitments made them untouchables for most of the intellectual left, the significance of his actions in this regard cannot be reduced to anticommunism. Aron’s political liberalism entailed redefining democracy not as the exercise of popular sovereignty but as political and intellectual pluralism, which, though governed ultimately by the rule of law, required citizens in general, but particularly intellectuals, to exercise an ethic of responsibility rooted partly in the rejection of political Manicheanism. It may be argued that there are some moments, such as during the mids crisis of democracy, when Manichean politics are a necessity, or even that one of the effects of such liberal pluralism in the postwar period was eventually to help legitimate the political views of a resurgent far right. But this is not to question the sincerity of Aron’s liberal convictions, which, remarkably, he arrived at precisely at a moment in European history when it appeared that ‘the term liberalism belongs to the past’. Today we are living through another such moment. As liberalism’s future appears increasingly uncertain, its history, we are often told, can help us to understand the illiberal present. One version of this argument is that a recovery of antitotalitarian thought offers a vital intellectual and ethical resource for confronting the populist threat to liberal democracy. Populism, in the more alarmist variations on this theme, appears more as a mutant reincarnation of twentieth-century totalitarianism than as a phenomenon specific to the end of the post-Cold War era. Other historians promoting a reappraisal of Cold War liberalism as a resource for   

Olivier Dard, Bertrand de Jouvenel (Paris, ), –, ; Daniel Garbe, Alfred Fabre-Luce: un non-conformiste dans le tumulte du XXe siècle (Paris, ), –. Albert Thibaudet in , quoted by Françoise Mélonio in her Tocqueville et les Français (Paris, ), . Timonthy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (London, ).



Conclusion

understanding and responding to the present crisis of liberal democracy are more sensitive to its historical specificity. While recognising that the critique of totalitarian ideology is of limited use in the face of an ideologically impoverished populism, they associate Cold War liberalism with a ‘principled pluralism’ and ‘self-critical spirit’ that offers a timely corrective to the cynicism and complacency of post–Cold War liberalism. On the opposite side of the debate are those who argue that the present crisis of liberal democracy necessitates reinventing a liberalism that for too long has been haunted by its colonial and Cold War pasts. Cold War liberalism is here seen to have paved the way for both the neoliberal revolution and the controversial foreign military interventions that accompanied it; reinventing liberalism, on this telling, must begin with an excavation of its ‘lost history’. How can a historical understanding of Raymond Aron’s place in the development of twentieth-century liberal thought contribute to these debates? It is doubtful that a body of work so deeply engaged with the political problems of the short twentieth century has direct applications to those of today. Abstracted from its historical context, it is true that a central problem of Aron’s political thought, the relationship between liberalism and democracy, is as pertinent as it ever has been. But the contemporary context in which this problem is posed changes the stakes of the debate. Today’s liberals may not be wrong to worry about the threat posed by Putin’s Russia, but for all the hype around a new Cold War, the bipolar international order that Aron described and theorised in his work is not coming back. International communism and the intellectual hegemony of Marxism belong to the past. And while the global threat posed by the authoritarian right should not be understated, to imagine that threat as the spectre of a renascent totalitarianism will do more harm than good if it encourages a retreat further into a minimalist liberalism centred on the protection of individual rights.







Jan-Werner Mu¨ller, ‘What Cold War liberalism can teach us today’, The New York Review of Books,  November , www.nybooks.com/daily////what-cold-war-liberalism-can-teach-ustoday/ [accessed  December ]. Samuel Moyn, ‘Judith Shklar’s critique of Cold War liberalism’, The Nicolai Rubenstein Lecture, , www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiHOdaXoY [accessed  December ]. For a revised text of this lecture see Samuel Moyn, ‘Before – and beyond – the liberalism of fear’ in Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess (eds.), Between Utopianism and Realism: The Political Thought of Judith Shklar (Philadelphia, ). Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism from Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, ).

Conclusion



In this respect recent attempts to publicise a more capacious intellectual history of liberalism are to be welcomed, since if it is necessary to rethink liberalism in the twenty-first century then that task must begin by acknowledging its history as a heterogenous tradition of thought often more concerned with the public good than with private interest and compatible with a wide variety of economic theories, including elements of democratic socialism. It is striking, however, that Cold War liberalism has tended to perform an entirely negative function in the excavation of liberalism’s ‘lost history’. Helena Rosenblatt explains the loss of this history as a direct result of liberalism’s mid-twentieth-century reinvention. When liberalism was ‘reconfigured as the ideological “other” of totalitarianism’, she writes, it ‘lost much of its moral core and its centuries-long dedication to the public good. Individualism replaced it as liberals lowered their sights and moderated their goals’. Samuel Moyn has written in a similar vein of the ‘rich resources in the history of liberalism for returning to and correcting its recent truncation’, a truncation that he associates with an ‘anti-totalitarian constriction of liberalism’ under the pressures of decolonisation and the Cold War. For Moyn, this reconfiguration of liberalism amounts to ‘a stark reversal (or even betrayal) of nineteenth-century optimism’ not only because Cold War liberals bleakly abandoned any claim to offer a philosophy of the good life but also because they ‘ditched sociology for formalism, even though generations of liberals had concluded that ambitious progress depended on the reverse move’. While offering a salutary reminder of the diversity of liberalism’s history, such accounts offer a somewhat caricatural image of its more recent Cold War past. That the liberalism that emerged from its antitotalitarian reconfiguration was more pessimistic in outlook than its late nineteenth-century counterparts and that its first priority was to protect the basic rights of individuals is both undeniable and entirely understandable. But this pessimism was not all-consuming and this concern with individual rights was not necessarily wedded to an individualist social philosophy. At the beginning of the Cold War Aron described the philosophical basis for his liberalism as a ‘virile and pessimistic humanism’. But in contrast to Oswald Spengler, who ‘used to say that man is an animal of prey and that he cannot stop being one without demeaning himself’ Aron remarked that ‘Virile humanism would respond that man is an animal of prey capable,  

 Ibid., –, –. Ibid., . Samuel Moyn, ‘Human rights and the crisis of liberalism’ in Stephen Hopgood, Jack Snyder and Leslie Vinjamuri (eds.), Human Rights Futures (Cambridge, ), –, , , .



Conclusion

since he is endowed with conscience and liberty, of reaching a moral order.’ Never having subscribed to an individualist social philosophy, he was never remotely interested in redefining liberalism as a defence of individualism; indeed, Aron promoted a vision of French liberalism as a fundamentally sociological tradition. Because he defined this sociological tradition in opposition to the Durkheimian school Aron arguably contributed to the occlusion of alternative French liberal traditions inspired by Durkheim, such as liberal socialism and solidarism. But this hardly means that Aron helped to pave the way for neoliberalism. Recent suggestions that the neoliberal revolution was less of a break with Cold War liberalism than a product of its rightwards drift should not be dismissed out of hand. They rightly remind us that the cultural legitimation of neoliberalism was not based exclusively on values associated with the later new left in the s. But there was nothing inevitable about this trajectory: the neoliberal turn was no more immanent within Cold War liberalism than it was in second wave feminism or the libertarianism of . The end of ideology doctrine was defined against Hayekian neoliberalism and in conjunction with leading socialist politicians from all major European countries. Of course, by the end of the s almost no one subscribed to the same economic policy formulas that they had in the late s, and it is true that some of the first neoliberal policy prescriptions were implemented by the Democratic and Labour parties. It is also the case that neoconservatism was to a large extent a product of Cold War liberalism’s turn to the right in the late s, and that American neoliberals and neoconservatives found common cause in the s over the issue of welfare reform. Raymond Aron’s own trajectory after  is not so dissimilar to that of someone like Daniel Bell, another proponent of the end of ideology doctrine who became increasingly  



 

Aron, ‘Discours à des étudiants allemands sur l’avenir de l’Europe’, La Table ronde,  (January ), –, –. On the occlusion of these varieties of French liberal thought as a result of the antitotalitarian turn of the s see the introduction of Jean-Fabian Spitz, Le moment républicain en France (Paris, ). The most important recent contribution along these lines is Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York, ). Cooper’s revisionism is directed against, for example, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London, ); Wolfgang Streeck, ‘Flexible employment, flexible families, and the socialization of reproduction’ in Florian Coulmas and Ralph Lu¨tzeler (eds.), Imploding Families in Japan and Germany: Comparison (Leiden, ), –. Daniel Steadman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (New Jersey, ), –. Cooper, Family Values, –, –.

Conclusion



preoccupied with moral crisis and western decadence in the s. But to argue that ‘neoliberalism was perhaps the most dubious artefact of the Cold War mentality’ seems counterintuitive in light of recent research indicating that neoliberals regarded the Cold War as at most ‘a sideshow to the main event of mass enfranchisement and the end of empire’. An understandable desire to refute the charge of left-wing complicity in the advent of the neoliberal age should not lead us to replace one reductive account of that age’s cultural origins with another. The fact that recent critiques of Cold War liberalism sometimes caricature it does not mean that, properly understood, the political thought of Cold War liberals can offer us solutions to the problems of today. Raymond Aron’s denunciation of the Algerian War reminds us that liberal anti-communism did not always entail acquiescence to the violent suppression of anti-colonialism, but it is doubtful that his pessimism about the integration of a large North African population in France provides a helpful basis on which to approach to the opportunities and challenges of a multicultural society. Aron’s critique of economic neoliberalism may be as valid as ever, but the productivist economic model that he championed in the mid-twentieth century would be ecologically indefensible and regressive from the standpoint of gender equality if applied today. Perhaps it is the style of Aron’s intellectual engagement more than the contents of his thought that might offer an inspiration at a time when expertise is routinely denigrated and political debate often descends into a dialogue of the deaf. But if Aron’s mid-twentieth century reconfiguration of liberalism has anything to teach us it is that the survival of liberal democratic regimes cannot be taken for granted, that it requires a willingness to rethink old principles in new circumstances. Political liberalism, Aron reminds us, does not have to be based on an individualist social philosophy or a dogmatic commitment to the logic of the market. The meaning of and relationship between liberalism and democracy is never fixed. Liberal dogma may have undone the demos over recent decades, but this was neither inevitable nor irreversible.  

 

Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York, ); Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York, ). For the first quote see Moyn, ‘Before – and beyond – the liberalism of fear’, ; for the second see Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge MA, ), . Aron, La tragédie algérienne (Paris, ), –. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York, ).

Select Bibliography

A comprehensive bibliography of works by and about Raymond Aron can be found on the website of the Centre d’études sociologiques et politiques Raymond Aron: raymond-aron.ehess.fr/index.php? [accessed  July ]. For the catalogue of Aron’s personal archive see Élisabeth Dutartre, Fonds Raymond Aron: Inventaire (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France / École des hautes études en sciences sociales, ). ARCHIVES Fonds Raymond Aron, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF): NAF. Pour une histoire de l’École normale supérieure. Sources d’archives, presses de l’École normale supérieur. (Papers of Célestin Bouglé and the Centre de documentation sociale), Archives nationales (AN): AJ/-. B O O K S BY RA Y M O N D AR O N Books and articles by Aron are listed in order of their original dates of publication. Where first editions of these and other primary sources have not been used, the original year of publication is shown in square brackets before the publication year of the edition used. Aron, Raymond, La sociologie allemande contemporaine (Paris: Quadrige / Presses Universitaires de France, [] ). Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire: essai sur les limites de l’objectivité historique (Paris: Gallimard, ). La philosophie critique de l’histoire: essai sur une théorie allemande de l’histoire, nouvelle édition revue et annotée par Sylvie Mesure (Paris: Julliard, [] ). Le grand schisme (Paris: Gallimard, ). Les guerres en chaîne (Paris: Gallimard, ). L’opium des intellectuels (Paris: Gallimard, ). La tragédie algérienne (Paris: Plon, ). L’Algérie et la République (Paris: Plon, ). Immuable et changeante: de la IVe à la Ve République (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, ). 

Select Bibliography



La société industrielle et la guerre suivi d’un tableau de la diplomatie mondiale en  (Paris: Plon, ). Paix et guerre entre les nations (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, ). Dix-huit leçons sur la société industrielle (Paris: Gallimard, ). La lutte de classes: nouvelles leçons sur la société industrielle (Paris: Gallimard, ). German Sociology, trans. Mary and Thomas Bottomore (Glencoe: Free Press, ). Démocratie et totalitarisme (Paris: Gallimard, ). Essai sur les libertés (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, ). Main Currents in Sociological Thought : Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ). Main Currents in Sociological Thought : Pareto, Weber, Durkheim, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ). Les étapes de la pensée sociologique: Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Pareto, Weber (Paris: Gallimard, ). La révolution introuvable: réflexions sur les événements de mai (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, ). The Elusive Revolution: Anatomy of a Student Revolt, trans. Gordon Clough (London: Pall Mall Press, ). Les désillusions du progrès: essai sur la dialectique de la modernité (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, ). Marxismes imaginaires: d’une sainte famille à l’autre (Paris: Gallimard, ). An Essay on Freedom, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: World Publishing Company, ). De la condition historique du sociologue: leçon inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le  décembre  (Paris: Galliard, ). Progress and Disillusion: The Dialectics of Modern Society, trans. Terence Kilmartin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ). Histoire et dialectique de la violence (Paris: Gallimard, ). République impériale: les États Unis dans le monde, – (Paris: CalmannLévy, ). Penser la guerre, Clausewitz: I l’âge européen (Paris: Gallimard, ). Penser la guerre, Clausewitz: II l’âge planétaire (Paris: Gallimard, ). Plaidoyer pour l’Europe décadente (Paris: Laffont, ). Les élections de mars et la Ve République (Paris: Julliard, ). Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire: essai sur les limites de l’objectivité historique, complétée par des textes récents (Paris: Gallimard, [] ). Le spectateur engagé: entretiens avec Jean-Louis Missika et Dominique Wolton (Paris: Julliard, ). Mémoires:  ans de réflexion politique (Paris: Julliard, ). Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire: essai sur les limites de l’objectivité historique, nouvelle édition préfacée et annotée par Sylvie Mesure (Paris: Gallimard, [] ).



Select Bibliography

Leçons sur l’histoire: cours du Collège de France, ed. Sylvie Mesure (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, ). Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection, trans. George Holsch with a foreword by Henry A. Kissinger (New York: Holmes & Meier, ). In Defense of Decadent Europe, trans. by Stephen Cox with a new introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson (Lanham: Transaction, ). Introduction à la philosophie politique: démocratie et révolution (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, ). Main Currents in Sociological Thought : Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver with a new introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson and a foreword by Pierre Manent (New Brunswick: Transaction, ). Dialogue: Raymond Aron et Michel Foucault, ed. Jean-François Bert (Paris: Lignes, ). Liberté et égalité: cours au Collège de France (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, ). Aron, Raymond and F. Clairens, Les Français devant la Constitution (Paris: Éditions Défense de la France, ). E D I T E D C O L L E C T I O N S O F W O R K S B Y R AY M O N D A R O N Aron, Raymond, L’homme contre les tyrans (New York: Éditions de la Maison Française, ). De l’armistice à l’insurrection nationale (Paris: Gallimard, ). L’âge des empires et l’avenir de la France (Paris: Défense de la France, ). Polémiques (Paris: Gallimard, ). Espoir et peur du siècle: essais non partisans (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, ). et al., Colloques de Rheinfelden (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, ). Dimensions de la conscience historique (Paris: Plon, [] ). Trois essais sur l’âge industriel (Paris: Plon, ). et al., Aspects de la sociologie française (Paris: Les éditions ouvrières, ). Marxism and the Existentialists, trans. Helen Weaver, Robert Addis and John Weightman (London: Harper & Row, ). Études politiques (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, ). Politics and History (ed. and trans.) Miriam Bernheim Conant (London: Transaction Books, ). History, Truth, Liberty: Selected Writings of Raymond Aron (ed.), Franciszek Draus, various translators (London: University of Chicago Press, ). Études sociologiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ). Power, Modernity and Sociology: Selected Sociological Writings (ed.), Dominique Schnapper with an introduction by S.N. Eisenstadt and trans. Peter Morris (Aldershot: Edward Elgar Publishing, ). Chroniques de guerre: ‘La France Libre’, – (ed.), Christian Bachelier (Paris: Gallimard, ).

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

Les articles de politique internationale dans Le Figaro de –, tome première, La guerre froide (juin  à mai ) (ed.), Georges-Henri Soutou (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, ). Les articles de politique internationale dans Le Figaro de –, deuxième tome, La coexistence (mai  à février ) (ed.), Georges-Henri Soutou (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, ). Machiavel et les tyrannies modernes (ed.), Rémy Freymond (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, ). In Defense of Political Reason (ed. and trans.), Daniel J. Mahoney (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, ). Les articles de politique internationale dans Le Figaro de –, troisième tome, Les crises (février  à avril ) (ed.), Georges-Henri Soutou (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, ). Thinking Politically: A Liberal in the Age of Ideology (ed.), Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson, trans. James and Marie McIntosh (New Brunswick: Transaction, ). De Giscard à Mitterrand: -, préface de Jean-Claude Casanova, recueil d’articles publiés entre juillet  et octobre  dans L’Express (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, ). Penser la liberté, penser la démocratie, préface de Nicolas Baverez (Paris: Gallimard, ). Les sociétés modernes (ed.), Serge Paugam (Paris: Presses universitaires de la France, ). Essais sur la condition juive contemporaine (ed.), Jean-Claude Zylberstein (Paris: Texto, ). A R T I C L E S , B O O K C HA P T E R S , A N D B O O K R E V I E W S B Y RAYMOND ARON Aron, Raymond, ‘Ce que pense la jeunesse universitaire d’Europe’, Revue de Genève (December ), –. ‘À propos de la trahison des clercs’, Libres propos,  (April ), –. ‘Lettre d’Allemagne’, Libres propos,  (December ), . ‘De Man, Au delà du marxisme’, Libres propos,  (January ), –. ‘Simples propositions du pacifisme’, Libres propos,  (February ), –. ‘“Autre impasse” ou “devoir présent”’, Europe,  (February ), –. ‘Lettre d’Allemagne: Cologne, le  février ’, Libres propos,  (March ), –. ‘Lettre d’Allemagne: révision des traités’, Libres propos,  (May ), –. ‘Lettre d’Allemagne: List der Vernunft (Ruse de la Raison), Libres propos,  (June ), –. ‘Lettre d’Allemagne: de l’Anschluss à Hoover’, Libres propos,  (July ), –. ‘Sur le problème des réparations’, Libres propos,  (January ), –.



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‘Lettre d’Allemagne: Berlin,  janvier ’, Libres propos  (February ), –. ‘Nouvelles perspectives allemandes’, Europe,  (February ), –. ‘Lettre d’Allemagne: Berlin,  mars ’, Libres propos  (March ), –. ‘Lettre d’Allemagne: réflexions de politique réaliste. Berlin le  avril ’, Libres propos  (May ), –. ‘Combien l’Allemagne a-t-elle payé?’, Libres propos  (May ), –. ‘Combien l’Allemagne a-t-elle payé? Remarques et rectifications’, Libres propos,  (June ), . ‘Lettre d’Allemagne: Berlin,  juin ’, Libres propos,  (June ), –. ‘Allemagne, juin ’, Europe,  (July ), –. ‘Elections allemandes: perspectives’, Libres propos,  (August ), –. ‘Désarmement ou union franco-allemande’, Libres propos (August ), –. ‘G. Hess Alain (Emile Chartier) in der Reihe der französischen Moralisten’, Libres propos,  (October ), –. ‘Lettre d’Allemagne: Berlin,  novembre’, Libres propos,  (November ), . ‘F. Fried, La fin du capitalisme’, Europe,  (December ), –. ‘Après les élections’, Europe,  (December ), –. ‘La pensée de M. Léon Brunschvicg: à propos de son dernier ouvrage (De la Connaissance de soi)’, Revue de synthèse,  (), –. ‘Réflexions sur le pacifisme intégral’, Libres propos,  (January ), –. ‘A. Malraux, La condition humaine’, Libres propos, (December ), –. ‘Lettre ouverte d’un jeune français à l’Allemagne’, Esprit,  (February ), –. ‘La révolution nationale en Allemagne’, Europe,  (September ), –. ‘De l’objection de conscience’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (January ), –. ‘Une révolution antiprolétarienne: idéologie et réalité du national-socialisme’ in E. Halévy, R. Aron, G. Friedmann, E. Bernard, R. Marjolin, E. Dennery et C. Bouglé, Inventaires: la crise sociale et les idéologies nationales (Paris: Félix Alcan, ), –. ‘Bourthoumieux, C., Essai sur le fondement philosophique des doctrines économiques. Rousseau contre Quesnay. Raynaud, B., La loi naturelle en économie politique. . L’idée de la loi naturelle en économie politique’, Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung,  (), . ‘Gurvitch, G. L’expérience juridique et la philosophie pluraliste du droit’, Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung,  (), –. ‘Hauser, H. La paix économique’, Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung,  (), . ‘H. De Man, L’idée socialiste’, Annales Sociologiques, Série A, fascicule  (),–. ‘L’idéologie’, Recherches philosophiques,  (-), –.

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

‘Réflexions sur les problèmes économiques français’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (October ), –. ‘Annales sociologiques, -’, review, Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung,  (), –. ‘La sociologie de Pareto’, Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung,  (), –. ‘Recherches philosophiques, , -’, review, Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung,  (), –. ‘Troisième centenaire du Discours de la méthode’, review, Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung,  (), –. ‘Halbwachs, M., Morphologie sociale’, review, Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung,  (), . ‘L’ère des tyrannies d’Élie Halévy’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (April ), –. ‘Remarques sur l’objectivité des sciences sociales’, Théoria,  (January ), –. ‘Paix sans illusion’, Point de vue,  April . ‘Nouvelle carte du monde’, Point de vue,  May . ‘En quête d’espérance’, Point de vue,  May . ‘Appelons les choses par leur nom’, Point de vue,  June . ‘Reflections on the foreign policy of France’, International Affairs,  (October ), –. ‘Les désillusions de la liberté’, Les Temps modernes,  (October ), –. ‘Après l’événement, avant l’histoire’, Les Temps modernes,  (October ), –. ‘La chance du socialisme’, Les Temps modernes,  (November ), –. ‘La scène politique: II – Le parti communiste français’, Combat,  April . ‘Comment sortir du tripartisme’, Combat,  June . ‘Le mal et ses symptômes’, Combat,  September . ‘Aménagement du tripartisme’, Combat,  October . ‘Discours à des étudiants allemands sur l’avenir de l’Europe’, La Table ronde,  (January ), –. ‘Y a-t-il une nature humaine?’, Recherches et débats du centre catholique des intellectuels français,  (February–March ), –. ‘Conditions d’une détente’, Preuves,  (October ), –. ‘À propos de la Société Européen de Culture’, Preuves,  (March ), –. ‘Les deux tentations de l’européen’, Preuves,  (June ), –. ‘Discours aux étudiants allemandes’, Preuves, – (August–September ), –. ‘Alain et la politique’, Nouvelle revue française (September ), –. ‘La politique américaine des visas’, Preuves,  (January ), –. ‘James Burnham et la politique de libération’, Preuves,  (May ), –. ‘Risques et chances d’une économie dominante’, Preuves,  (July ), –. ‘La Russie après Staline’, Preuves,  (October ), –. ‘L’avenir du Japon’, Preuves,  (February ), –.

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‘Les concepts de vérité de classe et de vérité nationale dans le domaine des sciences sociales’, Preuves,  (March ), –. ‘La révolte asiatique, connaît-elle ses limites?’, Preuves,  (March ), –. ‘L’Asie entre Marx et Malthus: le mirage de la méthode soviétique d’industrialisation’, Preuves,  (May ), –. ‘La rencontre de l’Asie et de l’Occident: la revanche militaire de l’Asie’, Preuves,  (July ), –. ‘Les intellectuels français et l’utopie’, Preuves,  (April ), –. ‘Visage du communisme en France et Italie’, Preuves,  (August ), –. ‘À l’âge atomique peut-on limiter la guerre?’, Preuves,  (December ), –. ‘Aventures et mésaventures de la dialectique’, Preuves,  (January ), –. ‘Le fanatisme, la prudence et la foi’, Preuves,  (May ), –. ‘L’autocritique française hier et aujourd’hui’, Preuves,  (November ), –. ‘La société soviétique et l’avenir de la liberté’, Preuves,  (October ), –. ‘Une révolution antitotalitaire’, Preuves,  (December ), i–xiii. ‘Discours à Harvard’, Le Monde,  July . ‘Note sur le pouvoir économique’, Revue économique,  (), –. ‘La Cinquième République ou l’empire parlementaire’, Preuves,  (November ), –. ‘Charles de Gaulle et la chambre introuvable’, Preuves,  (January ), –. ‘Démission des français ou rénovation de la France?’, Preuves,  (February ), –. ‘La Cinquième République choisit la rigueur monétaire’, Preuves,  (May ), –. ‘Idées politiques et vision historique de Tocqueville’, Revue française de science politique,  (September ), –. ‘Science et théorie de la politique’ Revue française de science politique,  (June ), –. ‘À propos de la théorie politique’, Revue française de science politique,  (March ), –. ‘La théorie de développement et l’interprétation historique de l’époque contemporaine’ in Le développement social (ed.), Raymond Aron and Bert F. Hoselitz (Paris: Mouton & Co., ), –. ‘The Promethean dream: society in search of itself’ in Britannica Perspectives, vol. II, trans. Elaine P. Halperin (London: William Benton, ), –. ‘Student rebellion: vision of the future of echo from the past?’, Political Science Quarterly,  (June ), –. ‘Remarques sur le nouvel âge idéologique’, Contrepoint,  (), –.

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

Aron, Raymond et Schaeffer, Pierre, ‘Société et communication’ in Pillaudin, Roger (ed.), Quelle crise? Quelle société? (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, ), –. ‘Henri de Man: Au delà du marxisme’, Contrepoint,  (), –. ‘Incertitudes françaises’, Commentaire,  (Spring ), –. Pour le progrès: après la chute des idoles, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –. ‘Tocqueville retrouvé’, The Tocqueville Review / La revue Tocqueville,  (Fall ), –. ‘Henry Kissinger, le Vietnam et le Cambodge’, Commentaire,  (Winter ), –. ‘The social scientist: pur savant ou citoyen engagé’ in The Social Responsibilities of Scientists, proceedings of a joint meeting on  June  of the Royal Society and the American Philosophical Society held in the rooms of the Royal Society (London: The Royal Society, November ), –. ‘Discours de Raymond Aron lors de la réception du Prix Tocqueville’, The Tocqueville Review / La revue Tocqueville,  (Winter ), –. ‘Pluralisme et démocratie’, The Tocqueville Review / La revue Tocqueville,  (Spring-Summer ), –. ‘Intervention de Raymond Aron en conclusion des assises du CIEL de juin ’, La lettre du CIEL,  (), –. ‘L’itinéraire intellectuel d’Élie Halévy’, Commentaire,  (Winter ), –. O T H E R PR I M A R Y S O U R C E S : B O O K S AN D E D I T E D COLLECTIONS Abensour, Miguel, Lettre d’un ‘révoltiste’ à Marcel Gauchet converti à la ‘politique normale’ (Paris: Sens & Tonka, ). Agathon, L’esprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne: la crise de la culture classique, la crise du français (Paris: Mercure de France, ). Alain (Émile Chartier), Mars, ou la guerre jugée (Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, ). Le citoyen contre les pouvoirs (Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, ). Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, [] ). Le système totalitaire, trans. Jean-Loup Bourget, Robert Davreu and Patrick Lévy (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Sur l’antisémitisme, trans. Micheline Pouteau (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, ). L’impérialisme, trans. Martine Leiris (Paris: Fayard, ). Les origines du totalitarisme (Paris: Fayard, ). Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers Correspondence, – (ed.), Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (London: Harcourt Brace Johanovich, ).



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Within Four Walls. The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blu¨cher (ed.), Lotte Kohler, trans. Peter Constantine (London: Harcourt Inc: ). Beauvoir, Simone de, La force de l’âge (Paris: Gallimard, ). Quiet Moments in a War: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, –, trans. Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee (London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., ). Bell, Daniel, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Free Press, [] ). The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, ). La cérémonie des adieux (Paris: Gallimard, ). Benda, Julien, La trahison des clercs (Paris: Bernard Grasset, ). Besançon, Alain, Court traité de soviétologie à l’usage des autorités civiles, militaires et religieuses (Paris: Hachette, ). Les origines intellectuelles du Léninisme (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, ). Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, ). Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, – (New York: Simon & Schuster, ). Bouglé, Célestin, Les sciences sociales en Allemagne: les méthodes actuelles (Paris: Félix Alcan, ). Les idées égalitaires: étude sociologique (Paris: Félix Alcan, ). Essai sur le régime des castes (Paris: Félix Alcan, ). La sociologie de Proudhon (Paris: Armand Colin, ). Leçons de sociologie sur l’évolution des valeurs (Paris: Armand Colin, ). Proudhon (Paris: Félix Alcan, ). Socialismes français: du socialisme utopique à la démocratie industrielle (Paris: Armand Colin, ). Qu’est-ce que la sociologie? (Paris: Félix Alcan, ). Bilan de la sociologie française contemporaine (Paris: Félix Alcan, ). Essays on the Caste System, trans, D.F. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Bourdieu, Pierre, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (Paris: Éditions Raisons d’Agir, ). Brunschvicg, Léon, Le progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale (Paris: Félix Alcan, ). Burnham, James, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (New York: John Day, ). The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (New York: John Day, ). Castoriadis, Cornelius, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis and the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ). Clark, Colin, The Conditions of Economic Progress (London: Macmillan, ). Comte, Auguste, Cours de philosophie positive, tome IV (Paris: Bachelier, ).

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The Essential Comte: Selected from Cours de Philosophie Positive (ed.), Stanislav Andreski, trans. Margaret Clarke (London: Croom Helm, ). Constant, Benjamin, De la liberté chez les modernes, textes choisis, présentés et annotés par Marcel Gauchet (Paris: Librairie générale français, ). Daniel, Jean, La blessure (Paris: Bernard Grasset, ). Déat, Marcel, Perspectives socialistes (Paris: Librairie Valois, ). Mémoires politiques (Paris: Éditions Denoël, ). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: Continuum, ). Dilthey, Wilhelm, Introduction to the Human Sciences: An Attempt to Lay a Foundation for the Study of Society and History, trans. Ramon J. Betanzos (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, [] ). Durkheim, Émile, Les règles de la méthode sociologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, [] ). The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method, edited and with an introduction by Steven Lukes, trans. W.D. Halls (London and Basingstoke: The MacMillan Press, [] ). Montesquieu et Rousseau: précurseurs de la sociologie, trans. Armand Cuvillier (Paris: Librairie Marcel Rivière et Cie, [] ). Fabre-Luce, Alfred, Le secret de la République (Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset, ). Benjamin Constant (Paris: Fayard, ). Faguet, Émile, Le libéralisme (Paris: Société française d’imprimerie et de librairie, ). Ferry, Luc et Renaut, Alain, La pensée  (Paris: Gallimard, ). Freund, Julien, L’essence du politique (Paris: Éditions Sirey, ). Furet, François, Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, ). Le passé d’une illusion: essai sur l’idée communiste au XXème siècle (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, ). Furet, François, Julliard, Jacques, et Rosanvallon, Pierre, La république du centre: la fin de l’exception française (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, ). Gauchet, Marcel, La condition historique: entretiens avec François Azouvi et Sylvain Piron (Paris: Stock, ). Gide, André, Retour de l’URSS (Paris: Gallimard, ). Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, Démocratie française (Paris: Fayard, ). Glucksmann, André, La cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes: essai sur les rapports entre l’État, le marxisme et les camps de concentration (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Grémion, Pierre (ed.), Preuves: une revue européenne à Paris (Paris: Julliard, ). Groethuysen, Bernard, Autres portraits (ed.), Philippe Delpuech (Paris: Gallimard, ). Gurvitch, Georges, Les tendances actuelles de la philosophie allemande (Paris: Vrin, ).

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La vocation actuelle de la sociologie, tome II: antécédents et perspectives (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, [] ). (ed.), Traité de sociologie, tome I (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ). Halévy, Élie, L’ère des tyrannies: études sur le socialisme et la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, ). Histoire du socialisme européen (Paris: Gallimard, [] ). Hayek, F.A., The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, [] ). The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [] ). Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press Ltd., [] ). Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, unified edition, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company Inc., [/] ). Korsch, Karl, Marxism and Philosophy, trans. Fred Halliday (London: New Left Books, [] ). Kriegel, Annie, Ce que j’ai cru comprendre (Paris: Robert Laffont, ). Laqueur, Walter, Fin de Siècle and Other Essays on America and Europe: (New Brunswick: Transaction, ). Lefort, Claude, Edgar Morin and Jean-Marc Coudray, Mai , la brèche: réflexions sur les événements (Paris: Fayard, ). Lefort, Claude, Le travail de l’œuvre Machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, ). Éléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie, second edition (Paris: Gallimard, ). Un homme en trop: réflexions sur ‘l’Archipel du goulag’, second edition (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). L’invention démocratique: les limites de la domination totalitaire (Paris: Fayard, ). Essais sur le politique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Écrire: à l’épreuve du politique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, ). La complication: retour sur le communisme (Paris: Fayard, ). Le temps présent: Écrits - (Paris: Belin, ). Lévy, Bernard-Henri, La barbarie à visage humain (Paris: Bernard Grasset, ). Lhoste-Lachaume, Pierre, Réhabilitation du libéralisme (Paris: Editions Sedif, ). Lindenberg, Daniel, Le rappel à l’ordre: enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires (Paris: Éditions du Seuil et La République des Idées, ). Lippmann, Walter, Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society (Boston: Little Brown & Co., ). Lipset, Seymour Martin, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (London: Mercury Books, ). Luchaire, Jean, Une génération réaliste (Paris: Librairie Valois, ). Lukács, György, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin, [] ).

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Man, Henry de, The Psychology of Socialism, trans. E. and C. Paul (London: George Allen & Unwin, [] ). Manent, Pierre, Tocqueville et la nature de la démocratie (Paris: Gallimard, ). Les libéraux (Paris: Hachette, ). La cité de l’homme (Paris: Flammarion, ). An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). Modern Liberty and Its Discontents, trans. Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Seaton (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, ). Le regard politique: entretiens avec Bénédicte Delorme-Montini (Paris: Flammarion, ). Marcuse, Herbert, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge, [] ). Maritain, Jacques, Humanisme intégral: problèmes temporels et spirituels d’une nouvelle Chrétienté (Paris: Fernand Aubier, ). Les droits de l’homme et la loi naturelle (New York: Éditions de la Maison Française, ). Marjolin, Robert, Le travail d’une vie: mémoires, – (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, ). Marrou, Henri-Irénée, De la connaissance historique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Meinecke, Friedrich, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. J.E. Anderson (London: Routledge, ). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Humanisme et terreur: essai sur le problème communiste (Paris: Gallimard, [] ). Les aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, ). Mills, C. Wright, The Power Elite (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, ). Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (ed. and trans.) Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Nizan, Paul, Les chiens de garde (Paris: François Maspero, [] ). Ortega y Gasset, José, La révolte des masses, trans. Louis Parrot (Paris: Delamain et Boutelleau, ). Perec, Georges, Un homme qui dort (Paris: Éditions Denoël, ). Peyrefitte, Alain, Le mal français (Paris: Plon, ). C’était de Gaulle (Paris: Fallois, ). Philip, André, Henri de Man et la crise doctrinale du socialisme (Paris: Librairie universitaire J. Gamber, ). Pirou, Gaétan, Néo-libéralisme, néo-corporatisme, néo-socialisme (Paris: Gallimard, ). Popper, Karl, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, [] ). Rauschning, Hermann, The Revolution of Nihilism. A Warning to the West (New York: Alliance Book Corporation, ). Renan, Ernest, La réforme intellectuelle et morale (Paris: Michel-Lévy Frères, ).

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Rosanvallon, Pierre, L’âge de l’autogestion ou la politique au poste de commandement (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). La crise de l’État providence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Le moment Guizot (Paris: Gallimard, ). L’État en France de  à nos jours (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Le sacre du citoyen: histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris: Gallimard, ). Le peuple introuvable: histoire de la représentation démocratique en France (Paris: Gallimard, ). La démocratie inachevée: histoire de la souveraineté du peuple en France (Paris: Gallimard, ). Le modèle politique français: La société civile contre le jacobinisme de  à nos jours (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). La contre-démocratie: la politique à l’âge de la défiance (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Democracy Past and Future (ed. and trans.) Samuel Moyn (New York: Columbia University Press, ). Rosanvallon, Pierre and Patrick Viveret, Pour une nouvelle culture politique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Rostow, Walt W., The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Du contrat social (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, [] ). Doctrine de Saint-Simon: exposition, première année,  (ed.), Célestin Bouglé and Élie Halévy (Paris: Libraire des sciences politiques et sociales, ). Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de, L’oeuvre d’Henri de Saint-Simon. Textes Choisis (Paris: ). Sartre, Jean-Paul, L’être et le néant: essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, ). Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard, ). L’existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Nagel, [] ). Questions de méthode (Paris: Gallimard, [] ). Critique de la raison dialectique, tome I: théorie des ensembles pratiques (Paris: Gallimard, ). Critique de la raison dialectique, tome II: l’intelligibilité de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, ). Situations VIII: autour de  (Paris: Gallimard, ). Cahiers pour une morale (Paris: Gallimard, ). Carnets de la drôle de guerre: septembre –mars  (Paris: Gallimard, ). Schnapp, Alain and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (eds.), The French Student Uprising, November –June , trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, ). Schumpeter, Joseph A., Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, second edition (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., [] ). Serge, Victor, S’il est minuit dans le siècle (Paris: Grasset, ).

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Schmitt, Carl, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge MA. and London: MIT Press,[] ). The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, [] ). The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab with Leo Strauss, ‘Notes on Carl Schmitt’, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, [] ). ‘Further development of the total state in Germany’ [] in Carl Schmitt, Four Articles, – (ed. and trans.) Simona Draghici (Washington D.C.: Plutarch Press, ), –. Sorel, Georges, Les illusions du progrès (Paris: M. Rivière, ) Souvarine, Boris, Cauchemar en URSS (Paris: Revue de Paris, ). Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies, second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [] ). Talmon, Jacob, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, ). Les origines de la démocratie totalitaire, trans. Paulette Fara (Paris: CalmannLévy, ). Tardieu, André, L’heure de la décision (Paris: Flammarion, ). Thibaudet, Albert, La république des professeurs (Paris: Grasset, ). Les idées politiques de la France (Paris: Librairie Stock, Delamain et Boutelleau, ). Thorez, Maurice, France Today and the People’s Front (London: Gollancz, ). Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, trans. Gerald Bevan (London: Penguin, [/] ). The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Anchor Books, [] ). Todd, Olivier, Un fils rebelle (Paris: Grasset, ). Traverso, Enzo, Le totalitarisme: le XXe siècle en débat (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Union pour la vérité, Problèmes franco-allemands d’après-guerre. Entretiens tenus au siège de l’Union pour la vérité (Paris: Librairie Valois, ). Voegelin, Eric, Autobiographical Reflections (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, ). Wahl, Jean, Vers le concret: études d’histoire de la philosophie contemporaine (Paris: Vrin, ). Waxman, Chaim Isaac (ed.), The End of Ideology Debate (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, ). Weber, Max, Le savant et le politique, introduction par Raymond Aron (Paris: Librairie Plon, ).



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Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, various translators (Berkeley: University of California Press, [] ). From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by Hans Heinrich Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, ). O T H E R P R I M A R Y S O U R C E S : AR T I C L E S A N D B O O K C HA P T E R S Anon, ‘Possibilités économiques dans l’Empire français’, La France libre,  (February ), –. ‘Au lecteur’, La Table ronde,  (January ), –. ‘Des professeurs à la Sorbonne expriment leur adhésion à la politique gouvernementale’, Le Monde,  May . ‘Une conversion retentissante’, L’Echo d’Alger,  June . ‘Éditorial’, Contrepoint,  (May ), –. ‘Commentaire’, Commentaire,  (Spring ), –. ‘La France perd son prof’, Libération,  October . Arendt, Hannah, ‘A reply to Eric Voegelin’, The Review of Politics,  (), –. Assouline, Pierre, ‘Enquête sur un historien condamné pour diffamation’, L’histoire,  (June ), –. Baechler, Jean, ‘Libéralisme et autogestion’, Commentaire,  (Spring ), –. ‘Maître et disciple’, Commentaire, – (Winter ), –. Beigbeder, Marc, ‘La bouteille à la mer: l’heure des comptes?’, Commentaire,  (Spring ), –. Berlin, Isaiah, ‘La théorie politique existe-t-elle?’, Revue française de science politique,  (June ), –. Besançon, Alain, ‘Raymond Aron à l’oral’, Commentaire, – (Winter ), –. ‘Pourquoi nous aimons tant Raymond Aron’, Commentaire,  (Summer ), –. ‘Souvenirs et réflexions sur mai ’, Commentaire,  (Summer ), –. Bloom, Allan, ‘Un vrai philosophe: Léo Strauss’, Commentaire,  (Spring ), –. ‘Le dernier des libéraux’, Commentaire, – (Winter ), –. Boudon, Raymond, ‘Éloge du conformisme intellectuel’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –. Boudon, Raymond and François Bourricaud, ‘La sociologie aujourd’hui’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –. Bouglé, Célestin, ‘La crise du libéralisme’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (), –. ‘Le Darwinisme en sociologie’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (), –.

Select Bibliography



Bourdieu, Pierre and Passeron, Jean-Claude, ‘Sociology and philosophy in France since : death and resurrection of a philosophy without subject’, Social Research,  (Spring ), –. Bourricaud, François, ‘La crise de l’autorité professionnelle: avocats, magistrats, médecins et professeurs’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –. ‘L’avenir de l’institution universitaire en France’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –. ‘De la psychanalyse à la révolution’, Commentaire  (Winter ), –. Colliot-Thélène, Catherine, ‘Carl Schmitt à l’index?’, Le Débat,  (SeptemberOctober ), –. Cot, Jean-Pierre, ‘Actualité et ambiguïtés du libéralisme’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –. Crozier, Michel, ‘The cultural revolution: notes on the changes in the intellectual climate of France’, Daedalus,  (Winter ), –. ‘Les angoisses existentielles des intellectuels français’, Commentaire,  (Summer ), –. Davenson, Henri, ‘Tristesse de l’historien’, Esprit,  (April ), –. Davy, Georges, ‘Sur la méthode de Montesquieu’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (July ), –. Fabre-Luce, Alfred, ‘Benjamin Constant et ses partenaires’, Commentaire,  (Summer ), –. Ferenczi, Thomas, ‘La mort de Raymond Aron’, Le Monde,  October . Freund, Julien, ‘Raymond Aron directeur de thèse’, Commentaire, – (Winter ), –. Fukuyama, Francis, ‘La fin de l’histoire?’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –. Furet, François, ‘Les intellectuels français et le structuralisme’, Preuves,  (February ), –. ‘Tocqueville et le problème de la Révolution française’ in Jean-Claude Casanova (ed.), Science et conscience de la société: mélanges en l’honneur de Raymond Aron, volume  (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, ), –. ‘La rencontre d’une idée et d’une vie’, Commentaire, – (Winter ), –. Gauchet, Marcel, ‘L’expérience totalitaire et la pensée de la politique’, Esprit,  (July–August ), –. ‘Les droits de l’homme ne sont pas une politique’, Le Débat,  (July–August ), –. ‘Changement de paradigme en sciences sociales?’, Le Débat,  (May–August ), –. Groethuysen, Bernard, ‘Une philosophie critique de l’histoire’, La nouvelle revue française (October ), –. Guindey, Guillaume, “L’autogestion de l’économie’, Commentaire,  (Winter ), –. Gurvitch, Georges, ‘La sociologie juridique de Montesquieu’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (October ), –.



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Halbwachs, Maurice, ‘Max Weber: un homme, une œuvre’, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale,  (), –. Hoffmann, Stanley, ‘Théorie et relations internationales’, Revue française de science politique,  (June ), –. Hubert, René, ‘Le notion du devenir historique dans la philosophie de Montesquieu’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale,  (October ), –. Jaspers, Karl, ‘La pensée de Descartes et la philosophie’, Revue philosophique,  (), –. Jouvenel, Bertrand de, ‘Théorie politique pure’, Revue française de science politique,  (June ), –. Kervégan, Jean-François, ‘Questions sur Carl Schmitt’, Le Débat,  (September–October ), –. Kriegel, Annie, ‘L’art de vivre de la haute Université’, Commentaire, – (Winter ), –. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, ‘Neither an accident nor a mistake’, Critical Inquiry,  (Winter ), –. Lefebvre, Henri, ‘Marxisme et politique: le marxisme a-t-il une théorie politique?’, Revue française de science politique,  (June ), –. Lefort, Claude, ‘Droits de l’homme et politique’, Libre,  (), –. Manent, Pierre, ‘Lire Michel Foucault’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –. ‘Aux origines du libéralisme: Benjamin Constant’ Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –. ’Démocratie et totalitarisme: à propos de Claude Lefort’ Commentaire,  (Winter ), –. ‘Situation du libéralisme’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –. Maritain, Jacques, ‘The End of Machiavellianism’, The Review of Politics,  (January ), –. Marjolin, Robert, ‘Les années ’, Commentaire, – (Winter ), –. Marrou, Henri, ‘France, ma patrie . . .’, Le Monde,  April . Mills, C. Wright, ‘Letter to the New Left’, New Left Review,  (September– October ), –. Mongin, Olivier, ‘Le politique en question’, Esprit,  (July–August ), –. Nora, Pierre, ‘Que peuvent les intellectuels?’, Le Débat,  (May ), –. Nora, Pierre and Taylor, Michael, ‘America and the French intellectuals’, Daedalus,  (Winter ), –. Nordmann, Jean-Thomas, ‘Taine libéral’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), . Peyrefitte, Alain, ‘Les paradoxes de Tocqueville’, Commentaire,  (Summer ), –. ‘Tocqueville et les illusions pénitentiaires’, Commentaire,  (Summer ), –. ‘Un intellectuel responsable’, Commentaire,  (Summer ), –. Pomeau, René, ‘Montesquieu: le vécu d’une politique’, Commentaire,  (Spring ), –.

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

Raynaud, Philippe, ‘Que faire de Carl Schmitt?’, Le Débat,  (September– October ), –. Rémond, René, ‘Le contemporain du contemporain’ in Pierre Nora (ed.), Essais d’égo-histoire (Paris: Gallimard, ), –. Renterghem, Marion van, ‘Raymond Aron l’émotion continue’, Le Monde,  mars . Rétat, Pierre, ‘La notion du principe chez Montesquieu’, Commentaire,  (Spring ), . Revel, Jean-François, ‘Pour lire Jouffroy’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –. Rocard, Michel, ‘La social-démocratie et la liberté”, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –. Rolland, Patrice, ‘Équivoques du libéralisme: à propos de Benjamin Constant’, Commentaire,  (Winter ), . Rollin, J.F., ‘Georges Perec, Un homme qui dort’, Esprit,  (November ), –. Rosanvallon, Pierre, ‘Marx et la société civile’, Commentaire,  (Winter ), –. Rougement, Denis de, ‘D’une critique stérile’, Esprit,  (May ), –. Sartre, Jean-Paul, ‘Présentation’, Les Temps modernes,  (October ), –. Savès, Christian, ‘Aron, notre maître’, ENA mensuel, numéro hors-série: ‘Politique et littérature’ (December ), . Shils, Edward, ‘The end of ideology?’, Encounter,  (November ), –. Spiro, Herbert J. and Benjamin R. Barber, ‘Counter-ideological uses of “totalitarianism”’, Politics and Society,  (March ), –. Théolleyre, J.-M., ‘Sa dernière tribune’, Le Monde,  October . Thibaud, Paul, ‘Une lecture politique du Goulag’, Esprit,  (July–August ), –. ‘Aujourd’hui’, Esprit,  (December ), –. Thibaudet, Albert, ‘Réflexions: sur un plan universitaire’, Nouvelle revue française,  (September ), –. ‘Réflexions’, Nouvelle revue française,  (December ), –. Trotsky, Léon, ‘Hitler et le désarmement’, Europe,  (July ), –. Weil, Eric, ‘Philosophie politique, théorie politique’, Revue française de science politique,  (June ), –. Weill, Nicolas, ‘Le relativisme, voilà l’ennemi !’, Le Monde,  February . SECONDARY SOURCES: BOOKS Abensour, Miguel, et al., Ontologie et politique: actes du colloque Hannah Arendt (Paris: Éditions Tierce, ). Agulhon, Maurice, La République: de Jules Ferry à François Mitterrand (Paris: Hachette, ). Ahearne, Jeremy, Intellectuals, Culture and Public Policy in France: Approaches from the Left (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, ).



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Anderson, Brian, C., Raymond Aron: The Recovery of the Political (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, ). Anderson, Grey, La guerre civile en France, –. Du coup d’État gaulliste à la fin de l’OAS (Paris: La Fabrique, ). Anderson, Perry, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, ). Antonetti, Guy, Histoire contemporaine politique et sociale, third edition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ). d’Appollonia, Ariane Chebel, Histoire politique des intellectuels en France, . Tome I (Paris: Éditions Complexe, ). Arblaster, Anthony, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ). Audier, Serge, Raymond Aron: la démocratie conflictuelle (Paris: Éditions Michalon, ). Tocqueville retrouvé: genèse et enjeux du renouveau tocquevillien français (Paris: Vrin, ). Machiavel, conflit et liberté (Paris: Vrin, ). Le socialisme libéral (Paris: La Découverte, ). La pensée anti-: essai sur une restauration intellectuelle (Paris: La Découverte, ). Le Colloque Lippmann: aux origines du néo-libéralisme (Paris: Les Éditions du Bord de l’eau, ). Néo-libéralisme(s): une archéologie intellectuelle (Paris: Bernard Grasset, ). Bachelier, Christian and Dutartre, Elisabeth (ed.), Raymond Aron et la liberté politique: actes du colloque international de Budapest tenu les  et  octobre  (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, ). Bachofen, Blaise (ed.), Le libéralisme au miroir du droit: L’État, la personne, la propriété (Paris: ENS Éditions, ). Baehr, Peter, Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, ). Balandier, Georges, Gurvitch, trans. Margaret A. Thompson and Kenneth A. Thompson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ). Barilier, Étienne, Les petits camarades (Paris: Julliard, ). Baudouin, Jean et Hournant, François (eds.), Les revues et la dynamique des ruptures (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, ). Bellamy, Richard and Hollis, Martin (eds.), Pluralism and Liberal Neutrality (London: Frank Cass, ). Baverez, Nicolas, Raymond Aron: un moraliste au temps des idéologies (Paris: Flammarion, ). Bell, Duncan, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, ). Bendersky, Joseph J., Carl Schmitt, Theorist for the Reich (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, ). Berman, Paul, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton, ).

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

Berghahn, Volker R., America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, ). Berstein, Serge et Milza, Pierre, Histoire de la France au XXe siècle: I. – (Paris: Perrin, ). Besnard, Philippe (ed.), The Sociological Domain: The Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Biard, Jean-François Le socialisme devant ses choix: La naissance de l’idée de plan (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, ). Birebent, Christian, Militants de la paix et de la SDN: les mouvements de soutien à la Société des Nations en France et au Royaume-Uni – (Paris: L’Harmattan, ). Blanning, Tim, Divanna, Isabel and Dodds, Dawn (eds.), Historicising the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, ). Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, ). Bottomore, Tom, Elites and Society, second edition (London and New York: Routledge, ). Bourg, Julian (ed.), After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France (Lanham: Lexington Books, ). Bourg, Julian, From Revolution to Ethics: May  and Contemporary French Thought (London: McGill Queen’s University Press, ). Bracher, Karl Dietrich, The Age of Ideologies: A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century, trans. Ewald Osers (London: Methuen, ). Breaugh Martin, Christopher Holman, Rachel Magnussen, Paul Pazzocchi, and Devin Penner (eds.), Thinking Radical Democracy: The Return of Politics in Post-war France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ). Breckman, Warren, Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, ). Breckman, Warren, Peter E. Gordon, Dirk A. Moses, Samuel Moyn, and Elliot Neaman (eds.), The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory. Essays in Honour of Martin Jay (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, ). Brower, Daniel, R., The New Jacobins: The French Communist Party and the Popular Front (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, ). Brown, Wendy, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, ). Buchanan, Tom, Europe’s Troubled Peace, – (Oxford: Blackwell, ). Burgin, Angus, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, ). Burrin, Philipppe, La dérive fasciste: Doriot, Déat, Bergery, – (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ).

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Burrow, J.W., The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, – (London: Yale University Press, ). Canto-Sperber, Monique, Les règles de la liberté (Paris: Plon, ). Le libéralisme et la gauche (Paris: Hachette Littératures, ). Canto-Sperber, Monique et Tenzer, Nicolas, Faut-il sauver le libéralisme? (Paris: Grasset, ). Casanova, Jean-Claude (ed.), Science et conscience de la société: mélanges en l’honneur de Raymond Aron, deux tomes (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, ). Castiglione, Dario and Hampsher Monk, Iain (eds.), The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Catalano, Joseph S., A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, ). Caute, David, Communism and the French Intellectuals, – (London: Andre Deutsch, ). Chabal, Emile (ed.), France since the s: History, Politics and Memory in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Bloomsbury, ). A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Chamboredon, Jean-Claude (ed.), Raymond Aron, la philosophie de l’histoire et les sciences sociales, colloque organisé à l’École normale supérieure en  (Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm, ). Chaplin, Tamara, Turning on the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Châton, Gwendal, Introduction à Raymond Aron (Paris: La Découverte, ). Christofferson, Michael Scott, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the s (Oxford: Berghahn Books, ). Clark, Terry Nichols, Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). Clouet, Stéphane, De la rénovation à l’utopie socialistes: Révolution Constructive, un groupe d’intellectuels socialistes des années  (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, ). Cohen-Solal, Annie, Sartre: A Life (London: Heinemann, ). Cointet, Jean-Paul, Marcel Déat: du socialisme au national-socialisme (Paris: Perrin, ). Coleman, Peter, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, ). Colen, José and Élisabeth Dutartre-Michaut (eds.), The Companion to Raymond Aron (New York: Palgrave, ). Collini, Stefan, Liberalism and Sociology: L.T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England, - (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).

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

Colquhoun, Robert, Raymond Aron: Volume I, The Philosopher in History, – (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, ). Raymond Aron: Volume II, The Sociologist in Society, – (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, ). Cooper, Melinda, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone Books, ). Craiutu, Aurelian, Liberalism Under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires (Lanham: Lexington Books, ). Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ). Daileader, Philip and Philip Whalen (eds.), French Historians, - (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, ). Dard, Olivier, Le rendez-vous manqué des relèves des années  (Paris: PUF, ). Bertrand de Jouvenel (Paris: Perrin, ). Davey, Eleanor, Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Davis, Reed M., A Politics of Understanding: The International Thought of Raymond Aron (Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, ). De Crespigny, Anthony and Minogue, Kenneth (eds.), Contemporary Political Philosophers (London: Methuen, ). De Dijn, Annelien, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Defrasne, Jean, Le pacifisme en France (Paris: PUF, ). Denord, François, Néo-libéralisme version française: histoire d’une idéologie politique (Paris: Demopolis, ). Digeon, Claude, La crise allemande de la pensée français, – (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ). Dobson, Andrew, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of Reason: A Theory of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Dosse, François, History of Structuralism, Volume II: The Sign Sets, – Present, trans. Deborah Glassman (London: University of Minnesota Press, ). La marche des idées: histoire des intellectuels – histoire intellectuelle (Paris: La Découverte, ). La saga des intellectuels français, –: à l’épreuve de l’histoire, – (Paris: Gallimard, ). La saga des intellectuels français, –: l’avenir en miettes, – (Paris: Gallimard, ). Drake, David, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ). French Intellectuals and Politics from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ).

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Dutartre, Élisabeth (ed.), Raymond Aron et la démocratie au XXIe siècle, colloque international organisé tenu les  et  mars  à l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, ). Ellwood, David W., Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America and Postwar Reconstruction (London: Longman, ). Elsenhans, Hartmut, La guerre d’Algérie –. La transition d’une France à une autre. Le passage de la IVe République à la Ve République, trans. Vincent Goupy (Paris: Éditions Publisud, ). Elwitt, Sandford, The Third Republic Defended: Bourgeois Reform in France, – (London: Louisiana State University Press, ). Evans, Martin, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Fawcett, Edmund, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). Fessard, Gaston, La philosophie historique de Raymond Aron (Paris: Julliard, ). Flynn, Thomas R., Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason: Towards an Existentialist Theory of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Fourastié, Jean, Les trente glorieuses ou la révolution invisible de  à  (Paris: Fayard, ). Francis, Claude and Gontier, Fernande, Simone de Beauvoir (London: Minerva, ). Garbe, Daniel, Alfred Fabre-Luce: un non-conformiste dans le tumulte du XXe siècle (Paris: Franois-Xavier de Guibert, ). Gentile, Emilio, Politics as Religion, trans. George Staunton (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, ). Geroulanos, Stefanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ). Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ). Gilman, Nils, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). Girard, Louis, Les libéraux français, – (Paris: Éditions Aubier Montaigne, ). Gleason, Abbott, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Godin, Christian, La totalité: tome , la totalité réalisée. L’Histoire (Seyssel: Éditions Champ Vallon, ). Grémion, Pierre, Paris-Prague: La gauche face au renouveau et à la régression tchécoslovaques, – (Paris: Julliard, ). Intelligence de l’anticommunisme: Le Congrès pour la liberté de la culture à Paris, – (Paris: Fayard, ). Guieu, Jean-Michel, Le Rameau et le glaive. Les militants français pour la Société des Nations (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, ).

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Gutting, Gary, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Hassner, Pierre, Violence and Peace from the Atomic Bomb to Ethnic Cleansing (London: Central European University Press, ). Hartwell, R.M., A History of the Mont Pèlerin Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, ). Hawthorn, Geoffrey, Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Social Theory, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Hazareesingh, Sudhir, Intellectuals and the French Communist Party: Disillusion and Decline (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Intellectual Founders of the Republic: Five Studies in Nineteenth-Century French Republican Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People (London: Allen Lane, ). Hellman, John, The Communitarian Third Way: Alexandre Marc and Ordre Nouveau, – (London: McGill-Queens University Press, ). Heurgon-Desjardins, Anne (ed.), Paul Desjardins et les décades de Pontigny: études, témoignages et documents inédits (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ). Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Hobsbawm, Eric, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, – (London: Abacus, ). Howells, Christina (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Sartre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Howard, Dick, The Specter of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, ). Hughes, H. Stuart, Consciousness and Society (Sussex: The Harvester Press, ). The Obstructed Path: French Social Thought in the Years of Desperation,  (New York: Harper & Row, ). Hulliung, Mark, Citizens and Citoyens: Republicans and Liberals in France and America (London: Harvard University Press, ). Isaac, Joel, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, ). Jackson, Julian, The Politics of Depression in France, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). France: The Dark Years, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Jardin, André, Histoire du libéralisme politique de la crise de l’absolutisme à la constitution de  (Paris: Hachette, ). Jaume, Lucien, L’individu effacé ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français (Paris: Fayard, ).

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La liberté et la loi: les origines philosophiques du libéralisme (Paris: Fayard, ). Jay, Martin, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). Jennings, Jeremy (ed.), Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century France: Mandarins and Samurais (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ). Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France since the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Jennings, Jeremy and Anthony Kemp-Welch (eds.), Intellectuals in Politics from the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie (London: Routledge, ). Jobert, Bruno (ed.), Le tournant néolibéral en Europe: idées et recettes dans les pratiques gouvernementales (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, ). Judt, Tony, Marxism and the French Left: Studies in Labour and Politics in France, - (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, – (Oxford: University of California Press, ). The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (London: University of Chicago Press, ). Postwar: A History of Europe Since  (London: Pimlico, ). Kelly, Duncan, The State of the Political: Conceptions of Politics and the State in the Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz Neumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Kennedy, Ellen, Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Durham and London: Duke University Press, ). Kennedy, Sean, Reconciling France against Democracy: The Croix de Feu and the Parti Social Français, – (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, ). Khilnani, Sunil, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (London: Yale University Press, ). Kleinberg, Ethan, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, – (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ). Kritzman, Lawrence D. (ed.), The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, ). Kuisel, Richard F., Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (London: University of California Press, ). Lallement, Michel, Histoire des idées sociologiques de Parsons aux contemporains (Paris: Armand Colin, ). Lapparent, Olivier de, Raymond Aron et l’Europe: itinéraire d’un Européen dans le siècle (Bern: Peter Lang, ). Larkin, Maurice, France since the Popular Front: Government and People, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Larrouturou, Pierre, Le livre noir du libéralisme (Paris: Éditions du Rocher, ).

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Launay, Stephen, La pensée politique de Raymond Aron (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ). Lefranc, Georges, Le mouvement socialiste sous la troisième République (Paris: PBP, ). Le Strat, Claire and Willy Pelletier, La canonisation libérale de Tocqueville (Paris: Syllepse, ). Le Sueur, James D., Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ). Leterre, Thierry, Alain. Le premier intellectuel (Paris: Éditions Stock, ). Lévy, Michel, Alfred Sauvy: compagnon du siècle (Paris: La Manufacture, ). Leymarie, Michel, Les intellectuels et la politique (Paris: PUF, ). Albert Thibaudet: ‘l’outsider du dedans’ (Villeneuve-d’Asq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, ). Lichtheim, George, Marxism in Modern France (New York and London: Columbia University Press, ). Liebowitz, Nathan, Daniel Bell and the Agony of Modern Liberalism (London: Greenwood Press, ). Lilla, Mark (ed.), New French Thought: Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). Logue, William, From Philosophy to Sociology: The Evolution of French Liberalism, – (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, ). Losurdo, Domenico, Liberalism: A Counter-History, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, ). Lottman, Herbert R., The Left Bank: Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War (London: Heinemann, ). Loubet del Bayle, Jean-Louis, Les non-conformistes des années : une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Machelon, Jean-Pierre, La République contre les libertés? (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, ). Madelin, Alain (dir.), Aux sources du modèle libérale français (Paris: Perrin, ). Mahoney, Daniel J., The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron: A Critical Introduction (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, ). Mahoney, Daniel J. and Frost, Bryan-Paul (eds.), Political Reason in the Age of Ideology: Essays in Honour of Raymond Aron (New Brunswick: Transaction, ). Maier, Charles S., In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Maier, Hans (ed.), Totalitarianism and Political Religions: Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships, three volumes, translated by Jodi Bruhn (Abingdon: Routledge,  and ). Malia, Martin, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia (New York: The Free Press, ). Malis, Christian, Raymond Aron et le débat stratégique français, - (Paris: Economica, ).

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Mazower, Mark, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, ). McCormick, John P., Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Meadowcroft, James (ed.), The Liberal Political Tradition: Contemporary Reappraisals (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, ). Mélonio, Françoise, Tocqueville et les Français (Paris: Aubier, ). Merlio, Gilbert (ed.), Ni gauche, ni droite: les chassés–croisés idéologiques des intellectuels français et allemands dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Talence: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme d’Aquitaine, ). Mesure, Sylvie, Raymond Aron et la raison historique (Paris: Vrin, ). Michaud, Guy (dir.), Tendances politiques dans la vie française depuis  (Paris: Hachette, ). Mirowski, Philip and Plehwe, Dieter (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neo-Liberal Thought Collective (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, ). Mishra, Pankaj, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (London: Allen Lane, ). Monnet, François, Refaire la République: André Tardieu, une dérive réactionnaire (–) (Paris: Fayard, ). Mouric, Joël, Raymond Aron et l’Europe (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, ). Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, ). Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ). Mu¨ller, Jan-Werner, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). Nisbet, Robert A., The Sociological Tradition (London: Transaction, ). Noiriel, Gérard, Dire la vérité au pouvoir: les intellectuels en question (Marseille: Agone, ). Nord, Philip, France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, ). Noronha-DiVanna, Isabel, Writing History in the Third Republic (Newcastleupon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, ). Ory, Pascal et Sirinelli, Jean-François, Les intellectuels en France de l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours, deuxième édition (Paris: Armand Colin, ). O’Sullivan, Noel, European Political Thought Since  (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ). Pangle, Thomas L., Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism: A Commentary on The Spirit of the Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Passmore, Kevin, The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Pels, Dick, The Intellectual as Stranger: Studies in Spokespersonship (London and New York: Routledge, ).

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Philip, Loïc, Histoire de la pensée politique en France de  à nos jours (Paris: Economica, ). Picketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, ). Pierce, Roy, Contemporary French Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Pitts, Jennifer, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). Plot, Martin (ed.), Claude Lefort: Thinker of the Political ed. Martin Plot (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ). Pont, Jean-Claude and Flavia Padovani (eds.), Louis Rougier: vie et oeuvre d’un philosophe engagé (Paris: Éditions Kimé, ). Prasad, Monica, The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Prochasson, Christophe, Les intellectuels, le socialisme et la guerre, – (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Saint-Simon, ou l’anti-Marx: Figures du Saint-Simonisme français xix xx siècles (Paris: Perrin, ). François Furet, les chemins de la mélancolie (Paris: Éditions Stock, ). Ricci, David M., The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). Rieffel, Rémy, La tribu des clercs: les intellectuels sous la Ve République (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, ). Riera, Monica and Schaffer, Gavin (eds.), The Lasting War: Society and Identity in Britain, France and Germany after  (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ). Rioux, Jean-Pierre, La France de la IVe République, I: L’ardeur et la nécessité – (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). La France de la IVe République, II: l’expansion et l’impuissance – (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Rodgers, Daniel T., Age of Fracture (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, ). Rosenblatt, Helena, The Lost History of Liberalism from Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). Rosenboim, Or, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, – (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). Ross, Kristin, May ’ and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Rudelle, Odile, La République absolue: aux origines de l’instabilité constitutionnelle de la France républicaine, – (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, ). Ruggiero, Guido de, The History of European Liberalism, trans. by R.G. Collingwood (London: Oxford University Press, ).

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Runciman, David, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, ). Sapiro, Gisèle, The French Writers’ War, –, trans. Vanessa Doriott Anderson and Dorrit Cohn (Durham: Duke University Press, ). Sassoon, Donald, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (London: Harper Collins, ). Sawyer, Stephen W. and Iain Stewart (eds.), In Search of the Liberal Moment: Democracy, Anti-totalitarianism and Intellectual Politics in France since  (New York: Palgrave, ). Schecter, Darrow, The History of the Left from Marx to the Present: Theoretical Perspectives (New York: Continuum, ). Schiffer, Daniel Salvatore, Les intellos ou la dérive d’une caste (Laussanne: Éditions L’Age d’Homme, ). Schooyans, Michel La dérive totalitaire du libéralisme (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, ). Schrift, Alan D., Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, ). Scott-Smith, Giles, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and Post-War American Hegemony (London: Routledge, ). Scott-Smith, Giles and Krabbendam, Hans (eds.), The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, – (London: Frank Cass Publishers, ). Sewell Jr., William H., Logics of History: Social Theory and Transformation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, ). Shennan, Andrew, Rethinking France: Plans for Renewal, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Shepard, Todd, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ). Shipway, Martin Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of Colonial Empires (Oxford: Blackwell, ). Shurts, Sarah, Resentment and the Right: French Intellectual Identity Reimagined, – (Newark: University of Delaware Press, ). Sirinelli, Jean-François, Génération intellectuel: khâgneux et normaliens dans l’entredeux-guerres (Paris: Fayard, ). Intellectuels et passions françaises: manifestes et pétitions au XXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, ). Deux intellectuels dans le siècle: Sartre et Aron (Paris: Fayard, ). Slezkine, Yuri, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, ). Slobodian, Quinn, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, ). Snyder, Timothy, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (London: The Bodley Head, ).

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Soulez, Philippe (ed.), La guerre et les philosophes de la fin des années  aux années  (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, ). Spitz, Jean-Fabien, Le moment républicain en France (Paris: Gallimard, ). Steadman Jones, Daniel, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). Stern, Ludmila, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, –: From Red Square to the Left Bank (London and New York: Routledge, ). Sternhell, Zeev, La droite révolutionnaire: – les origines françaises du fascisme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, ). Stoffaës, Christian, Psychanalyse de l’antilibéralisme: les français ont-ils raison d’avoir peur? (Paris: Éditions Saint-Simon, ). Stonor Saunders, Frances, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, ). Stromberg, Roland N., European Intellectual History Since  (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, ). Swedberg, Richard, Sociology as Disenchantment: The Evolution of the Work of Georges Gurvitch (New Jersey: Humanities Press, ). Todorov, Tzvetan, The Morals of History, trans. Alyson Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ). Touchard, Jean, La gauche en France depuis  (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Turner, Rachel S., Neo-Liberal Ideology: History, Concepts and Politics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ). Verstraeten, Pierre, L’anti-Aron (Paris: La Différence, ). Viellard, Marc, Contre Tocqueville (Paris: Le Temps des Cerises, ). Vincent, Andrew (ed.), Political Theory: Tradition and Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Vincent, Andrew The Nature of Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Waddicor, Mark, Montesquieu and the Philosophy of Natural Law (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, ). Weber, Eugen, The Hollow Years: France in the s (London: W.W. Norton & Co., ). Welch, Cheryl B. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Wieviorka, Olivier, Les orphelins de la République: destinées des députés et des sénateurs français, - (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Winock, Michel, Histoire politique de la revue Esprit, – (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Le siècle des intellectuels, deuxième édition (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Wohl, Robert, The Generation of  (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ). Wolin, Richard, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the s (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, ).

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Zeldin, Theodore, France –: Volume One, Ambition, Love and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Žižek, Slavoj, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London: Verso, ). SECONDARY SOURCES: ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS Anderson, Brian C., ‘The Aronian renewal’, First Things,  (March ), –. Anderson, Amanda, ‘Character and ideology: the case of Cold War liberalism’, New Literary History,  (Spring ), –. Antonio, Roberto J., ‘After post-modernism: reactionary tribalism’, American Journal of Sociology,  (July ), –. Aronson, Ronald, ‘Sartre and the dialectic: the purposes of the Critique, II’, Yale French Studies,  (), –. Audier, Serge, ‘Introduction aux Idées égalitaires de Célestin Bouglé’ in Célestin Bouglé, Les idées égalitaires (Paris: Le Bord de l’Eau, ), –. Baker, Donald M., ‘Two paths to socialism: Marcel Déat and Marceau Pivert’, Journal of Contemporary History,  (January ), –. Berger, Guy, ‘Les Français et la raison économique: Raymond Aron commentateur économique dans les années –’, Commentaire, - (Winter ), –. Blandin, Claire, ‘Les interventions des intellectuels de droite dans Le Figaro littéraire’, Vingtième siècle,  (October-December ), –. Blondiaux, Loic, ‘Comment rompre avec Durkheim? Jean Stœtzel et la sociologie française de l’après-guerre (–)’, Revue française de sociologie,  (July–September ), –. Boyer, Alain, ‘Le fait des hommes: Raymond Aron et l’individualisme méthodologique’, Cahiers de philosophie politique et juridique,  (), –. Brandom, Eric, ‘Liberalism and rationalism at the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, –’, French Historical Studies,  (October ), –. Breckman, Warren, ‘Democracy between disenchantment and political theology: French post-Marxism and the return of religion’, New German Critique,  (Winter ), –. Breitling, Rupert, ‘The concept of pluralism’ in Stanislaw Ehrlich and Graham Wootton (eds.), Three Faces of Pluralism: Political, Ethnic, Religious (Farnborough: Gower, ), –. Brillant, Bernard, ‘Les ombres changeantes de mai ’, Vingtième siècle,  (February ), –. Burrin, Philippe, ‘Political religion: the relevance of a concept’, History and Memory,  (Fall ), –. Busino, Giovanni, ‘La destinée de la sociologie Parétienne en France’, L’année sociologique,  (), –. Campbell, Stuart L., ‘The four Paretos of Raymond Aron’, Journal of the History of Ideas,  (April–June ), –.

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‘Raymond Aron: the making of a Cold Warrior’, Historian,  (August ), –. Canto-Sperber, Monique, ‘Pourquoi les démocrates ne veulent-ils pas être libéraux?’, Le Débat,  (September–October ), –. Caye, Pierre, ‘Liberté et pouvoir démocratiques dans la philosophie de Raymond Aron’, Cahiers de philosophie politique et juridique,  (), –. Chappel, James, ‘The Catholic origins of totalitarianism theory in interwar Europe’, Modern Intellectual History,  (November ), –. Chapman, Herrick, ‘Modernity and national identity in postwar France’, French Historical Studies,  (Spring ), –. Châton, Gwendal, ‘Désaccord parfait: le Contrepoint libéral dans les configurations intellectuels des années soixante-dix’ in Jean Baudouin et François Hournant (eds.), Les revues et la dynamique des ruptures (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, ), –. ‘Libéralisme ou démocratie? Raymond Aron lecteur de Friedrich Hayek’, Revue de philosophie économique,  (), –. Clarke, Jackie, ‘Engineering a new order in the s: the case of Jean Coutrot’, French Historical Studies,  (Winter ), –. Conway, Martin, ‘Democracy in postwar Western Europe: the triumph of a political model’, European History Quarterly,  (January ), –. Cornick, Martin, ‘Catalyst for intellectual engagement: the serialisation of Julien Benda’s La trahison des clercs in the Nouvelle revue française, –’, French Cultural Studies,  (February ), –. Crapez, Marc, ‘Raymond Aron, homme de gauche?’, Controverses,  (March ), –. Dard, Olivier, ‘Voyage à l’intérieur d’X-Crise’, Vingtième siècle,  (July– September ), –. Davis, Reed, ‘The phenomenology of Raymond Aron’, European Journal of Political Theory,  (October ), –. Denord, François, ‘Aux origines du néo-libéralisme en France: Louis Rougier et le Colloque Walter Lippmann de ’, Le mouvement social,  (April–June ), –. Dieckmann, Herbert, ‘French existentialism before Sartre’, Yale French Studies,  (), –. D’Iribarne, Philippe, ‘Trois figures de la liberté’, Annales  (September–October, ), –. Draus, Franciszek, ‘Le politique dans la pensée de Raymond Aron’, Cahiers de philosophie politique et juridique,  (), –. Drochon, Hugo, ‘Raymond Aron’s “Machiavellian” liberalism’, Journal of the History of Ideas,  (October ), –. Drouard, Alain, ‘Réflexions sur une chronologie: le développement des sciences sociales en France de  à la fin des années soixante, Revue française de sociologie,  (January–March ), –.

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Duong, Kevin, ‘Does democracy end in terror? Transformations of antitotalitarianism in postwar France’, Modern Intellectual History,  (June ), –. Favre, Pierre, ‘La science politique en France depuis ’, International Political Science Review, : (), –. Ferry, Luc et Renaut, Alain, ‘Droits-libertés et droits-créances: Raymond Aron critique de Friedrich von Hayek’, Droits,  (January ), –. Flynn, Thomas R., ‘L’imagination au pouvoir: the evolution of Sartre’s political and social thought’, Political Theory,  (May ), –. Frost, Bryan-Paul, ‘Raymond Aron’s “Peace and War”, thirty years later’, International Journal,  (Spring ), –. Gallie, W.B., ‘An ambiguity in the idea of politics and its practical implications’, Political Studies,  (December ), –. Geenens, Raf, ‘“When I was young and politically engaged. . .” Lefort on the problem of political commitment’, Thesis Eleven,  (November ), –. Genieys, William, ‘The sociology of political elites in France: The end of an exception?’, International Political Science Review,  (October ), –. Goldman, Lawrence, ‘A peculiarity of the English? The Social Science Association and the absence of sociology in nineteenth-century Britain’, Past and Present,  (February ), –. Gould, John, ‘Tocqueville beyond the post-Cold War’, European Journal of Political Theory,  (October ), –. Gowan, Richard, ‘Raymond Aron, the history of ideas and the idea of France’, European Journal of Political Theory,  (October ), –. Goyard-Fabre, Simone, ‘Le libéralisme de Raymond Aron’, Cahiers de philosophie politique et juridique,  (), –. Green, S.J.D., ‘The Closing of the American Mind Revisited’, The Antioch Review,  (Spring ), –. Grémion, Pierre, ‘Les sociologues et : notes de recherche’, Le Débat,  (March–April ), –. Griffiths, Richard, ‘Fascism and the planned economy: ‘neo-socialism’ and ‘planisme’ in France and Belgium in the s’, Science and Society,  (October ), –. Haim Hacohen, Malachi, ‘The strange fact that the State of Israel exists: The Cold War liberals between cosmopolitanism and nationalism’, Jewish Social Studies,  (Winter ), –. Hassner, Pierre, ‘Raymond Aron and the history of the twentieth century’, International Studies Quarterly,  (March ), –. Hatier, Cécile, ‘The liberal message of Raymond Aron: a substantial legacy’, review article, European Journal of Political Theory,  (October ), –. Heilbron, Johan, ‘Les métamorphoses du durkheimisme’, Revue française de sociologie,  (April–June ), –.

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Hodges, Donald Clark, ‘The end of the end of ideology’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology,  (April ), –. Hoffmann, Stanley, ‘Raymond Aron and the theory of international relations’, International Studies Quarterly,  (March ), –. Horn, Gerd-Rainer, ‘From “radical” to “realistic”: Hendrik de Man and the international plan conferences at Pontigny and Geneva, –’, Contemporary European History,  (July ), –. Hyppolite, Jean, ‘A chronology of French existentialism’, Yale French Studies,  (), –. Ingram, James D., ‘The politics of Claude Lefort’s political: between liberalism and radical democracy’, Thesis Eleven,  (November ), –. Isaac, Jeffrey C., ‘Critics of totalitarianism’ in Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Jackson, Ben, ‘At the origins of neo-liberalism: the free economy and the strong state, –’, Historical Journal,  (March ), –. Jainchill, Andrew and Samuel Moyn, ‘French democracy between totalitarianism and solidarity: Pierre Rosanvallon and revisionist historiography’, The Journal of Modern History,  (March ), –. Jay, Martin, ‘Lafayette’s children: the American reception of French liberalism’, SubStance  (), –. Jennings, Jeremy, ‘Raymond Aron and the fate of French liberalism’, European Journal of Political Theory,  (October ), –. Jones, H.S., ‘The Era of Tyrannies: Élie Halévy and Friedrich von Hayek on socialism’, European Journal of Political Theory,  (), –. ‘French Liberalism and the legacy of the Revolution’ in Carolina Armenteros, Tim Blanning, Isabel DiVanna and Dawn Dodds (eds.), Historicising the French Revolution (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, ), –. Jones, H.S. and Iain Stewart, ‘‘Positive political science and the uses of political theory in postwar France: Raymond Aron in context’, History of European Ideas,  (), –. Karady, Victor, ‘Durkheim, les sciences sociales et l’Université: bilan d’un semiéchec’, Revue française de sociologie,  (April–June ), –. Kolodziei, Edward A., ‘Raymond Aron: a critical retrospective and prospective’, International Studies Quarterly  (March ), –. Lecoq, Tristan, ‘Louis Rougier et le néo-libéralisme de l’entre-deux-guerres’, Revue de synthèse,  (April–June ), –. Legros, Robert, ‘Aron, lecteur de Tocqueville’, Le messager européen,  (), –. Lieberman, Sima, ‘The ideological foundations of Western European Planning’, Journal of European Economic History,  (Fall ), –. Lilla, Mark, ‘The other velvet revolution: continental liberalism and its discontents’, Daedalus,  (Spring ), –.



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Logue, William, ‘Sociologie et politique: le libéralisme de Célestin Bouglé’, Revue français de sociologie,  (January–March ), –. Losurdo, Domenico, ‘Towards a critique of the category of totalitarianism’, Historical Materialism  (), –. Luterbacher, Urs, ‘The frustrated commentator: an evaluation of the work of Raymond Aron’, International Studies Quarterly,  (March ), –. Mahoney, Daniel J., ‘Raymond Aron and the morality of prudence’, Modern Age,  (Summer ), –. ‘Aron, Marx and Marxism’, European Journal of Political Theory,  (October ), –. ‘ and the meaning of democracy’, The Intercollegiate Review,  (Fall ), –. ‘A liberal and a classic: Pierre Manent’s neo-Aristotelian reading of Raymond Aron’, Perspectives on Political Science,  (), –. Maier, Charles S., ‘Between Taylorism and technocracy: European ideologies and the vision of industrial productivity in the s’, Journal of Contemporary History,  (April ), –. Manin, Bernard, ‘Montesquieu et la politique moderne’, Cahiers de philosophie politique, – (–), –. McDougall, James, ‘The impossible Republic: the reconquest of Algeria and the decolonization of France, -’, The Journal of Modern History,  (December ), –. Mercer, Ben, ‘The paperback revolution: mass circulation books and the cultural origins of  in western Europe’, Journal of the History of Ideas,  (October ), –. Mesure, Sylvie, ‘De l’antipositivisme à l’antirelativisme: Raymond Aron et le problème de l’objectivité historique’, Commentaire,  (Autumn ), –. ‘Objectivité théorique et objectivité pratique chez Raymond Aron’, Cahiers de philosophie politique et juridique,  (), –. Moyn, Samuel, ‘On the intellectual origins of François Furet’s masterpiece’, The Tocqueville Review  (), –. ‘Concepts of the political in twentieth-century European thought’ in Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. ‘Human rights and the crisis of liberalism’ in Stephen Hopgood, Jack Snyder and Leslie Vinjamuri (eds.), Human Rights Futures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. ‘Before – and beyond – the liberalism of fear’ in Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess (eds.), Between Utopianism and Realism: The Political Thought of Judith Shklar (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, ). Mu¨ller, Jan-Werner, ‘Fear and Freedom: On “Cold War Liberalism”’, European Journal of Political Theory,  (January ), –. Netter, Marie-Laurence, ‘Raymond Aron and the French Revolution’, European Journal of Political Theory,  (October ), –.

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

North, Richard, ‘Political realism: introduction’, European Journal of Political Theory,  (October ), –. Pangle, Thomas L., ‘Political theory in contemporary France: towards a renaissance of liberal political philosophy?’, International Political Science  (Autumn ), –. Passmore, Kevin, ‘L’historiographie du fascisme en France’, French Historical Studies,  (August ), –. Pierce, Roy, ‘Liberalism and democracy in the thought of Raymond Aron’, The Journal of Politics,  (February ), –. Pierré-Caps, Stéphane, ‘Albert Camus, le fédéralisme et l’Algérie’, Civitas Europa,  (), –. Prasad, Monica, ‘Why is France so French? Culture, institutions, and neoliberalism, -’, American Journal of Sociology,  (September ), –. Rabinbach, Anson, ‘Moments of totalitarianism’, History and Theory,  (February ), –. Racine-Furland, Nicole, ‘La revue Europe -. Du pacifisme rollandien à l’antifascisme compagnon de route’, Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps,  (), –. Raynaud, Philippe, ‘Raymond Aron et le droit international’, Cahiers de philosophie politique et juridique,  (), –. ‘Qu’est-ce que le libéralisme?’, Commentaire,  (Summer ), –. Richter, Melvin, ‘Raymond Aron as political theorist’, Political Theory,  (May ), –. Rosanvallon, Pierre, ‘Histoire des idées keynésiennes en France’, Revue française d’économie,  (Autumn ), –. Rosenboim, Or, ‘Amica America: Raymond Aron’s views on Franco-American relations in ’, The Tocqueville Review,  (), –. Rousseas, Stephen W. and Farganis, James, ‘American politics and the end of ideology’, The British Journal of Sociology,  (December ), –. Roussellier, Nicolas, ‘André Tardieu et la crise du constitutionalisme libéral, –’, Vingtième siècle,  (), –. Sandel, Michael J., ‘Liberalism and republicanism: Friends or foes? A reply to Richard Dagger’, The Review of Politics,  (Spring ), –. Sawyer, Stephen W. and Iain Stewart, ‘The search continues’, Politics, Religion & Ideology,  (), –. Schalk, David L., ‘La trahison des clercs –  and later’, French Historical Studies,  (Autumn ), –. ‘Professors as watchdogs: Paul Nizan’s theory of the intellectual in politics’, Journal of the History of Ideas,  (April–June ), –. Schrift, Alan D., ‘The effects of the agrégation de philosophie on twentiethcentury French philosophy’, Journal of the History of Philosophy,  (), –.



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Scott Christofferson, Michael, ‘An anti-totalitarian history of the French Revolution: François Furet’s Penser la Révolution française in the intellectual politics of the late s’, French Historical Studies,  (Fall ), –. Scott-Smith, Giles, ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the end of ideology and the  Milan conference: defining the parameters of discourse’, Journal of Contemporary History,  (July ), –. Sirinelli, Jean-François, ‘Quand Aron était à gauche de Sartre’, Le Monde dimanche,  (January ). ‘Raymond Aron avant Raymond Aron (-)’, Vingtième siècle,  (April ), –. ‘Effets d’âge et phénomènes de génération dans le milieu intellectuel français’, Cahiers de l’IHTP,  (November ), –. ‘Les khâgneux et normaliens des années : un rameau de la “génération de ”’, Cahiers de l’IHTP,  (November ), –. Steinmetz-Jenkins, Daniel, ‘Why did Raymond Aron write that Carl Schmitt was not a Nazi? An alternative genealogy of French liberalism’, Modern Intellectual History, (November ), –. Stewart, Iain, ‘Existentialist manifesto or conservative political science? Problems in interpreting Raymond Aron’s Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire’, European Review of History - Revue européenne d’histoire,  (April ), –. ‘Sartre, Aron, and the contested legacy of the anti-positivist turn in French thought, -’, Sartre Studies International,  (Summer ), –. ‘Plurality and universality in the political thought of Raymond Aron’ in Joanne Paul et al. (eds.), Governing Diversities: Democracy, Diversity and Human Nature (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, ). ‘France’s anti- liberal revival’ in Emile Chabal (ed.), France since the s: History, Politics and Memory in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Bloomsbury, ), –. ‘The origins of the “end of ideology”? Raymond Aron and industrial civilisation’ in José Colen and Elisabeth Dutartre-Michaut (eds.), The Companion to Raymond Aron (New York: Palgrave, ), –. ‘From Pétain to Pinochet: Raymond Aron, Henry Kissinger and the problem of political realism’, The Tocqueville Review,  (), –. Stoffaës, Christian, ‘La ‘société industrielle trente ans après’, Commentaire, – (Winter ), –. Stowers, Stanley, ‘The concepts of ‘religion’, ‘political religion’ and the study of Nazism’, Journal of Contemporary History,  (January ), –. Streeck, Wolfgang, ‘Flexible employment, flexible families, and the socialization of reproduction’ in Florian Coulmas and Ralph Lu¨tzeler (eds.), Imploding Families in Japan and Germany: Comparison (Leiden: Brill, ), –. Strong, Tracey B., ‘History and choices: the foundations of the political thought of Raymond Aron’, History and Theory,  (), –.

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

Swartz, David L., ‘From critical sociology to public intellectual: Pierre Bourdieu and politics’, Theory and Society,  (December ), –. Thiele, Leslie Paul, ‘Heidegger, history, and hermeneutics’, The Journal of Modern History,  (September ), –. Thomson, David, ‘The three worlds of Raymond Aron’, International Affairs,  (January ), –. Tommissen, Piet, ‘Raymond Aron face à Carl Schmitt’, Schmittiana,  (), –. Van de Graaff, John H., ‘The politics of innovation in French higher education: the University Institutes of Technology’, Higher Education,  (May ), –. Vergez-Chaignon, ‘Le tombeau d’une génération: quarante ans de critique de mai ’, Le Débat,  (March–April ), –. Vogt, W. Paul, ‘Un durkheimien ambivalent: Célestin Bouglé, -’, Revue française de sociologie,  (January–March ), –. Waite, Geoffrey, ‘Heidegger and/or Cassirer at Davos’, Political Theory,  (), –. Winock, Michel, ‘Les intellectuels dans le siècle’, Vingtième siècle,  (April ), –. ‘Les générations intellectuels’, Vingtième siècle,  (April–June ), –. Whiteside, Kerry H., ‘Perspectivism and historical objectivity: Maurice MerleauPonty’s covert dialogue with Raymond Aron’, History and Theory,  (May ), –. Wilder, Joseph C., ‘Raymond Aron’s pragmatic liberalism’, The Review of Politics,  (Winter ), –. Wolin, Richard, ‘Carl Schmitt, political existentialism, and the total state’, Theory and Society,  (August ), –. Wright, Julian, ‘The state and the left in modern France’, French History,  (December ), –. Zakaria, Fareed, ‘The rise of illiberal democracy’, Foreign Affairs,  (NovemberDecember ), –. Zolberg, Aristide R., ‘Moments of madness’, Politics and Society,  (March ), –. SECONDARY SOURCES ON THEORY AND METHODOLOGY Bevir, Mark, ‘Mind and method in the history of ideas’, History and Theory,  (May ), –. ‘On tradition’, Humanitas, : (), –. ‘How to be an intentionalist’, History and Theory,  (May ), –. Bloom, Harold, ‘Antithetical criticism: an introduction’, Diacritics,  (Winter ), –. Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘Intellectual field and creative project’, trans. Sîan France, Social Science Information,  (April ), –.



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Camic, Charles, ‘Reputation and predecessor selection: Parsons and the institutionalists’, American Sociological Review,  (August ), –. Cannadine, David (ed.), What Is History Now? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ). Chartier, Roger, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (London: Duke University Press, ). Frohnen, Bruce, ‘Tradition, habit, and social interaction: a response to Mark Bevir’, Humanitas,  (), –. Gadamar, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, second edition, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, ). Gross, Neil, ‘Becoming a pragmatist philosopher: status, self-concept and intellectual choice’, American Sociological Review,  (February ), –. Gunnel, John G., ‘The myth of the tradition’, The American Political Science Review,  (March ), –. Janssen, Peter L., ‘Political thought as traditionary action: the critical response to Skinner and Pocock’, History and Theory,  (May ), –. Jones, Adrian, ‘Reporting in prose: reconsidering ways of writing history’, The European Lecgacy,  (June ), –. Kelley, Donald R., ‘Intellectual history in a global age’, Journal of the History of Ideas,  (April ), –. Kurzman, Charles and Lynn Owens, ‘The sociology of intellectuals’, Annual Review of Sociology,  (), –. LaCapra, Dominick, ‘Intellectual history and reading texts’, History and Theory,  (October ), –. MacIntyre, Alisdair, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, ). McMahon, Darrin M. and Samuel Moyn (eds.), Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Pels, Dick, ‘Three spaces of social theory: towards a political geography of knowledge’, The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie,  (Winter ), –. Pocock, J.G.A., Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Ringer, Fritz, ‘The intellectual field, intellectual history, and the sociology of knowledge’, Theory and Society,  (June ), –. Samuel, Raphael, ‘Reading the signs II: fact grubbers and mind-readers’, History Workshop Journal,  (Spring ), –. Skinner, Quentin, Visions of Politics I: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Toews, John E., ‘Intellectual history after the linguistic turn: the autonomy of meaning and the irreducibility of experience’, American Historical Review,  (October ), –. Tully, James (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ).

Select Bibliography



Veyne, Paul, Writing History: Essays on Epistemology, trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolueri (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ). White, Hayden V., ‘The burden of history’, History and Theory,  (), –. U N P U B LI S HE D T H E S E S Chappel, James Gregory, ‘Slaying the Leviathan: Catholicism and the Rebirth of European Conservatism, -’ (Columbia University, PhD thesis, ). Châton, Gwendal, ‘La liberté retrouvée: une histoire du libéralisme politique en France à travers les revues Aroniennes Contrepoint et Commentaire (PhD thesis, Université de Rennes , ). Hatier, Cécile, ‘Liberal Minds: A Comparison of the Political Thought of Raymond Aron and Isaiah Berlin’ (University of Birmingham, PhD thesis, ). ONLINE SOURCES Le Conseil national de la Résistance, Programme du Conseil national de la Résistance [March ], felina.pagesperso-orange.fr/social/programme_cnr.htm [accessed  July ] Anon, ‘À Bercy, Sarkozy attaque les ‘héritiers de mai ’, L’Express [//], www.lexpress.fr/actualite/politique/a-bercy-sarkozy-attaque-les-heritiers-de-mai_.html [accessed  July ] Clemenceau, Georges, ‘Discours prononcé à la chambre des députés le  janvier www.assemblee-nationale.fr/decouvrir-l-assemblee/histoire/grands’, moments-d-eloquence/georges-clemenceau--janvier- [accessed  July ] Foucault, Michel and Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze” [], libcom.org/library/ intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze [accessed  July ] Laurent, Vincent, ‘Enquête sur la Fondation Saint-Simon: les architectes du social-libéralisme’, Le Monde diplomatique [septembre, ], www.mondediplomatique.fr///LAURENT/ [accessed  July ] Moyn, Samuel, ‘Judith Shklar’s critique of Cold War liberalism’, The Nicolai Rubenstein Lecture, , available online at www.youtube.com/watch?v= yiHOdaXoY [accessed  December ] Mu¨ller, Jan-Werner, ‘What Cold War liberalism can teach us today’, The New York Review of Books,  November , www.nybooks.com/daily/// /what-cold-war-liberalism-can-teach-us-today/ [accessed  December ] Quinton, François, ‘Entretien avec Jean-Claude Casanova’ [//], www.non fiction.fr/article--entretien_avec_jean_claude_casanova__video.htm [accessed  July ]

Index

Alain (Émile Chartier), , –, ,  Althusser, Louis,  Anderson, Perry,  Anti-fascism, –, –, –, , ,  as historical sensibility, –, , , –, ,  Popular Front, –, , , –, –, , , ,  economic policy of, –, – Resistance and, , – Antitotalitarianism, –, –, , –, , , –, , – antitotalitarian moment of the s, –, , , , –, , –, –, –, , –, , , , – Arendt, Hannah, , –,  Aristotle, ,  Aron, Raymond Algeria and the Republic,  anti-communism, , , , –, –, ,  Atlanticism, ,  childhood, ,  Cold War commentary, , – critique of intellectual anti-fascism, –, – critique of intellectual collaborationism, – critique of the Third Republic, –,  decolonisation, – Algeria, , –,  Indochina, –,  Democracy and Totalitarianism, –, – influence on Claude Lefort, –, –,  democracy, theory of, –, –, –, –, , –, –, –



Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society, –, ,  elite theory and, , , , –, – Essai sur la théorie de l’histoire dans l’Allemagne contemporaine, ,  Essais sur le Machiavélisme moderne, , ,  Essay on Liberties,  German Sociology, – critique of Mannheim in, – In Defense of Decadent Europe, – intellectual ethic of responsibility, –, –, , –, –,  Introduction à la philosophie politique, –, –,  Introduction to the Philosophy of History, –, –, , ,  Aron’s dissatisfaction with, , , – causal explanation in, , – changes to later editions,  critique of Durkheim in, – critique of Marxism in, –, – dissolution of the object in, , –,  existentialism and, , , , , – German anti-positivist tradition and, – Heidegger’s influence in, , –,  importance for Aron’s political thought, –, –, –, – influence on Aron’s interpretation of Montesquieu, – influence on Maurice Merleau-Ponty,  influence on Sartre, , , – interpretative understanding (Verstehen) in, , –, – knowledge of self in, –, – objective spirit in, –, – phenomenology in, ,  reception of, ,  relativism of, , , , –, –, –

Index reorientation of French philosophy and, – Weber’s influence in, –, –,  Jewish identity, ,  Le grand schisme, – liberalism, –, –, –, , , –, , –, –, –, –, , –, –, – living in Germany, –, , , –, , ,  living in London, ,  Main Currents in Sociological Thought, –, –, –, –, –, – ‘French school of political sociology’ in, , –, –, , –,  consensus gap in postwar French sociology and, –, – Opium of the Intellectuals, , , , ,  pacifism, –, , , , –,  Progress and Disillusion, –,  realism, , , –, , ,  socialism, –, –, , , –, ,  student at the École normale supérieure, –, –, –, –,  The Algerian Tragedy, – The Century of Total War, , ,  The Elusive Revolution, –,  theory of totalitarianism, , , –, –, –, –, – critique of Élie Halévy and, –, , ,  critique of Hannah Arendt and, –, – influence of Carl Schmitt on, –, –, , – secular religion and, –, ,  Autogestion, , – Baechler, Jean,  Balandier, Georges,  Barre, Raymond,  Basch, Victor, , –, – Baudin, Louis,  n. Baverez, Nicolas,  Bell, Daniel,  n., ,  Benda, Julien, –,  Berlin, Isaiah, ,  n. Bismarck, Otto von,  Bloom, Allan,  Blum, Léon, , –,  Bouglé, Célestin, , , , , –, –, , 



Bourricaud, François,  Brunschvicg, Léon, –, , ,  n. Burnham, James, –,  Buron, Robert,  n. Camus, Albert,  Canguilhem, Georges,  Cartier, Raymond,  n. Casanova, Jean-Claude, – Castoriadis, Cornelius, ,  n. Clemenceau, Georges,  Cold War liberalism, , –, , , , , , , , –, –, See also ‘Antitotalitarianism’ and ‘End of Ideology’ Commentaire, , , , , –, , –, –,  Communism, ,  as secular religion, , , , , , , , –, , –, , – Jacobinism and, , –, , ,  Parti communiste français (PCF), , , , , , –, –, –, –, , ,  Soviet Union (USSR), , –, , –, –, –, –, – Comte, Auguste, –, , –, –, – Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT), , ,  Congress for Cultural Freedom, , , –, , –, –, , , –, –,  Constant, Benjamin, , , , , , , –, , – Contrepoint, , –, , –,  Crosland, Anthony,  n. Crossman, Richard,  n. Dahl, Robert,  Daniel, Jean, – Davy, Georges, – Déat, Marcel, , , , , –,  Decolonisation, – Deleuze, Gilles, , – Descartes, René, – Detoeuf, Auguste,  Deutscher, Isaac,  Devedjian, Patrick, – Dilthey, Wilhelm, –, –, ,  Doriot, Jacques, – Downs, Anthony,  n. Dreyfus Affair, , –, , ,  Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre,  Durkheim, Émile, , , –, , –, , –, –, 



Index

École nationale d’administration, , ,  École normale supérieure, ,  Centre de documentation sociale, , , –, , ,  Groupe d’études des socialistes des Écoles normales supérieures (GESENS), –, – Groupe d’étudiants socialistes, – Groupement universitaire pour la Société des Nations (GUSDN), –,  End of ideology, –, , , , –, –, , –, –, –,  economic planning and, –, – industrial society and, , , , – political theory and, , –, – Fabre-Luce, Alfred, , , –, , , – Faguet, Émile,  Fascism, –, – French fascism, , –, –, –, –, – National Socialism, –, , –,  Fauconnet, Paul,  Fessard, Gaston,  Fontaine, André, – Foucault, Michel, , , – Fourier, Charles, ,  Freund, Julien,  Friedmann, Georges,  n.,  Fukuyama, Francis,  Fumaroli, Marc,  Furet, François, , – Gaitskell, Hugh,  Gauchet, Marcel, , ,  n. Gaulle, Charles de, , , –,  Girardet, Raoul,  n. Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, , – Glucksmann, André,  Goguel, François,  n. Guattari, Félix,  Guizot, François, ,  Gurvitch, Georges, –, , , – Halbwachs, Maurice,  Halévy, Élie, , –, –, , , , –, , , –, –, ,  Hayek, Friedrich von, , , ,  n., , –,  Healey, Denis,  n. Heidegger, Martin, , , , –,  Hirsch, Étienne, , 

Hitler, Adolf, , , ,  Hoffmann, Stanley,  n. Hubert, René, – Husserl, Edmund,  Hyppolite, Jean,  Industrial society. See ‘End of ideology’ Institut Raymond Aron, , ,  Intellectuals Algerian War and, – Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes, , ,  debates over responsibilities of, –, , – philocommunism and,  Jaspers, Karl, , ,  Jenkins, Roy,  n. Jouvenel, Bertrand de, , , , , ,  n.,  n.,  Keynes, John Maynard,  Kojève, Alexandre,  n. Labarthe, André, ,  Lacan, Jacques, , , ,  Lacoste, Robert,  Lagache, Daniel,  Langevin, Paul,  Lassalle, Ferdinand,  Lefebvre, Henri,  n. Lefort, Claude, , , –, , –, –, –, – Lefranc, Georges, ,  Leftism,  Lenin, Vladimir,  Lévy, Bernard-Henri,  Liberalism, , , –, , –, See also ‘Neoliberalism’ as historical sensibility, –, , –, – economic planning and, ,  economic liberalism, –, –, ,  empire and, – French liberal revival, –, –, – human rights and,  n. influence of Aron on, , , –, –, – May ‘ and, , –, – notion of civil society in, – problems with concept of, , – French liberal tradition, , –, , , , , –, –, – idea of progress in, 

Index individualism and, , , , , – republicanism and, –,  Liébert, Georges, – Ligue des droits de l’homme,  Lipset, Seymour Martin, – Machiavelli, Niccòlo, –, – Maillot, Henri,  Malraux, André,  Man, Hendrik de, , –, , , ,  Manent, Pierre, , , –, – n.,  Manin, Bernard,  n. Mannheim, Karl,  Marc, Alexandre,  n. Marcuse, Herbert,  Maritain, Jacques, , ,  Marjolin, Robert, –, ,  n. Marrou, Henri, ,  Marshall Plan,  Marxism, –, , –, –, –, , –, , , , , –, –, –, , , , –, –, , , –,  Mauriac, Claude,  Mauss, Marcel, ,  May ‘, , , –, –, , ,  Aron’s Tocquevillian interpretation of, –,  Meinecke, Friedrich,  n. Mercier, Ernest,  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice,  Mills, Charles Wright, ,  Mises, Ludwig von,  n. Moch, Jules, ,  Mollet, Guy,  Mongin, Olivier,  Monnet, Jean, ,  Mont Pèlerin Society, ,  Montesquieu, , , , –, , , , –, – n., –, –, – Montherlant, Henry de,  Morazé, Charles,  n. Moutet, Maurius,  Napoleon III,  Neoconservatism,  n.,  Neoliberalism, , –, , –, –, , – New Left, ,  New Philosophers,  n.,  New social movements, –



Nizan, Paul, , –,  Non-conformism, , –, , , , – Ortega y Gasset, José,  Pareto, Vilfredo, , , ,  Parti populaire français (PPF), –,  Parti social français (PSF),  Perec, Georges,  Personalism, , – Pétain, Philippe, –,  Peyrefitte, Alain, ,  Philip, André,  n. Pluralism, , , –, , , –,  Political, the (le politique), , , , , –, –, ,  Aron’s account of, –,  Lefort’s account of, , – reception of, – Schmitt’s account of, – Pomian, Krzysztof,  n. Popper, Karl,  Popular Front. See Anti-fascism Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, , , –,  Raffarin, Jean-Pierre,  Rassemblement du peuple français (RPF),  Rauschning, Hermann, , ,  Raynaud, Philippe,  n. Renan, Ernest, , ,  Riesman, David, ,  n. Rist, Charles,  Rivet, Paul,  Robbins, Lionel,  Rocard, Michel,  Rockefeller Foundation,  n. Romains, Jules,  Rosanvallon, Pierre, , , – n., ,  Rougement, Denis de,  n. Rougier, Louis,  n. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, ,  Roy, Claude,  Rueff, Jacques, ,  n. Ru¨stow, Alexander,  n. Saint-Simon, Henri de, , –, , , , ,  n., –,  Sarkozy, Nicolas,  Sartre, Jean-Paul, , –, –, , , , , –, – Sauvy, Alfred, ,  n. Schmid, Carlo,  n. Schmitt, Carl, , , , –, , –, , –



Index

Sciences Po, , ,  Shils, Edward, – Siegfried, André,  n. Socialism, , , –, –,  neo-socialism,  Parti socialiste (PS), ,  ‘second left’ and, , –, – Section française de l’internationale ouvrière (SFIO), –, , , , –,  Solidarism, ,  Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, , ,  n.,  Spengler, Oswald,  Spinasse, Charles,  Staël, Germaine de,  Stalin, Joseph, , , , ,  Sternhell, Zeev,  Stoetzel, Jean,  Strauss, Leo, , , , , –, –, ,  Taine, Hippolyte, , ,  Talmon, Jacob,  Thibaud, Paul, – Thibaudet, Albert, , ,  n., 

Thorez, Maurice, ,  Tocqueville, Alexis de, , , , , –, , , , , , , –, –, –, , –, –, , , –,  Totalitarianism, theory of, –, –, –, –, , – n. democracy and, , –, –, –, – secular religion and, –, – Tradition, – Traditionary action,  as canonisation, , ,  as counter-innovation,  Uri, Pierre,  Vietnamese boat people,  Voegelin, Eric, ,  n. Weber, Max, , , –, , , –, –, –, , , –, –, , – Weil, Eric,  n. X-Crise, –, , , 

   Edited by David Armitage, Richard Bourke, Jennifer Pitts and John Robertson .  , . .  and   (eds.) Philosophy in History Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy PB  . . . .  Virtue, Commerce and History Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century PB  . . .  Private Vices, Public Benefits Bernard Mandeville’s Social and Political Thought HB  .   (ed.) The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe PB  .   The Judgment of Sense Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics PB  .   Hegel Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit, - PB  .   Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order PB  .    Gassendi the Atomist Advocate of History in an Age of Science PB  .   (ed.) Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe PB  .   Between Literature and Science

The Rise of Sociology PB  .  ,   and  .  (eds.) Political Innovation and Conceptual Change PB  .   et al. The Empire of Chance How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life PB  .   That Noble Dream The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession HB  PB  .   The Province of Legislation Determined Legal Theory in Eighteenth-century Britain PB  .   Faces of Degeneration A European Disorder, c.-c. PB  .   Inventing the French Revolution Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century PB  .   The Taming of Chance HB  PB  .  ,   and   (eds.) Machiavelli and Republicanism PB  .   The Origins of American Social Science PB  .    The Rise of Neo-Kantianism German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism HB 

.   Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance The Case of Law HB  PB  .   From Politics to Reason of State The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics - HB  PB  .    The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt - HB  PB  .   and   (eds.) Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain HB  .   An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts HB  PB  .   Philosophy and Government - PB  .   Defining Science William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain HB  PB  .   The Court Artist On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist HB  .  .  Defining the Common Good Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain HB  PB  .  .  The Idea of Luxury

A Conceptual and Historical Investigation PB  . . .  The Enlightenment’s ‘Fable’ Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society HB  PB  .   Englishness and the Study of Politics The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker HB  PB  .   Strategies of Economic Order German Economic Discourse, - HB  PB  .   The Transformation of Natural Philosophy The Case of Philip Melanchthon HB  PB  .  ,   and   (eds.) Milton and Republicanism HB  PB  .   Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought - HB  PB  .   The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand Russell The Development of an Aristocratic Liberalism HB  PB  .  ,  ,   and  .  Otto Neurath Philosophy between Science and Politics HB 

.   Riches and Poverty An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, - PB  .   A History of Sociological Research Methods in America HB  PB  .   (ed.) Enlightenment and Religion Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain HB  PB  . . . .  Adversaries and Authorities Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science HB  PB  .   The Reportage of Urban Culture Robert Park and the Chicago School HB  PB  .   Liberty, Right and Nature Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought HB  PB  .  .  (ed.) William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire HB  .   Rousseau and Geneva From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, - HB  PB  .   Pluralism and the Personality of the State HB  PB 

.   Early Modern Liberalism HB  PB  .   Equal Freedom and Utility Herbert Spencer’s Liberal Utilitarianism HB  PB  .    and   (eds.) Pedagogy and Power Rhetorics of Classical Learning HB  PB  .   The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics A Study in Cognitive History HB  PB  .  .  and   (eds.) Models as Mediators Perspectives in Natural and Social Science HB  PB  .   Measurement in Psychology A Critical History of a Methodological Concept HB  PB  .  .  The American Language of Rights HB  PB  .    The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism HB  PB  .   Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I Queen and Commonwealth -

HB  PB  .   (ed.) Renaissance Civic Humanism Reappraisals and Reflections HB  PB  . ..  Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment HB  PB  .   The Ideological Origins of the British Empire HB  PB  .   Rival Enlightenments Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany HB  PB  .   and  - (eds.) The History of Political Thought in National Context HB  .   Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance The Case of Learned Medicine HB  .   Elizabethan Rhetoric Theory and Practice HB  PB  .   The Ambitions of Curiosity Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China HB  PB  .   The Duel in Early Modern England Civility, Politeness and Honour

HB  PB  .   Judaism and Enlightenment HB  PB  .   Humanism and America An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, - HB  .   Self-Interest before Adam Smith A Genealogy of Economic Science HB  PB  .   The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought HB  PB  .   Jesuit Political Thought The Society of Jesus and the State, c.- HB  .   Machiavelli and Empire HB  .   Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England HB  .   The Case for the Enlightenment Scotland and Naples - HB  PB  .   Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond HB  .   The Constitutionalist Revolution

An Essay on the History of England, - HB  .   Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy HB  .  ,   and   (eds.) The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe The Nature of a Contested Identity HB  .   The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy Robert Burton in Context HB  .   Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince HB  .   Language, Mind and Nature Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke HB  .   The Young Karl Marx German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing HB  .   Taming the Leviathan The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England - HB  .   Utilitarianism and the New Liberalism HB  .   The Feminist Avant-Garde Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century HB  .   Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics HB 

.   (ed.) Victorian Visions of Global Order Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought HB  .   The Secularisation of the Confessional State The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius HB  .    Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History HB  .    French Political thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville Liberty in a Levelled Society? HB  .   Thinking about Property From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution HB  PB  .   The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir Ambiguity, Conversion, Resistance HB  .   Liberal Values Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion HB  .   Public Philosophy in a New Key Volume : Democracy and Civic Freedom HB  PB  .   Public Philosophy in a New Key Volume : Imperialism and Civic Freedom HB  PB  .   Wealth and Life

Essays on the Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, - HB  PB  .  - Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory HB  .   Imperial Sceptics British Critics of Empire - HB  .   The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, - HB  .   Republic of Women Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century HB  . . .  Recovering Liberties Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire HB  PB  .   Montaigne and the Life of Freedom HB  .   Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought From Charisma to Canonizaion HB  .   (translated by  ) Toleration in Conflict Past and Present HB  .   Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England HB  .   The Italian Renaissance in the German Historical Imagination

- HB  .   Liberty Abroad J. S. Mill on International Relations HB  .   Sovereignty, Property and Empire, - HB  .   Roman Law in the State of Nature The Classical Foundations of Hugo Grotius’ Natural Law HB  .   The Crisis of German Historicism The Early Political Thought of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss HB  .    Enlightenment and Utility Bentham in French, Bentham in France HB  .   The Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution HB  .   Free Trade and Its Enemies in France, - HB  .   Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science HB  .   Italian Renaissance Humanism in the Mirror HB  .   The World of Mr Casaubon Britain’s Wars of Mythography, – HB 

.  ö Trust in Early Modern International Political Thought, – HB  .   The Emergence of Modern Aesthetic Theory Religion and Morality in Enlightenment Germany and Scotland HB  .  ’ Utilitarianism in the Age of Enlightenment The Moral and Political Thought of William Paley HB  .   Parliament the Mirror of the Nation Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain HB  .   The History of the Arthaśāstra Sovereignty and Sacred Law in Ancient India HB  .   Parliamentarism From Burke to Weber HB  .   Revolutionary Thought after the Paris Commune, – HB  .  .  Gendering the Renaissance Commonwealth HB  .   Raymond Aron and Liberal Thought in the Twentieth Century HB 