aron as a political theorist

8/14/2019 Aron as a Political Theorist

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Raymond Aron as Political Theorist

Author(s): Melvin Richter

Source: Political Theory, Vol. 12, No. 2, (May, 1984), pp. 147-151

Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191358

Accessed: 25/06/2008 19:13

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RAYMOND ARON AS POLITICAL THEORISTMEL VIN RICHTERCity University of New York

AYMOND ARON developed a style of political theory uniquenot only in France but elsewhere. He combined the capacity andthe willto investigate in depth the major political problemsof his day and thento make clear their theoretical meaning as well as their probableconsequences in actual practice. Both a practicing journalist and awriter of serious academic books, he put his awesome intellectualpowers into the service of clarifying political choices for the intelligentcitizen and the governmental policymaker able to think beyond theshort term. This function Aron performed at a higher theoretical levelthan any other commentator of his time, while never disdaining theneeds to master the hard facts and technical languages needed to chartthe complex choices generated by the world in which he lived.How did he manage to learn so much about so many fields usuallyregarded as the exclusive province of one or another departmentalspecialist? He had taught himself to skim rapidlymost of what had to beread about the facts of a matter. At the opposite end of the spectrum,using his analytical capacity as a philosopher, he devoted much time tothose few theoretical books that really counted. He taught himselfeconomics by just such a close critical reading of Keynes's GeneralTheory.As a professional social scientist, Aron (when he began teaching atthe Sorbonne) chose to breakwith the most prominentAmericansocialscientists of the period by making his primary frame of reference thecomparative analysis of societies in terms of their type of politicalregime. Sociologists like Parsons, political scientists like Lipset, eco-nomists like Rostow concurred with Marxists to the extent of playingdown the autonomy and significance of political regimes for thesocieties they governed. Aron insisted on askingwhat political liberties,if any, existed in a modern society, whether industrialized or developing;POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 12 No. 2, May 1984 147-151@ 1984 Sage Publications, Inc.

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148 POLITICAL THEORY / MAY 1984how these liberties had come into existence and were institutionalized,what were their costs and practical consequences, in socialist or inliberal capitalist societies. Believing, as had Montesquieu and Tocque-ville, in the irreducibleautonomy of political institutions and practices,Aron applied their mode of analysis to modern industrialsocieties. Theoutcome of social andeconomic structures,he argued,weredeterminedultimately by the interactions betweentheirpolitical regimeand form ofsociety and economy.In the second half of the 20th century this meant comparingAmerican and western European societies to those of the Soviet Unionand eastern Europe. Aron insisted on confronting Soviet, that is,Stalinist performance with Marxist and Leninist theory. He system-aticallycontrasted such societies in theireconomic, social, and above allpolitical aspectsto the liberal capitalist democracies. Aron never ceasedto wonder at what he considered to be the unexamined apologetic leftistassumptions of French intellectuals, as for example his former closefriend, Sartre. Aron attacked by acerbic ideological critiques such asThe Opium of the Intellectuals (1955), and by continuing his rigorousexamination of Marx'sphilosophy of history (begun by his Introductionto the Philosophy of History [1938]), and above all Marx's economics,and theories of the state and politics. These, Aron believed, were sounsatisfactory as to saddle Marx and his followers with some partof theresponsibility of the development of the one party state, and Stalinism.

Contrary to what his many hostile critics alleged, Aron did notconfine his critiqueto the Soviet Union and Marxism while carryingonthe cold war by justifying all aspects of capitalist liberal democracy orthe welfare state. Anyone who has read Aron's Essai Sur Les Libertesdelivered originally as lectures at Berkeleyin 1963(and whose title wasmistranslated asAn Essay on Freedom [1970]), can see how seriously hetook the criticisms of American economic and social performancethatcame from Michael Harrington or Gabriel Kolko. Aron saw a set ofsystematic dilemmasin the dialectics of liberty,or as he preferred o say,liberties in the modern democratic state at this stage of capitalism. Hecame down hard on those who saw in the United States of the Kennedyera the fulfillment of human history and the model for less developedstates elsewhere in the world. In America Aron was too wedded tocritical analysis and too proud to flatter his hosts, prone as Tocque-ville had noted to this democratic disease self-congratulation. Aronbelieved that every government has dirty hands and comes off


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Richter / RAYMOND ARON 149

badly when its own ideals are contrasted to its actual performance. Hedid not believe that the regimes he favored should be exempted fromcontinuing criticism in terms of their own professed standards. Aronalso took seriously the classical theory that every regime is subject tocorruption, and that every form is especially liable to peculiar andpotentially fatal disorders. It is the duty of the analyst, whetherphilosopher or social scientist, to diagnose and to prescribe counter-measures ratherthan to predict an inevitable fate.In these lecturesas in his notable serieson the founders of sociology,Aron subscribed to the tradition of Montesquieu and Tocqueville. Bothdenied that men weresubjectto inexorable laws of history;both soughtto explain human arrangements and action but also approved orcondemned them in terms of the political liberties they conferred orremoved. Aron increasingly used Tocqueville to provide alternativeanalyses and recommendations to those of Marx. If Tocqueville isregarded now as a major political theorist in France, this was Aron'sdoing. His lectures on Main Currentsof Sociological Thought (1960-1962) were models of brevity, incisiveness, and accuracy in theirinterpretations of theoretical texts at once difficult and significant.Despite their title, imposed by the title of the chairAron occupied, theirfocus was on how political and sociological theoryinteracted.Historiansof political thought who areled to the analyses of theoriststreated by M.Aron find themselves hard put to go beyond these wonderfully lucidshort statements. Aron's criticism was not selective in its targets whentreating the United States and othercapitalist liberaldemocracies.Aronwished to distinguish different forms of liberty, to establish thepossibility that these forms might conflict both among themselves andwith the values of equality and democracy. He condemned bothdogmatic democratic and dogmatic liberal theories of freedom. Heargued that there is no one adequate concept of liberty. As for theso-called formal or bourgeois liberties denigrated by Marxists, theyremain vital to the mass of citizens denied them in nonliberal states.Aron conceded that these liberties providing security under law toindividuals were not the same as what he called liberties of capacity,liberties he did not dismiss as does Hayek. Yet the liberal democraticstates Aron favored face a dilemma. We now expect our regime to be atonce free, democratic and egalitarian, economically efficient, and toprovide for the minimum needs of everyone living in them. To achieveall of these goals is far from easy. Yet Aron did not take the path of


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150 POLITICAL THEORY / MAY 1984simply renouncing one or more of them. He sought to point outshortfalls of achievement without engaging in advocacy of unrealizableforms of society and politics.Raymond Aron was notable because he transcendedthe specialitiesof academic departments. Once he had identified his dialogue withMarx as the axis of his thought, Aron went on to deal technically or onthe level of civilized discourse with philosophy, economics, sociology,and politics. Trained as a neo-Kantian philosopher, he developed anextraordinary capacity for analysis carried on with an austere andelegant clarity that persistedeven when he pursuedthe strange gods hestudied in Germany and in the English-speaking world. These includedboth Max Weber, "The Sociologist" as Aron called him, and J. M.Keynes. Aron, so characteristically French in his clarity, was most"unFrench"in being genuinely trilingual and aware of thought andexperience elsewhere. His stays in Weimar Germany and Great Britaingave him his distinctive perspective and made him for a long timeunassimilable in France.As has already been said, Aron from an early period had identifiedKarl Marx as the formidable thinker he had to master if he were todevelop his own way of addressingthe problems and solutions acceptedby so many of his contemporaries and friends. Aron's ultimatejudgement of Marxism has to be understood in the light of the majoralternatives he confronted while living as a young philosopher and Jewin Weimar Germany during the riseof the Nazis to power. Aron came toview Marxism as sharing some but not all characteristicsof Nazism:fanaticism, extremism, and utopianism. Aron never doubted Marx'sown commitment to generous, humane, emancipatory goals. Yet fromAron's encounters first with Nazism and then Stalinism came his owndeepest commitments to skeptical realism, moderation, and the arts ofthe possible in politics. Such values did not count for much in theParisian world of intellectuals. To take such positions were enough tocall forth derisionby those more closely tied to thepassions and fashionsof Paris. For a long time he fought on almost alone.

Much in liberalism appealed to his own temperament. He wassuspicious of unchecked power and uncriticizedenthusiasms in politics.He saw his intellectual duty to be a counter-cyclical analyst refusing tobe swept away by the dominant currents of thought and feeling. Arononce wrote about Hayek what may have come as an insight abouthimself: "I see there the additional merit of a liberal who does not fear


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Richter / RAYMOND ARON 151and perhaps even secretly desiresunpopularity."But Aron did not sharewhat he called Hayek's whig views. Aron thought the best attainablecombination in our time is a mixed economy with a strong welfarestate.Of himself, he wrote the following:

I choose once and for all, not the role of the reactionary, but that of the adversary,he who reacts against the tendencies of the social body and his country, against thestatist regime, againsttheunrealizable deologiesthat so manyParisianintellectualsdelight in, and against the disregardof economic necessities.

Again of himself, he wrote, "Ihave sought to base myrejectionsand mychoices on reason by the comparative analysisof types of regimesand tomark the point at which verifiable knowledge ends and leaves theresponsibility to one's conscience." It is good to know that he diedfeeling that he was isolated much less than he had been. Even Parisianintellectuals accepted from Soviet dissidents what they had rejectedasmere ideology when argued by Raymond Aron. Aron's memoirsbecame the best-selling work in France at the time he died. We shall feelhis loss as a political theorist, for he has no successor.

aron as a political theorist

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