Raymond Aron: Aron et De Gaulle. Partie II: Le Retour de De Gaulle (1958-1959); Partie III: La Cinquième République (1960-1968). Jean-Claude Casanova, ed. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2022.
Raymond Aron: “Liberté et Égalité.” In Pierre Manent, ed.: Liberté et Égalité. Paris: EHESS, 2013.
France recovered economically in the 1950s, but not sufficiently to retain its empire. The French withdrew from Indochina in 1954 and from Tunisia and Morocco in 1956. Algeria remained under their control, having been settled extensively by French nationals, beginning in the 1830s. But the Arab population there had become restive, especially since the Second World War, finding organizational form in a succession of groups, culminating in the founding of the National Liberation Front in 1954. Civil war followed, and as the war went on, the Fourth Republic fought poorly. So much so, that there was danger of a military putsch led by Army colonels who had been posted in Algeria for many years, a gaggle of miniature Caesars but formidable to a weak regime. In the final volume of his War Memoirs, de Gaulle perceived “a glimmer of hope” for his return.
So did Aron, and by November 1958 it was more than a glimmer. “General de Gaulle left power voluntarily at the beginning of the year 1946, not to say farewell to politics but in the conviction that parliamentarians must eventually make appeal to him” to save the country. This had now happened, albeit twelve years later and after the failure of the RPF. For the RPF to have succeeded, de Gaulle would have needed “to consent to play the parliamentary game,” to become the leader of a party and to renounce the persona of a national hero. “He decided otherwise, and in 1958, events gave him reason.” Parliament had recalled him, giving him plenary powers to resolve the crisis.
Given the national crisis, Parliament granted him the power of a Roman dictator in his “role as of legal savior” to frame a new constitution. The legality of the role is crucial, although it can be misused in what Aron calls this “Bonapartist conjuncture” of circumstances. But Louis-Napoléon was an “adventurer,” Pétain “an old man.” De Gaulle is “an authentically great man,” one who “by his background, by his intellectual formation, had the right” to “claim the Republic.” Therefore, “the recourse to a ‘dictator’ in the Roman sense of the term, the desire, in a period of crisis, to render obedience to a power incarnated in one man, are not, in themselves, pathological phenomena.”
Today, Aron writes a non-Gaullist government not allied with the Communists is inconceivable. While the Fourth Republic has presided over a strong economic rebound, it lost the empire without being able to resolve the Algerian crisis and the regime itself continues to exhibit the characteristic defects of parliamentarism, which Aron and de Gaulle alike had never ceased to deplore. Accordingly, in writing his new constitution, de Gaulle has “obeyed precedents less than his own genius.” Given the structure of political parties in France, particularly their advocacy of different and opposing regimes, “one can find stability and efficiency in the executive neither in the British method nor in the American procedure.” In France, “the sole recourse is to reinforce the authority of the executive and to limit the action of the legislature.”
Under de Gaulle’s constitution, the president of the Republic is “not a symbol” but wields “a part of the power.” He chooses the prime minister, who is responsible before parliament, thereby linking the executive and the legislative branches while maintaining their independence from one another. The president has the power to dissolve the Assembly, to name certain civil and military officials, to submit laws to the country for a referendum vote, to negotiate treaties, and to serve as both Chief of the French State and Chief of the Community—i.e., the remaining French colonial possessions and those former possessions that choose to maintain a close relationship with France. He is elected not by Parliament but by an electoral college of 80,000 persons.
Aron considers “none of the articles of the Constitution” to be “scandalous in itself.” “Taken together, they recall to us the constitutional monarchy or the parliamentary Empire of the milieu of the last century.” Aron worries no more about Bonapartism, as he had done in 1943, but about what will happen to the regime once de Gaulle leaves office. As the author of a book on “the industrial society” of the middle of the twentieth century, Aron also regards the Gaullist constitution as weighted to heavily in favor of rural France, “static and traditional.” And while the constitution “maintains a liberal facade,” the “regime will be, in fact, authoritarian” if not despotic-Napoleonic. Finally, he worries that a far-Right majority might take over in the Assembly, its “superpatriots” leading the regime into ill-judged “adventures.” Might de Gaulle himself fall in with their demands?
By “integrating the plebiscitary element into the democratic regime,” in the form of the referendum, “France oscillates between the anonymity of parliaments of the second order and the éclat of the charismatic leader.” “General de Gaulle is the charismatic leader par excellence, but with historic ambitions comparable to Washington”; as a genuine republican, he wants neither to prolong his ‘Roman dictatorship’ nor to use the legislature “to make his rule permanent.” Two questions nonetheless persist: What will happen with the ambitious colonels and other French “semi-fascists”? And can “the imperial will of the French” reconcile itself to “the necessities of our century,” particularly in Algeria, where the two sides are irreconcilably contradictory? Given these difficulties, a third and more fundamental question arises: “Resignation of the French, or renovation of France?”
As head of state, the president “represents the whole of France because he is foreign to the parties and superior to the faction. Since General de Gaulle is not the descendent of kings, he is in the line of leaders by acclamation.” As a “Washington, not Louis-Napoléon,” he is “the Legislator” who “has founded a Republic, not an Empire”. And in any event, “neither the First nor the Second Empire were totalitarian or fascist regimes.” But while in his status as founder, de Gaulle remains in the spirit he took on as the “leader of Fighting France” during the world war, the Gaullist members of Parliament are RPF types. De Gaulle is not identical to the Gaullists. Will the real power in this new regime belong to the President of the Republic or to the prime minister, who answers to a legislature now dominated by a coalition itself dominated by the newly-named Gaullist party, the Union for the New Republic? Only experience will tell. And after de Gaulle, who but a UNR man—not likely a great man but a party man—will take up the presidency? Can such a man defend the Fifth Republic from the remaining ‘regime’ parties? And as for the UNR deputies themselves, “antiparliamentarians in opposition, they will not necessarily be so tomorrow.” If so, parliamentarism might return after de Gaulle. True, an outrightly fascist turn seems “improbable,” as the UNR is not “a party of the masses in the style of fascism or national-socialism.” The most worrisome of the lot is the ardent advocate of Algérie française, Jacques Soustelle, but even he “appears too intelligent to misconceive the difference of the epochs and the spirit of the times.” [1] More realistically, “in future years, will the UNR become a normal party in a normalized regime?” Might it appeal to the moderate Left and the moderate Right? “It would be premature to say yes, unjust to say no.”
The underlying problem remains in the character of the French people themselves. They want governmental stability, efficiency, and modernization, but they also want la gloire. “But glory in the twentieth century costs early and for a semi-industrial country of 45 million souls will always be semi-illusory.” Many UNR members want both a realistic policy that ushers France into “industrial civilization” and a “French Algeria.” That won’t happen. Indeed, “the political language of the French is more abstract than that of the English or the Americans,” but now that “there are no longer monarchists or Bonapartists of conviction and since everyone demands the Republic, it is by willed illusion that France takes hold of ideologies,” those abstractions, only “in order to tear them off.” While the Left remains, “perhaps, ideological, today it is defeated, it and its ideologies, perhaps more decisively than it was in 1940.”
This “erasure of the Left” has profound causes: part of the Left “obstinately remains with the Communist Party”; yet even Nikita Khruschev, the current ruler of the Soviet Union, still the ostensible leader of Communists worldwide, has criticized the “sanguinary tyrant,” Josef Stalin. As for the non-Communist Left, it is as much anti-Soviet as anti-American, and a substantial part of its program has been adopted by ‘capitalism’ itself. Finally, the French Left hasn’t succeeded in getting rid of the French empire, however much it declaims against it. The Communist Party still gets twenty percent of French votes, but “has lost its dynamism, its power to attract the youth, the intellectuals,” remaining more Stalinist than the Soviets. To revive itself, can the democratic Left effect a rapprochement with the Communists, set a firm policy on Algeria, reanimate “the old words of the socialist order (especially the notion of collective ownership of the means of production) and induce the people of today to want that? Aron thinks not.
“Compared to the Fourth Republic,” then, and compared to any of its main parties, “the Fifth appears to be a regime of our time.” With its seven-year presidential term, it features “a monarch invested by the people,” a Parliament that cannot remove him, a prime minister who “explicates the policy of the power the nation has elected.” However, French civil society may still lack the conditions that will support a “technocratic government in industrial society,” a society that accepts the rules of the game and political parties which also respect those rules. And again, if the regime does establish itself, how long will it last when de Gaulle absents himself?
It took some time before the French would find out, as de Gaulle would serve for a decade, giving Aron no shortage of topics to consider. Being an economist, Professor Casanova quite understandably includes several of Aron’s statements on the Gaullist management of France’s political economy, beginning with the 1959 budget, “a symbol and expression of another spirit” than that of the Fourth Republic. The first Gaullist budget, “inspired,” Aron writes, “by a coherent conception,” indeed by “resolution, coherence, and continuity,” subordinated expansion to equilibrium in the balance of trade. Budget imbalance was inevitable, due to the cost of the Algerian war, de Gaulle’s plans to strengthen the French military (including a nuclear weapons arsenal), and continued expenses associated with the maintenance of ties with former French colonies. “The combination of a strong State, an ambitious diplomacy, and a liberal economic practice is not in itself contradictory.”
As years passed, however, Aron—a genuine, free-market liberal in the Adam Smith-John Stuart Mill line, although never so extreme as Bastiat—became disenchanted. On the matter of workers’ profit-sharing, which de Gaulle endorsed, Aron could only shake his head: “One man, sure of having reason against all regarding a problem whose complexity he ignores and whose gravity he misconceives, cannot put to rest the demon of pride.” Companies need profits for investment in equipment and to meet unforeseen expenses in order to achieve the expansion and modernization de Gaulle wants. They are not democracies. In fact, “the firm of our epoch is a techno-bureaucratic hierarchy.” Alert to the criticism that will come at him from both Left and Right, Aron denies that he argues this way to defend some ‘class interest;’ he insists that the self-interest of workers and of capitalists, separately or together, should not animate economic policy. “I defend, on this occasion, no other interest but that of the French economy taken as a whole.” Similarly, worker-capital association poses practical difficulties, however it may cultivate the civic spirit of the French.
In the aftermath of the “évenèments” of May-June 1968, when the de Gaulle administration faced down a concatenation of student protests and workers’ strikes, Aron offered a critical overview of Gaullist economic policy. Given strong inflationary pressures, the franc must be devalued, since “neither the French nor the foreigners any longer know how to maintain the parity of money.” What we do know is that “a system of fixed parities, without an automatic mechanism of readjustment brings with it an intrinsic vulnerability” as economic conditions change.” For reasons of prestige (that demon of pride, again), France has attempted to redefine a crisis of the franc as a crisis of the international financial system, dominated by the Americans, and to rely upon French gold reserves as ballast against the vagaries of the fiat money—specifically, the American dollar—upon which that system relies. But, in reality, the franc eventually will need to be devalued, since “the international monetary system has no need of a fundamental revision.” De Gaulle’s policy has been to appeal to the political confidence of the moderates in the Fifth Republic generally and in his administration in particular, to adopt austerity measures, reducing the budget in order to bring prices down, and to increase exports. “Events confirm in this regard a severe lesson: the real power of a country is measured not by its gold resources but by the prosperity of the economy and by political and moral unity.”
Since “the dollar no longer constitutes a secure refuge against the eventual devaluation of a currency,” “only one question” remains: “how long until the next crisis?” The de Gaulle administration’s tax on consumption won’t work because “the high prices do not derive from an excess of demand but from an augmentation of costs.” Although “the government…in my mind, had perfect reason to attribute to the ‘évènements of May-June’ the main responsibility for the present difficulties,” devaluation is the only way out of them. Politically, the blame for this refusal to face reality falls upon the President of the Republic, not his prime minister, since his own “constitutional doctrine” makes him responsible for “the big decisions” in all areas of policy, including finance. More broadly, France itself “has never understood the rules of authentic liberalism.” “The refusal of a necessary devaluation, between 1931 and 1936, between 1952 and 1958, caused damages to the French economy that the men now in power must never forget.” But by “never” Aron means not only in his own lifetime but from the time of the foundation of the modern state in France, to the policy of Louis XIV’s Controller-General, Jean-Baptist Colbert. Colbert advocated substantial state intervention in the economy, with heavy tariffs on foreign imports and subsidies of French industry—all with the intent of increasing treasury revenues. “The French have Colbertism in their blood.” But such dirigisme defies the laws of economics, however seductive it may be to state officials, to monarchist subjects and to republican citizens.
This notwithstanding, Gaullist economic policy by no means preoccupied Aron. He remained primarily concerned with the regime itself, persistently wondering (as he did as early as July 1959), “Does democracy have a future in France?” After all, the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Republics all failed. “What is the meaning of these failings?” In some respects, the French have been inordinately obsessed with one dimension of their regimes, the institutional structures or arrangements of ruling offices. France’s population, especially vis-à-vis a Germany united under the Hohenzollerns, and the French economy—the material foundations of all its regimes—put every regime at a disadvantage when it came to guarding the peace and prosperity of France. More, “the democratic regime” in particular “is condemned, by its essence, to not employ all the arms of power against its enemies,” instead “tolerat[ing] revolutionary opponents.” Now that the monarchist and fascist iterations of the Right and (temporarily) the extreme Left have weakened, de Gaulle has had a chance to found and more stable republican regime. Contrary to Marxist pieties, the future of democracy in France does not depend on the “class interests” of either capitalists or worker. “It is the political psyche of the nation that manifests itself in the constant instability of its institutions.” Regrettably, “the spirit of faction seems endemic in our country” (as indeed Julius Caesar had said of the Gauls).
“A modernized France requires a rational administration and a somewhat reasonable politics.” While the Constitution of the Fifth Republic promised more of those things than any previous republican constitution, Aron judged it to be “not viable in its present form,” given the “duality of the executive”—a powerful president along with a prime minister charged with managing relations between the executive and legislative branches—which he judges unsustainable in the long run. If party struggles and legislative deliberation can function in industrial societies, on condition that citizens understand that they need to be limited in order to allow firm policy decisions by the executive, are French elites and the masses “attached” to the procedures that will ensure such a balance? Aron doubts it. And “the combination of an executive in the style of Louis XIV and a Parliament submitted to English discipline by the will of [Prime Minister] Michel Debré is, in the long term, impossible.” Can de Gaulle govern “in cooperation with a Parliament” at all?
From time to time, but increasingly, Aron raised a modified version of the concerns he had voiced during the war. Can this regime, can any regime, “combine nearly unconditional authority of one man with respect for democratic forms and essential liberties?” According to the letter of the Constitution, de Gaulle is little more than a counselor to the government which in ordinary times is directed by the Prime Minister, who must submit to interrogation by the legislators. But in fact, “Charles de Gaulle reigns,” presiding over the Council of Ministers, communicating directly with Parliament, and submitting laws for popular referendum. This reduces the Prime Minister to the status of an American vice president, while making the government—i.e., the ministers and their staffs—subordinate to the Head of State and the Parliament, at the same time. And in France, most political and administrative personnel are “hostile to the separation of powers of the American type.” As of 1960, “the French people have given an absolute power to General de Gaulle because they await from him the end of the Algerian War,” but what happens, once he delivers on that expectation? Will he ‘dial back’ his powers, or will he foment new crises, perpetuating his extraordinary powers?
Such crises were likely to erupt, given “the diplomacy of the Gaullist Republic.” European internationalists like Jean Monnet “suspect the ruin of their hopes”; supporters of the Atlantic Alliance anticipate “the putting into peril of the alliance that guarantees our security”; in both of these policies, “all the nations” worry that Gaullist policy will provide “an aid to the party of Moscow at the very moment when authoritarianism” in France “risks opening the voice of a popular front” because it falsely, but in the minds of the French Left seriously, raises the ghost of fascism. [2]
In the end, crisis-mongering will not suffice to maintain the Fifth Republic. “The government of modern societies is, for the most part, a prosaic task. Great politics only occupies the masters of the world a few days per year, a few hours per day.” No amount of dramatic state visits, not even the development of nuclear weapons, will “transfigure the role of France and what she represents,” whatever de Gaulle may hope. “Faithful to his traditional conceptions, he thinks in terms of diplomacy and prestige, rank and power” of nation-states, a stance which tends to weaken the international organizations and alliances that protect France in fact. He does, however, “know that nothing matters as much to his glory, to his biography, to the future of France than the safeguarding of democratic forms, the only ones adapted to the spirit of the epoch, to the nature of French society.” “Liberals who are Gaullists” continue to believe that de Gaulle “has represented a unique and exemplary exception” to the rule “posed by Montesquieu or Tocqueville,” that “no man great enough to exercise absolute power.”
Having upheld France during the war, having founded the Fifth Republic, how long will his greatness continue to serve France in the decidedly more prosaic tasks to come? And will his “traditional conceptions” of international politics suffice? In the final volume of his Mémoires de guerre, de Gaulle insists that France remains among the great powers of the world, that it must guard its borders, maintain the balance of powers in Europe and in the world at large, that states are, as Nietzsche saw, cold monsters, and so France must above all maintain its independence of action, even as it seeks a certain kind of alliance among Western European countries. He would build a greater Europe, one that can stand up once the Soviet hegemony fails in central and eastern Europe—as it must, because such a hegemony goes against the “national wills” of the countries it now dominates. Because ideology holds the Soviet hegemony together, and because in the end “alliances and enmities are determined more by national interests than by the internal regimes of the States,” a European alliance founded upon the interests of its members will eventually prevail.
Aron remained unconvinced. Because it is “to a certain degree overheated, nationalism does not favor comprehension of the other.” This is why de Gaulle mistakenly desired to dismember Germany in the 1940, only to reconcile with West Germany in 1963. Today, “has the time of la grande Europe arrived?” Probably not: Europe “from the Atlantic to the Urals” (in de Gaulle’s then-famous phrase) is an “enigmatic and grandiose” concept—dubious because Russians may not want to abandon the mineral-rich lands of Siberia, beyond the Urals. “General de Gaulle is never precise about the date in which la grande Europe will be accomplished,” but in the meantime he has excluded Great Britain from the Common Market, arguing that its economy is still too intimately tied with that of the United States. Aron doubts that an expanded Common Market and the eventual political integration of “small Europe” (i.e., Western Europe) is worth doing, given the existence of thermonuclear arms. This, he maintains, is needed in order to attain greater equality with the United States within the Atlantic Alliance, which is still indispensable for guarding European liberty. De Gaulle’s “anti-anglo-saxons” policy will result in “nothing more than a national policy, more narrow than romantic,” although it is also romantic. It may have the reverse effect of its intention by convincing other Europeans that American guidance is “less insupportable than French guidance.” In sum, as of the mid-1960s there are two questions remaining, questions which “will be given by the future in determining the final meaning of Gaullism.” They are: “is absolute national sovereignty compatible with nuclear arms? And “is the Constitution of the Fifth Republic…the model of democracy in the Industrial Age?” Aron does not necessarily answer ‘no’ to these questions, but, characteristically, neither does he answer with an unqualified ‘yes.’
Casanova is especially interested in Aron’s discussions of the Constitution. Aron continued unhesitatingly to concur with French opinion of 1958-59, which supported de Gaulle as the rightful ‘Dictator-Legislator’ of a France wracked by factions and misgoverned by an imbecilic parliamentary-republican regime. Subsequently, however, de Gaulle has made his founding into a project periodically renewed over the years, claiming in one press conference “that all powers, including the judiciary power, derive from the Chief of State”—an “extreme theory,” indeed, one “contrary to the principles of all liberal regimes.” “Such as it is today, the Constitution is unbalanced to the profit of the President of the Republic,” as it is “monocratic,” more or less an elective monarchy, de Gaulle having persuaded his countrymen to scrap the original electoral college in the Constitution in favor of direct election of the president by popular suffrage. Political life in “the Gaullist republic” is becoming “a succession of plebiscites.” In France today, “political stability is linked to a man, not to a Constitution,” and so the Constitution cannot become any more “deeply rooted” tomorrow than it is today. And when de Gaulle leaves the scene, he will leave the Fifth Republic without “a Constitution accepted by the whole of the nation.”
Yet, by the end of 1965, Aron admits that “the first experience of the election of the president of the republic by universal suffrage since 1848 has been, in many respects, an incontestable success.” The French people were engaged in politics, not indifferent or apathetic. “Great public problems were posed to the nation” and the candidates had equal opportunities to campaign. To the surprise of many, including Aron, de Gaulle did not win a majority on the first ballot. As head of state, de Gaulle had attempted “to appeal to every party and to incarnate the people as a whole.” But “this conception, in a democratic regime and in a normal period, is pure mythology,” as “the actual president of the Republic is elected by one party of the nation.” France simply no longer has great problems. De Gaulle “has given France years of stability and a Constitution which endeavors to prevent the return to the parliamentary games of yesterday.” Despite his withdrawal from NATO and other anti-Atlanticist moves, which might have emboldened the Soviets, “the fear of Soviet aggression has disappeared, American protection continues to be assured.” Why, then, does de Gaulle in his rhetoric transform all elections into quasi-plebiscites, thereby undermining the stability of his own Constitution with his “art of creating regime crises”? Popular election of the president transfers the authority of the executive to the principle of “majority rule, that of democracy,” not to the principle of “legitimacy, which in his own eyes general de Gaulle has incarnated since 1940.” At the same time, had the latest referendum not gone his way, de Gaulle might have invoked the Constitution’s Article 16, which allows the president to declare a state of national emergency and assume dictatorial powers. That is no way to treat a political event in ordinary times. France has no great problems left to solve, but it does have “arduous” ones: social legislation, education reform, and needed adjustments to the political economy in order to make it more competitive internationally. These are matters for normal politics, not for regime politics.
It was the educational institutions of France that proved de Gaulle’s stumbling block. Although he survived the crisis of ‘May `68,’ by calling another referendum in 1969—a worthy attempt to decentralize some of the power of the centralized French state— de Gaulle went to the proverbial well once too often. His proposal for education reform failed; wisely, he resigned rather than invoking Article 16. Aron reminds his readers, as he has had occasion to observe before, that “in politics, the French have a solidly established and well merited reputation for inconstancy.” What next?
Will the regime devolve into something similar to the Fourth Republic, in which a “man without qualities” assumes reduced executive power? It is true that France has become centrist, but the centrists themselves are divided, even as they were in the late 1940s and early 1950s, now into the Gaullist-nationalists of the center-right and the Atlanticists of the center-left. Further, with no one of de Gaulle’s stature in the presidency, how will relations between the executive and the legislative majority work themselves out? De Gaulle “had pushed he ‘sole exercise of power’ to a point which, in reaction, a certain restoration of Parliament and a reinforcement of the authority of the Prime Minister will impose itself.” How will that go?
By June 1969, the election of the loyal and decidedly undramatic Georges Pompidou to the presidency portended the change from “plebiscitary Gaullism to institutional and electoral Gaullism.” This should work because the Left remains divided among Communists, socialists and radicals. The center held, along with the Constitution, throughout the next decade. But by 1980, Aron titled one of his essays, “The Constitution in Question.” By then, the Left had regrouped under the leadership of François Mitterrand. The Socialists had put forward a twenty-seven-point platform prior to the presidential election of spring 1981, but Aron was more concerned about a potential constitutional crisis. The election of the president by universal suffrage has worked, so long as the president enjoys a majority in Parliament, but what if the majority party differs from that of the President? If Mitterrand wins the presidency without a Socialist majority in the Assembly, that carefully articulated program will stall. Under the Constitution, the president could dissolve the Assembly, but if the Socialists fail to win the subsequent parliamentary elections he would probably need to resign. That is, “the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, as it was interpreted by the parties in power, suffered the opposite defects of those of the Third and Fourth Republics.” None of them assured “the stability of executive power,” as the parliamentary republics featured little such power to begin with and the Gaullist republic put too much responsibility in the hands of the executive, leading to the rejection of the president when things go badly. At the same time, Aron wants no part of a return to the parliamentary republics.
Mitterrand did indeed win the presidency, then dissolved the Assembly, which came back with a large Leftist majority; the Socialists had made a rapprochement with the Communists seven years earlier, and Mitterrand put four of them into his Cabinet. In line with ‘Left’ policy in Europe at the time, Mitterrand advocated European neutrality between the two great powers while continuing France’s alliance with West Germany; given Central and East European subservience to Moscow, this was unlikely, even in Western Europe, whose citizens could not help noticing the lack of an alliance partner among the Communist countries. “Everyone imagines in his own manner what it would be like in a world transformed by the relative decline of the United States, the over-armament of the Soviets and the neutralizing temptation of the Europeans.
Domestically, Aron observed that the new president “has a mandate from the voters to fight against unemployment and inflation, not to install a French socialism,” inasmuch as “the traditional barriers” against socialism—religion, the family, the ideologies of the past—remained in place. “This year, socialism represented change, novelty,” but “the charm of novelty” will enjoy a “state of grace” with the voters which “will not endure.” Two of the old socialist self-contradictions will endure, however: the intention at once to nationalize industries, somehow in the service of multinationalism; and simultaneously claiming that capitalism amounts to the exploitation of man by man while attacking “the big firms which invest the bulk of their profits and only distribute a derisory percentage of their turnover to their shareholders.” It is rather the small and medium-sized businesses whose owners keep the major share of their profits for themselves, and West European socialists take care not to threaten them.
In view of the vagaries of French socialism and the disarray on the French Right, Aron calls upon his fellow moderates “to defend and illustrate liberal values” in our contemporary societies “which by their very weight, lean towards collectivist organizations.” This is of course Tocqueville’s critique of democracy—that is, social equality—which exercises a what we now call ‘peer pressure’ against the individual and political liberty prized by modern liberalism. Against this tendency, Tocqueville recommends civic associations; more than a century later, Aron adds that such organizations can, if their members are not careful, serve to reinforce statist collectivism, either finding themselves taken over by the ‘totalitarian’ state or lending themselves to collaboration with the administrative state that has organized itself within the republican regimes.
Too often, moderates have tended to go along with the collectivist reforms of socialists. “It is still necessary, when the favors of the voters return to the losers of today, that they bring to the French, beyond social advantages, a representation of the good society different from that of the socialist Party.” For, while it is true that “parties can retain power without a project,” “can they conquer it when they have none?”
The interplay between democracy or equality and liberty is precisely the theme of the Aron lecture Pierre Manent has edited and introduced, a lecture delivered at the Collège de France in April 1978. Wary of abstractions, Aron begins by remarking, “I seldom like to use the word liberty in the singular.” He wants his listeners rather to think about liberties, the specific instances of liberty. “Even in the most despotic societies, individuals enjoy certain liberties,” and in the free societies one must choose among the many liberties one may exercise, recognizing that to exercise one liberty often entails preventing other liberties from being exercised, as (for example) my political demonstration may be your inconvenience. Or, to cite another common habit, to condemn “in an extreme manner” a governmental policy, whether a law or a war, you may interfere with the government’s ability to function at all, to “apply or sustain the law or the policy.” What is the criterion for such choices? Liberals may reply that the criterion is liberal in the abstract, the right to liberty. But the problem with liberty as an abstraction, deduced from the modern ‘state of nature’ theory, which requires of the state that it protect our persons and property, is that the mere deduction doesn’t indicate how the state should or can go about doing that. France’s 1789 Rights of Man and the Citizen says that “Liberty consists of the power to do anything which does not harm others; thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man is limited only to those which assure other members of society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits cannot be determined by the law.” Aron cannot share the enthusiasm of the old revolutionaries for such practically unhelpful generalizing. “This formula is at the same time in a sense evident and in another sense nearly devoid of meaning.”
“Therefore, without pretending to make a general theory of liberties for all societies, I attempt here now to specify the content of our liberties, in our democratic countries, prosperous and liberal.” “The public power recognizes in individuals and guarantees” four liberties: individual security; liberty of movement; liberty of choice of employment or work, and liberty of choice of what we purchase; liberty of opinion, expression, and communication, including religious liberties. The paradox of individual security is that the liberties associated with it (the right of habeas corpus, the right to a jury trial, etc.) are both guaranteed by the state and against the police powers and the powers of courts. “Among us, the ambivalence is strong.” Liberty of movement means both movement within the borders of our own country and over its borders, if one becomes dissatisfied with the conditions there—a “relatively rare” liberty in human history. In addition to these “personal liberties,” the state also guarantees three political liberties, namely, voting, protesting, assembly. And there are social liberties, particularly the liberty of association. Associations do indeed resist democratization or egalitarianism, inasmuch as “professional life is not organized along democratic principles”; it is hierarchical.
All these liberties may be formal and/or real. In contemporary liberal societies, or personal and social liberties are real, but the reality or mere formality of our political liberties is a more complex matter. Political liberties have “symbolic value” and “indirectly a considerable efficacy in most circumstances.” For example, the right to vote bespeaks “the equality of all individuals,” although in reality a vote in a national election is only one among millions, and the choice often lies between two candidates one dislikes, or two parties one finds troubling. The right is nonetheless real in the sense that it is efficacious. Regimes that govern by majority consent do in fact preserve our liberties—better, if imperfectly, than other regimes do— as the history of the twentieth century has shown. “The heart” of citizen liberties is “liberty of participation in the state by the half-way of procedures, elections and others, which we know,” but all of these liberties, personal, social, and political “are defined at the same time from the State and against it.”
This causes a problem. In contemporary liberal societies “many individuals have the feeling that they are not free,” experiencing the regime as oppressive, sometimes because our society has inequalities, partly because there are so many kinds of liberty that one is bound to feel deprived of some of them. Too, the real society doesn’t measure up to their own personal conception of the good society. In other words, “the consciousness of liberty is not separated from the consciousness of the legitimacy of the society,” constrained as liberty is by hierarchies in the workplace and by the social liberties of “collective” organizations themselves, whether a firm of a labor union. Such consciousness cannot be satisfied by rearranging political and social institutions alone, or simply by changing the laws. And it cannot be satisfied by the search for and even the discovery of “rights of man that are universally valid.” Satisfaction of one’s consciousness of liberty supposes rather a civilization, “in large measure a civilization like ours, which protects and even encourages the free activity of everyone.” That is, the consciousness of liberty will satisfy itself only in civil—ization, in partaking of the civic culture. “After all, in Greek antiquity, the liberty of cities was primordial. The liberty par excellence was the liberty of the group, the city.” We no longer find such rigorously political liberty sufficient to satisfy us, but it remains indispensable to the human consciousness of liberty in practice, in the lives we actually live.
By such civic participation, we will need to pose and answer certain questions of political philosophy, while perhaps taking care not to call them that in our deliberations with fellow-citizens who are not particularly philosophic. What is the ‘rank order’ of liberties? “What is the relation between political and social liberties such as I have analyzed and the philosophy of liberty?” And “what is the liberty par excellence?” To answer that last question, one would need to describe “the good society,” then rank liberty and liberties in terms of it. The past two centuries have seen such questions raised in the debates between democratic republicans, partisans of political liberty, and socialists, partisans of social liberty. This debate resulted in “a severe lesson,” seen in the socialist regimes.
Marxian socialists have long charged that liberties in the liberal republics amounted only to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat. The remedy, Marx and Lenin both claimed, would be the dictatorship of the proletariat, the ever-growing majority within the industrialized societies. The Soviet Union put this into practice, yielding not real proletarian rule but another ruling class that quickly suppressed personal liberties along with social and political ones. This experience strongly suggests that there is always a ruling class of some sort, that “the difference between societies is the mode of exercising power by the ruling minorities, and the guarantees that the State or these powers are in a position to give to the governed.” While in the past, liberalism justifies itself with “some philosophic doctrines”—those abstract ideas Aron views with caution— today liberalism justifies itself “in a negative, or defense manner” against totalitarianism, even as some earlier liberals of the Enlightenment had defined it “against the absolutism of a religion.”
Well articulated by Aron’s eminent contemporary, the British political thinker Isaiah Berlin, this definition will not do. Resistance to tyranny in all its forms remains indispensable, but liberal-democratic regimes need more than that to justify themselves. As seen most impressively in the writings of Montesquieu, “one of the great ideas of the liberal democratic movement was to progressively introduce the constitutional principle into the government of men.” The then-recent ‘Watergate’ scandal, which brought down the Nixon presidency in America, illustrated the worth of proper governmental procedures, political participation, and the rule of law.
The danger to liberal democracy from within the liberal democracies themselves comes not from any overt appeal to modern ‘totalitarian’ tyrannies, now mostly discredited, but from a radical egalitarianism that democracy fosters in the minds and hearts of citizens. Today, “in the measure that one tends to confound, more and more, liberty and equality, any form of inequality becomes a violation of liberty.” Beneath this confusion lurks another, worse one. It might be called Nietzschean egalitarianism. “If you define liberty as power,” the claim that any form of inequality amounts to a violation of liberty is “evident.” “But if one retains the strict and rigorous sense of liberty—liberty as equal right—then equality of rights cannot be transmitted, in an inegalitarian society, by the equality of powers.” It is one thing to allow anyone to apply for admission to a university, quite another to admit all the applicants. To allow anyone to apply for admission obviates the privileges of social and economic class as they impinge upon the advancement of merit. To admit everyone to a university will interfere with the advancement of merit just as surely as the established class privileges, given the limited resources of any university. This necessarily non-universal universalism of the universities exemplifies the collision between social equality and necessarily hierarchic civil associations.
The French ‘New Philosophers’—Aron is thinking of such men as Bernard-Henri Lévy, Jean-Marie Benoist, Alain Finkelraut, and André Glucksmann, former Marxists who sobered up after reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago —have clearly seen this confusion of equality and power but overreact to it by rejecting “power itself.” For all the merit of their newfound anti-communism (to which they added a firm critique of Heidegger and other recent idolators of Rightist power), they fall into the sort of self-contradiction seen, nearly two decades earlier, in the Port Huron Statement, the founding screed of the American New Left. They would like to combine communalism with anarchy, but “I fear that these two ideas are antipodes to one another,” as indeed Walter Berns had noted in his critique of New-Left ideology. [3]
Aron politely dismisses such niaiseries. He reminds his listeners that “there is a great philosophic tradition according to which authentic liberty is the mastery of reason or the will over the passions.” “Liberty par excellence” guides the will, giving direction to choice, as distinguished from liberating the passions, which do not, strictly speaking, choose but merely impel. Genuine liberty doesn’t make reason the scout of the passions, as Hobbes contended in his advocacy of absolutist monarchic regimes in a powerful modern state. It is true, Aron remarks, that philosophic liberty and political liberty are not the same; philosophic liberty means the liberty of the human soul to think rationally, to live a life of the mind as the proper activity of a rightly ordered soul; political liberty, the liberty of a free citizen who is usually not a philosopher, consists of ruling oneself according to laws he and his fellow citizens have made, guided not by the theorizing reason of the philosopher but the practical reasoning that asks not so much ‘What is X?’—justice, nature, custom—but ‘What shall we do?’ Shall: “civism is a part of morality.”
However, “in the majority of Western societies” today, “liberty situates itself in the liberation of the desires.” Under this hedonistic framework, “it is the State or power” is made “the enemy of individual desires.” Even the liberal-democratic state’s enforcement of toleration—its protection of religious practice and of freedom of speech and of the press—has been damned as “repressive” by the likes of Herbert Marcuse, in the name of “the liberation of eros.” Aron unhesitatingly calls this “the moral crisis of liberal democracies.” [4]
Contrary to these claims, “the theories of democracy and the theories of liberalism have always in some way included the definition of the virtuous citizen or the way of life that will conform to the ideal of a free society.” It is scarcely possible “to give stability to democratic regimes” without ideas of what is just, without a “conception of good and bad.” But “the fact is that today, it appears to me extremely difficult, whether in the lycées or the universities, to speak seriously about the duties of citizens.” Against the phantom of ‘repressive toleration,’ educationists begin to impose a frankly repressive intolerance. Aron generously nods at André Malraux, who had identified and deplored this trend in his memoir, Le temps des limbes. “Like him, I am not sure that in our societies,” in some measure animated by a sort of egalitarian nihilism, “there is still a representation of the good society, or a representation of the ideal or accomplished man”—the ‘man in full,’ the completed human being. “Perhaps this kind of skepticism which underlies liberalism is the necessary culmination of our civilizations,” yet there can be no doubt that Western civilization faces rival regimes which do not hesitate to uphold their own “principle of legitimacy and their representation of the good society and the virtuous man.” While “I am not sure that such indoctrination as we encounter elsewhere really succeeds,” and “I do not conclude that all societies of the rest of humanity have for their vocation to organize their common life on our model, I say that we should never forget, in the measure to which we love liberties or liberty, that we enjoy a rare privilege in history and in space.”
Notes
- In this, Aron proved mistaken. Soustelle, who had served as Secretary-General of the RPF throughout its existence and who had been appointed governor of French Algeria by a subsequent French government, surviving an assassination attempt by the FLN, aided de Gaulle in his return to power in 1958 but broke with him when de Gaulle chose to grant independence to Algeria in 1960.
- Casanova smartly presents us with Aron’s excellent refutation of the charge that de Gaulle had real affinities with the pre-war French Right, which in any event had always detested him and would attempt to murder him on more than one occasion. See “Maurrasism and Gaullism,” an article published in Le Figaro in December 1964. While it is true, Aron writes, that de Gaulle shares Maurras’s distaste for the regime of the parties and also Maurras’s insistence on the primacy of politics over economics, the reality of the struggle among nation-states, the permanence of national interests over ideologies, a sympathy for economic corporatism, and “the passion for France alone, at the risk of accepting that France be alone,” de Gaulle sharply departs from Maurras in his republicanism and his toleration of religious and ethnic minorities. “Gaullist France is not fixed once and for all in the Roman, monarchic, or classical order; it remains itself, but on condition that it espouses its century,” that is, adapts to existing circumstances. Unlike Maurras, de Gaulle “is conscious of the chances and necessities of our epoch,” understanding that “one commands nature only by obeying it.” Finally, again unlike Maurras, de Gaulle is no historicist. “History is not, in his eyes, a fatality to which one must submit, it si no more a benevolent divinity, it is a milieu, more or less favorable and hostile, which a statesman has the duty to understand in order to master.” Hence de Gaulle’s readiness to relinquish the French empire and to adapt France to both the existing means of production in the French, and modern economy, and to the instruments of war modern technology has invented.
- See Walter Berns: “The New Left and Liberal Democracy.” In How Democratic Is America? Responses to the New Left Challenge. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971.
- See Paul Eidelberg: “The Temptation of Herbert Marcuse.” The Review of Politics, Volume 31, Issue 4, October 1969, pp. 442-458.
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