Raymond Aron: Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection. George Holoch translation. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990.
In the school year 1921-22, Raymond Aron took a class in philosophy at his lycée. Plato’s Socrates describes the experience of philosophy as a conversion, a turning-around of the soul, its redirection to a new way of life. Aron confirms this: “The study of philosophy revealed my vocation and the austere pleasures of reflection,” very much in contrast with the life of his brother, Adrian, who “was gifted with exceptional intelligence” and “put it at the service of bridge and stamps”—a decidedly unphilosophic way of life. “The class of philosophie had taught me that we can think our existence rather than submitting to it, we can enrich it by reflection, carry on a dialogue with great minds,” even if we cannot claim to have great minds by nature. In this, he shared the way of life of Léon Brunschvicg, his future colleague on the faculty at the Sorbonne, who described himself as “attached to meditation on and commentary about the greatest geniuses of humanity,” without supposing he numbered among them. “He did not set himself at the level of the greats, but he peopled his life through his contact with them.”
The philosophy class “taught me to think but also, above all, to learn, to study.” In thinking about France in the aftermath of the Great War, in sympathizing with “the oppressed” and “detest[ing] the powerful who were too confident of their rights,” Aron began to recognize that “between philosophy and my feelings there was a gap—ignorance of society as it is as it can be, and as it cannot be.” “Most of my contemporaries have not filled, have not even tried to fill, that gap.” Thinking philosophically about how the human mind knows, or how human beings should act, they did not think seriously about the social and political conditions in which the mind knows itself and the world, conditions within which it deliberates about what actions to take. In seeking knowledge about society, Aron turned to political reflection. His soon-to-be noteworthy classmate at the École Normale Supérieure, Jean-Paul Sartre, read Aron’s first published article on politics and fumed moralistically: “Has my little classmate become a bastard?” But Aron was only attempting to register his discovery that “politics, as such, differs from morality”—that is, from morality as defined by a strict adherence to certain fixed principles of conduct (for example, utility maximization or the categorical imperative). Politics requires prudential thought, a point that would come as no surprise either to Aristotle or Jesus of Nazareth but had been entirely lost in the neo-Kantian atmosphere of French academic philosophy in the 1920s. Although Sartre would depart from Kantian doctrines soon enough, he retained a Kantian ‘attitude’ for the rest of his life. Political philosophy was beyond his range, although he paid plenty of attention to politics in his uncompromising denunciation of ‘bourgeois democracy’ and his ‘existential commitment’ to egalitarianism. “I envied Sartre’s confidence and, in my heart, I accepted his certainties and my doubts, whose authenticity he had difficulty in admitting,” since any uncertainty, any inclination to examine, much less criticize, the sentiments of the Left could, in Sartre’s mindset, only bespeak bad faith.
Initially, Aron shared Leftist sentiments. “The year 1921-22 coincided with the renewal of the bourgeois, academic left, which had until then been suppressed by nationalist fervor” whipped up by the war against Germany. More, “philosophy in itself provides a lesson in universality”; a way of life devoted to thought partakes of the universal human capacity to think. “War denies the humanity of man because the victory has demonstrated nothing but his superior strength or cleverness”; since the “bourgeois” or non-communist Left had inclined to peaceableness, even to pacifism, in international relations, it seemed more compatible with philosophizing, and philosophizing seemed more compatible with it. Although a philosopher might ‘make war’ by polemicizing in defense of his way of life, when philosophizing he is ‘making love,’ ardently pursuing the wisdom his political regime, perhaps any political regime, can give him only in glimpses, and unphilosophically. As a Jewish man, albeit thoroughly ‘assimilated’ to French life, Aron additionally could “hardly do anything but will himself, feel himself, to be on the left,” given the anti-Semitism of so many on the French Right.
A philosopher or student of philosophers will form friendships on the basis of that love. Among his classmates at the École, Sartre and Paul Nizan “were recognized by their classmates as out the ordinary” in their devotion both “to literature and philosophy”; they became friends with, roommates of, one another and of Aron. Nizan was a young man whose philosophic inclinations brought him to seek the sort of absolute truth in politics as he sought in intellection. Before becoming a dedicated communist, he was “tempted by Action Française,” the principal organization of the postwar Right, led by Charles Maurras. [1] “Beyond his material elegance, beyond his humor, beyond his extraordinarily quick wit, one suspected that he was anguished, determined to overcome his anguish through action or serious thought, despite the intermittent gaiety beneath which he concealed himself.” His commitment to communism became so pure that he opposed the Popular Front of the mid-1930s—he disliked collaborating with non-communists—and would resign from the French Communist Party after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 not because he objected to the treaty but because the French party had lacked the daring of Stalin in proposing it. Some twenty percent of PCF members deserted the party in protest against the Pact; once Germany declared war on France, the party itself lined up in favor of the war against Nazis, only to reverse course when informed by Stalin that the struggle was an excrescence of bourgeois imperialism on both sides. Nizan would have no part of such a wishy-washy bunch. But in Aron’s terms, Nizan was thinking about politics apolitically, an instance of pure, if profoundly mistaken, moral dudgeon.
Adolescent Sartre entertained grander ambitions—to “rise to the level of Hegel” and perhaps “beyond” him, as a philosopher, while enjoying the esteem of men and the adoration of women. “He already scorned the privileged,” those now above him socially but unworthy of their prominence, the sort of men who had a court reserved for their exclusive use at the tennis club. Marxism, mixed with Husserlian and Heideggerian motifs, eventually provided the desired éclat, although there was more to it than doctrine. “Sartre wanted to become a great writer, and he did.” No Hegel, but then Hegel was no great writer. As for philosophy, “his vision of the world is not entirely he own,” as “there is no doubt that he seized ideas as they passed within his grasp”; “in 1945, Merleau-Ponty told me that he was careful not to tell Sartre of his ideas.”
Young men of philosophic ambition seek older men as mentors or as targets. In the 1920s, in France, the most prominent of these were Brunschvicg, Henri Bergson, and Émile-Auguste Chartier, better known by his pen name, Alain. Bergson had retired and seems not to have interested the ENS trio, and in any event had left before they came along. Brunschvicg was a different story. “A mandarin among mandarins,” he wrote on intellectual life, giving his books such titles as The Stages of Mathematical Thought and The Growth of Consciousness in Western Thought, “shed[ding] light on the history of Western philosophy with parallels from mathematics and physics.” (In the United States, the German emigré Jacob Klein, who taught for decades at St. Johns College, might be a rough parallel.) Brunschvicg “did not break with tradition” but did tend to “reduce philosophy to a theory of knowledge,” as if Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason formed the centerpiece of the philosophic enterprise. In his interpretation and adaptation of Kant, “science leaves to philosophy no specific object other than science itself”; “the mind constructs reality through science, and science consists essentially not in elaborating concepts or deducing their consequences, but in judging.” Such judging should be done by a mind purged of egoism, a religiosity without God. “Moral progress is expressed by detachment from the self, by true dialogue, with everyone putting himself in the other’s place,” even as the scientist qua scientist looks at the phenomena before him without regard to himself and his own ‘interests.’ In this way, “the attitude of the pure scientist would lead to justice.” This is hardly the stuff of political philosophy, and Aron would need to overcome it before he could learn to think politically, but in the meantime, “all the philosophy of the past remained latent, alive, in his books and lectures,” and is that not the crucial thing a professor of philosophy must ensure?
As for Alain, “I was more impressed by [his] personality than by his philosophy.” A man of courage, he detested war but volunteered for combat at the beginning of hostilities, demanding of himself that he live through it “with the combatants.” “Alain and his students were independent, neither communist nor socialist, but the eternal left, the left that never holds power, since it is defined by the resistance to power, which by its very essence leads to abuses and corrupts those who hold it,” in their estimation. Vis-à-vis Germany, this meant a refusal to “participate in the avalanche of anti-German propaganda” during the war, and the suspicion that Germany did not bear “exclusive or predominant responsibility” for the war. They opposed postwar French revanchisme, as seen in the occupation of the Ruhr by French forces. Aron gives Alain his due: “at least [he] had kept silent in the midst of the collective madness.” But silence isn’t enough.
“What do I retain from Alain? He helped me to read the major authors, even though I subscribed neither to his method nor to its results.” His students were led into a notion of philosophia perennis, that all philosophers “said more or less the same thing,” although Aron hastens to testify that Alain himself didn’t think that. The reaction was nonetheless understandable, as the master himself “drew a link between Kant, who lifted his hat to temporal authority without morally submitting to it, and Auguste Comte who accepted the rule of force and moderated it through spiritual power.” That is, as Aron remarks, “what both of them had thought, preached, or taught was in the final analysis, the philosophy of Alain himself.”
ENS had its political side, if not its political-philosophic side. The two main groupings were the socialists, led by the librarian Lucien Herr and a student, Georges Lefranc, and the Catholics, led by Professor Pierre-Henri Simon, who “at the time leaned toward the right perhaps in the limited sense that they did not rebel against the virtues and patterns of thought that had ruled wartime France.” Aron understandably had more sympathy with the socialists; regarding Maurras, “several times I tried to develop an interest in this doctrinaire supporter of the monarchy, without success.” But he remained painfully cognizant of his lack of real knowledge of politics, recalling a family discussion of a financial crisis in which a uncle who worked in a brokerage house silenced him by saying, “I’ll listen to you when you speak of philosophy; you know nothing of finance, so keep quiet.” Throughout his life, he remained on the Left in one sense: “I despise everyone who thinks he is of another essence” than other human beings. The “great men of our society…are no different from ordinary mortals, they seem to me neither more human nor more inhuman than their fellows.” There remains, however, a distinction among certain distinguished men. “There remains between us the inevitable, unbridgeable distance between the men of state or economic power and a free intellectual.”
French academic life offered Aron both an apolitical philosophy and an unphilosophic politics. But Kant does address the question of history, however implausibly, and this led Aron to a question: How does one understand history, and particularly one’s own time? This is a Kant-like question of epistemology directed neither at physics nor metaphysics, or at least not at the ‘metaphysics of morals,’ simply. “I gradually grasped my two tasks: to understand or know my time as honestly as possible, without ever losing awareness of the limit of my knowledge; to detach myself from immediate events without, even so, accepting the role of spectator.” He pursued these tasks in what for a French academic of the 1930s was an unusual place: Germany, at the University of Cologne. “As surprising as it may seem today, French and German philosophers were hardly aware of one another” in those days, despite the common legacy of Kant. While there, he immersed himself in Kant, “absorb[ing] a precious, perhaps the most precious, element of Germany philosophy,” namely, “the categorical imperative, the essence of ethics” and Kant’s argument in favor of “religion within the limits of reason.” But could Kantianism be integrated into political thought?
At Cologne, Aron read Marx’s Capital. Hoping to find in Marx “a confirmation of socialism as the next necessary phase of history,” Aron wondered if Marx’s “philosophy of history free[d] us from the heaving obligation that is nevertheless a constituent part of our humanity, of choosing different parties?” Does the dialectic that is class struggle answer that question for us? And did it explain the Great Depression “that was ravaging the world and tragically affecting Germany” while, conversely, “justify[ing] the communist movement, and the Soviet Union as well?” Witness to the rise of Nazis, Aron liked the Soviets no better, and so was both “attracted and repelled” by the philosophy of history that, in its contemporary manifestation, condemned the former as a symptom of ‘bourgeois reaction’ while esteeming the latter as History’s welcome cutting edge.
Upon returning to France, worried about “the nationalistic furor that had seized the entire people and the threat of war that Adolf Hitler’s rise to power would cause to hang over Europe,” Aron expressed these concerns to a French Foreign Ministry undersecretary, Joseph Paganon, whom he met through a friend of his brother. “He listened to me attentively, apparently with interest,” but then asked, with diplomatic courtesy, “You, who have spoken so well about Germany and the dangers appearing on the horizon, what would you do if you were in [the minister of foreign affairs’] place?” Philosophy, even genuinely political philosophy, takes one only so far; to think about politics, theoretical reasoning needs the supplement of prudential reasoning. When it came to the political question of understanding the politics of his time, Aron had reached a double impasse: ni Marx, ni Immanuel [Kant].
What, then, did the sociologists offer? “Max Weber provoked my sometimes passionate interest,” as his studies of religion “preserved the best elements of its philosophic origins” by reconstructing “the meaning men had given to their existence and of the institutions that had preserved religious messages, had transmitted or ritualized them, and the ways in which the prophets had shaken, revitalized, and renewed them.” In the contemporary world, Weber’s approach thus took account of both the modern system of transmitting and ritualizing messages, the bureaucracy of the modern state, and the modern ‘prophets,’ “the charismatic authority of the demagogue.” In Weber, “I glimpsed for the first time, in the constructions of the sociologist who was also a philosopher, my ethical dilemmas and my hopes.” And Weber’s “ethic of responsibility” also addressed the undersecretary’s polite demand for a bit of practicality. “I was linked to him by an elective affinity.”
Nor did Aron ignore Germany’s ongoing philosophic ferment, with Husserl and Heidegger on one hand, the “Hegelianized Marxism” of the Frankfurt School on the other. These two poles interacted to disarm German intellectuals: “The threat of death hovered over this Republic without republicans, over a marxisant left-wing intelligentsia that hated capitalism too much and did not fear Nazism enough to come to the defense of the Weimar regime. A few years later, the sign of death was inscribed on France.” In France, Aron reported on Husserl to Sartre, “awaken[ing] in him a feverish curiosity.” Both for Sartre and Aron, Husserl’s phenomenology proved a liberation from their “neo-Kantian training.” But in Sartre’s case, this turn of attention to ‘the things themselves’ was accompanied by no subsequent turn to sober Max Weber. He chose Marx as his guide to politics.
What of the ordinary Germans? “I heard Goebbels and Hitler several times.” Their audience cut across lines of social and economic class—a phenomenon Marx could not predict and Stalin (for one) would never understand. “They nodded in approbation to Hitler’s diatribes against the Jews, the French, or the capitalists,” likely without taking “the insults and pronouncements of Nazi orators literally.” After all, before the Holocaust, “how can one believe the unbelievable?”
In the Germany of the early 1930s, Aron “passed a threshold in my political education—an education that will last as long as I do.” He “had understood and accepted politics as such, irreducible to morality” as conceived by Kant and expressed by the categorical imperative. As a result, “I would no longer attempt, through statements of signatures, to demonstrate my fine feelings” but rather “to think about politics,” think about it in terms of “political agents,” and “hence to analyze their decisions, their goals, their means, their mental universe.” If Nazism “had taught me the power of irrational forces,” easily obscured in the then-polite domain of the universities, “Weber had taught me the responsibility of each individual, not so much with respect to intentions,” the purity of one’s ‘imperatives,’ “as to the consequences of his choices,” most notably the consequences of whipping up irrational forces for the sake of political mobilization. Even as he learned that those lessons, the world in which he lived had shifted from the postwar atmosphere of a Europe confident that Germany had been pacified, now ruled by a commercial republican regime that would not threaten its neighbors, to a prewar atmosphere, in which a new regime in Germany, far worse than the Kaiserreich. Unlike most of his contemporaries in France, Aron understood that “beyond the left and antifascism, it was now a question of France and its salvation.” “The patriotism of my childhood, of my family, of all my ancestors won out over the pacifism and badly defined socialism to which I had been led by philosophy and by the postwar atmosphere.”
He returned to Paris in 1934. At the Center for Social Documentation at ENS, he delivered a lecture on the Nazi regime, carefully identifying himself not only as a Frenchman but as a Jew. “I had understood that German anti-Semitism would call into question the existence of French Jews; I adopted once and for all the only attitude that seems to me appropriate: never to conceal my origins, without ostentation, without humility, without compensatory pride.” Although some French specialists on Germany had justified Nazism as Germany’s means of recovery from the Depression (which it was), Aron pointed to the larger political and military implications. Nazism, he told them, “is a catastrophe for Europe because it has revived an almost religious hostility between peoples, because it has propelled Germany toward its ancient dream and its perennial sin: in the guise of defining itself proudly in its singularity, Germany is lost in its myths, a myth about itself and about the hostile world.”
Having separated himself morally and intellectually from the French Left, the threat of Nazism nonetheless required contact and indeed alliance with elements of the Left throughout the remainder of the decade. Of these personalities, Aron emphasizes his relations with the members of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, André Malraux, and Alexander Kojève. Of the Frankfurt group, he found Theodor Adorno “the most impressive of all because of his culture, his knowledge of music, and the difficulty of his style.” On the other hand, “I must admit…thirty years later, I was not convinced of the genius of Marcuse.” They were all “followers, in one way or another, of Marx” but supported neither of the two principal Marxist factions in European politics, the Social Democrats and the Communists. “They did nothing to save the Republic,” eventually fleeing to America, where they enjoyed much success in influencing students in the safety America had helped to win for them in the 1940s and sustained for them ever since.
Malraux was, publicly at least, a ‘fellow-traveler’ with Marxists, but never a Marxist. Unlike the Frankfurters, he became a good friend of Aron, and their wives and daughters befriended one another, as well. Malraux had already published four novels and was writing Man’s Fate. “I felt his superiority and admitted it to myself without bitterness.” Aron is quick to vindicate Malraux’s self-taught knowledge, which would be ridiculed in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. “When I was able to verify, I was almost always struck by the precision and the pertinence of his knowledge of literature and history.” Politically, both men accepted the Soviet Union as an ally against fascism (“Hitler represented the immediate and therefore primary danger”)— Malraux with characteristically more enthusiasm, in public. “In private, Malraux spoke neither as a communist nor a fellow traveler. He concealed neither from himself nor from others the harshness and the crimes of the regime, but he also praised its social accomplishments.” Unfortunately, his public support for the Soviet regime, though tactical, “converted to the Party many young men in search of a cause to which they could devote themselves,” even as “Marxism had never subjugated” his own soul, and he consequently “never went through the conversion of ex-communist or ex-Maoists.” As a result, in the years immediately after the liberation of France he could ally himself with General de Gaulle; “his nationalism and Gaullism were much deeper than his quasi-Marxism.” He “understood more quickly and clearly than Sartre that the revolutionary spirit was no longer embodied in the East; the subjection of the Poles, the Hungarians, the Rumanians, was an expression of Realpolitik.” In one volume of his ‘anti-memoir,’ The Mirror of Limbo, Malraux quoted de Gaulle as remarking, “I was the real revolutionary,” with no objection. Aron suggests that once again Malraux was not so much wrong as too enthusiastic: “Perhaps the General gave his ministers [including Malraux, who served in his cabinet as Minister of Culture] the feeling that they were living in History and not in everyday life, but the impression was deceptive,” inasmuch as de Gaulle’s real political achievement was to found the Fifth Republic, a substantial improvement over the Fourth to be sure, a political revolution or regime change, but one unlikely to have stirred the soul of Hegel. The friendship of Malraux and Aron sustained itself on similarity of interests and allegiances, with sometimes complementary differences of temperament. (I recall a couple of college students, one of whom had the motto, “I. A. P.,” meaning, “It’s all poetry,” to which his pal countered with “I. M. P.”: “It’s mostly prose.”)
Another friendly acquaintance of the Thirties, Alexandre Kojève, called himself “a strict Stalinist,” although Aron wonders what he meant by that. Unlike Malraux, Kojève (a Russian, his real name was Kojevnikoff) was a philosopher and a Hegelian who regarded ‘History’ as having reached its end in the “universal and homogeneous empire” of Stalin. “That red Russia was governed by brutes, its very language vulgarized, its culture degraded—he admitted all this, in private.” The Soviets’ rival, the United States, was unacceptable because “he considered the United States the most radically unphilosophical country in the world.” Accordingly, after the war he worked to establish the European Economic Community in an attempt to preserve “the autonomy of France and Europe.” Before and after the war, “if I may risk a comparison that some will consider sacrilegious, he seemed to me, in a sense, more intelligent than Sartre,” whose “passions and his moralism, often inverted, limited his angle of vision.” Malraux and Kojève, whose political judgment Aron respected, both excelled Sartre in prudence, the leading virtue of Aron.
That prudence, wedded to moderation, guarded Aron from the excesses of Malraux and Kojève. He rejected the latter’s historicism, along with both the “rationalist progressivism” that “still dominated the Left of the Sorbonne,” and the Spenglerian pessimism seen among many on the Right. In his 1938 study, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, he “made explicit the mode of political thought that I adopted from then on.” Political thought requires, first, a choice between various forms of historical determinism—what he calls the “sociodicies” that have replaced the theodocies of earlier times—and an acceptance of “the existing order.” Theodicy aims at wiping out the existing order altogether; the revolutionary “has an ideology, that is, the representation of another system, transcending the present and probably unrealizable.” Ideology is a temptation characteristic of modern democracies, democracies in Tocqueville’s sense, which “invoke ideals that are to a large extent unrealizable and through the voice of their leaders”—demagogues—and aspire “to an inaccessible mastery over their fate.” The political thinker who instead chooses to accept the existing order begins with where he is; “it has its origin and its object in my own existence” in this time and place. Such a thinker has not chosen ‘conservativism’ but rather undertakes “the most rigorous possible study of reality and the possible regime that might replace the existing one.” Such is “rational choice in political history as I understand it.” One can then choose one realizable regime over another on the basis of multiple criteria: “effectiveness of institutions, individual liberty, equitable distribution, perhaps above all the kind of person created by the regime.” If the Soviet Union produces a brutal human type, as Kojève saw, then its supposed status as ‘History’s’ end-state is not worthy of choice. Put another way, the “politician of Reason” claims to know which way ‘History’ is going, “foresee[ing] at least the next stage of evolution”; “the Marxist knows that the disappearance of capitalism is inevitable and that the only problem is to adapt tactics to strategy, to harmonize accommodation with the current regimes with preparation for the future regime.” The “politician of understanding,” by contrast, “seeks to preserve certain goods—peace and freedom—or to reach a unique goal, national greatness, in situations that are always new and that follow one another without organized patterns.” The politician of Reason imports theory into practice by means of choosing to believe in certain ‘laws of History,’ said to be scientifically discernible; the politician of understanding doubts that any such laws exist, instead deploying investigation of existing conditions and prudential reasoning about possible future conditions.
Following this choice between ways of thinking about politics, a prudential political thinker next makes a decision about “a way of living,” what Aristotle calls the regime as a Bios ti. Given the limits of political life, a regime that will give scope to “a certain idea of man,” one who recognizes the limitations of human knowledge, will be his preference. True, “man has a history,” but it is “an unfinished history” and its end is unpredictable. “Existence is dialectical, that is dramatic, since it operates in an incoherent world, commits itself despite time, seeks a fugitive truth, without any assurance beyond a fragmentary science and formal reflection.” This suggests a preference for the regimes of liberty over the certitudes offered by ideologies Left and Right, ideologies that contended for worldwide dominance in the coming Second World War. In writing his book, “I was experiencing in advance the world war that my judges”—often “fanatics” whose sociodicies “divid[ed] the world into two opposed kingdoms”—did “not see coming.”
This principled factionalism prevented France from uniting to defend itself against the tyrannical regime now in Germany, forcibly and demagogically unified. To this principled factionalism, France soon added an economic division. The first few years of the Great Depression saw no mass unemployment in France, unlike in Great Britain, Germany, or the United States. But, in a display of “the absurdity of monetary patriotism,” French politicians refused to devalue the currency in response to currency deflation. This “condemned our economy to a prolonged case of lowering prices and to gradual weakening,” which “sharply affected the condition of the workers.” The crisis pushed them into opposition to the regime itself. But “how could we resist against Hitler’s threat if the government was supported by only half the nation?” French intellectuals were no help, both sets of ideologues rejecting preparation for war—that ‘What should the minister do?’ question. While the Catholic-Christian Right veered off into “the rhetoric of unreality,” the moderate Left invoked “international law,” while the less-than-moderate Left organized to fight in the Spanish Civil War. “I refused to join the committee of vigilance of antifascist intellectuals,” since “there was no fascist peril in France, in the sense given to the term because of the examples of Italy and Germany,” and because leftists themselves could not agree on whether the Soviets intended to prevent war or turn it against the republics of the West. They refused to think geopolitically, and therefore realistically. “It is easy to think about politics, but on one condition, recognition and submission to its rules.” At the same time, given France’s factionalism, they could not act realistically even if they had thought realistically: “Can the leader of a democratic government commit his country to an action that involves a risk of war and that half the country does not consider to be in the national interest?”
And so, when Hitler invaded the Rhineland in March 1936, “the French government had to say yes or know, to act or to accept: all the rest was only words, words, words.” The words hid a refusal to take responsibility for the reality in front of Europe. Similarly, in the Spanish Civil War, “behind Franco could be seen Hitler and Mussolini; behind the Republicans, Stalin and his GPU, active behind the lines and already engaged in the task of the purge.” Germany’s seizure of the Rhineland “had radically changed the balance of forces in Europe,” preventing the French from helping “our allies east of the Reich.” To resist the Germans at that time would have put France at little risk, as Hitler wasn’t ready for a wider confrontation. But France did nothing, Hitler soon occupied the Sudetenland, and “after his peaceful triumph, Hitler informed the world of the magnitude of the booty.” At the time, “what struck all of us—appropriately—was the contrast between the paralysis of democratic regimes and the spectacular recovery of Hitler’s Germany, as well as the rates of growth published by the Soviet Union.” Parliamentary republicanism was failing. “At times I even thought, and perhaps said aloud, that if we need an authoritarian regime to save France, fine, let us accept it, while simultaneously detesting it.” Authoritarianism, perhaps yes; fascism, certainly no, nor communism. Although Kojève declared his ‘Stalinism,’ Malraux his commitment to the ‘one big Left’ of the Popular Front, Kojève “seemed to me in spite of everything a White Russian, a communist perhaps for world-historical reasons, but very distant from the Party,” whereas as Malraux “in no way attempted to put pressure on me and considered me, I suppose, destined by nature for moderate opinions.” It was left to de Gaulle to understand that French republicanism need not be parliamentary, indefensible against foreign enemies. The remainder of Aron’s life would be lived in the light of that insight and in the shadow cast by the eventual founder of the Fifth Republic. [2]
Notes
- For a consideration of Maurras’s thought, see “The Monarchist Kulturkampf of Charles Maurras,” on this website under “Nations.”
- See “Aron on de Gaulle: Wartime and Postwar” and “Aron on de Gaulle: The Fifth Republic,” on this website under “Nations.”
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