José Colen and Elisabeth Dutartre-Michaut, eds.: The Companion to Raymond Aron. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 42, Number 2, Winter 2016. Republished with permission.

 

Prescient and judicious Raymond Aron stood firm in his defense of liberal republicanism in exactly those debates when the regimes of liberty so desperately needed every courageous, independent voice they could find. And he did that in France—central to Nazi and Soviet Communist schemes for the domination of Europe—when so many of his fellow intellectuals sided with the enemy. At precisely the time when brilliant men and women supposed that ‘the center will not hold, Aron saw that it could.

Aron’s large and many-sided body of writings may well need many minds to help his readers understand it. This collection has the merit of bringing together not only the American, French, and German scholars we might anticipate but also several very able Portuguese Aronians (including the lead editor) whose work will not likely be known to Anglophone readers.

In his foreword to the volume, Aron’s most prominent contemporary student, Pierre Manent, rightly calls his mentor “a very rare bird, a theoretical man who took very seriously the realm of action” (ix). Aron sought to develop a theory of action—he called it a “praxeology”—but did so in opposition to philosophers who attempt to unite theory and practice and who claim “that the innumerable human actions in the past constitute a coherent system that gives us the clue to future human actions” (x) in accordance with discernible and deterministic historical laws modeled on similar laws in physics and chemistry. In France, Marxism was the best known of these systems, but Aron also identified Auguste Comte’s positivism as another example of such “necessitarian thinking” aimed at ending the course of history and indeed the need for politics by “substitut[ing] the administration of thing for the governing of men” (x). Manent identifies two “theoretical endeavors” Aron undertook to establish his praxeology: first, the elaboration of a regime theory that accounted for the kinds of political orders seen in the twentieth century, an effort that involved him in an amendment but also a continuation of the work of Aristotle and Montesquieu; second, an account of political disorder, as seen in international, that is also to say interregime, relations. Here, Thucydides and Clausewitz proved useful.

Nicolas Baverez, a French attorney who teaches at the National School of Administration, and who has authored what is widely regarded as the definitive biography of Aron, elaborates on these themes in the first article, in which he narrates Aron’s intellectual journey. Born in 1905 to a “fully integrated, patriotic, and republican” French-Jewish family, Aron saw his country survive World War I, “which marked the suicide of liberal Europe” (3). In the 1920s he became a friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Nizan, fellow students at the École normale supérieure, and the three of them would go on to study Heidegger and Husserl, taking the first step toward French existentialism. Aron thus turned away from “the idealism and positivism that then dominated the Sorbonne” (5). He lived in Germany between 1930 and 1933, where he not only read the phenomenologists and Max Weber but saw the rise of Nazism. Although Sartre arrived in Germany around the same time, he didn’t seem to pay as much attention to Germany’s political agony; one suspects that Aron was more alert politically, less inclined to abstraction than his friend. Being Jewish, he could scarcely have overlooked Hitler’s poisonous animosity. With Élie Halévy, Aron was “among the first to highlight the novelty of, and the common traits linking, Fascism, Nazism, and Communism, their common opposition to democracy, and the lack of any solution other than war to the challenge they presented” (5). He fought the Germans when they invaded France in 1940, then joined the Free French organization of Charles de Gaulle, remaining with the Gaullists for a time after the war when the celebrated novelist André Malraux aligned himself with the Gaullist project; Aron served under Malraux in the Ministry of Information during the short-lived de Gaulle administration of 1946. He remained Malraux’s ally during the early years of the Cold War, when both men broke publicly with the French Left and joined the Gaullist party. The by-then-fashionable Sartre disapproved, and “from 1947 to 1955, [Aron] was a lonely man”—an antifascist anticommunist in Paris, writing newspaper articles on international politics and eventually finding a position at the Sorbonne, where he was elected (by a margin of one vote) to a chair in sociology. Eventually he broke with the Gaullists, too, regarding the general’s policy of quasi-independence from the Atlantic Alliance, implemented after his founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958, as impractical; Aron remained a confirmed Atlanticist, strongly supporting NATO, until his death in 1983.

Baverez distinguishes Aron from Sartre not only on the political issue of communism but more fundamentally on his understanding of political freedom. While both “are philosophers of freedom and commitment,” Aron identified the bases of freedom in practical political action in defense of republicanism and its institutions, whereas Sartre claimed that human ‘consciousness’ had become so radically alienated from, and by, the conditions of modern life that it can free itself only by violent, collective revolt, “welded by a pact of mutual terror” (8). Thus Sartre could admire a thinker like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his book Humanism and Terror, when Aron regarded such valorizations of political violence as a fascism of the Left. At the same time, Aron rejected the utilitarian liberalism of another well-known contemporary, Friedrich von Hayek, with its faith in free markets; again, political life mattered for Aron in a way that it fundamentally did not for the main line of French existentialists—who were rather reminiscent of the literary intellectuals who gave France the Terror in the 1790s—or for the libertarians, who maintained that economics mattered more than politics. Later on, as “one of the first theorists to recognize the global age” (110) that combined capitalism, technology, and geopolitical multipolarity, Aron never succumbed to dreams of an ‘end of history’—even as he did envision an eventual end of the Cold War.

If not historicism or existentialism, what formed the formation of Aron’s understanding of right? Baverez argues that it was Kantianism; reason was “a hidden universal,” although not identical to any historicized dialectic (10). That is, reason provides a moral standard, a source of political right that is neither itself historical nor a species of natural right. But this raises an obvious question: If, as Baverez and Manent both acknowledge, Aron put a premium on prudential reasoning, where does that leave Kantianism—a philosophy of right in which prudence plays a decidedly subordinate role? Not for Aron plans for perpetual peace under a league of nations. The first of the book’s three main sections addresses the question  of right s it manifests itself in international relations, the real self-named ‘realist’ describe as an amoral war of all against all.

Jean-Vincent Holeindre, a political scientist at the University of Poitiers, offers the first of the six essays in this group. Holeindre finds the link between Aron’s theory of war and his political thought generally in his understanding of history or the course of event as a series of examples of human freedom and unfreedom, not a  teleological march towards a projected realm of absolute freedom. Initially a follower of Émile-Auguste Chartier, a pacifist philosopher who wrote under the pen name of Alain, Aron rejected pacifism when he witnessed the rise of modern tyranny or ‘totalitarianism’; at the same time, he never went to the opposite extreme of the ‘realist’ school, which inclined toward treating all states in the international system alike, regardless of their regimes. International politics, he decided, was simply too variegated a thing to be brought into the domain of any systematic theory. Although each country typically had a regime to give it sufficient internal coherence to permit theorizing, international politics could be understood in the terms offered by Carl von Clausewitz—namely, as the clash of regimes bent on advancing the characteristic interests of each regime. This is the sense in which war is political; not that it involves the give-and-take, the ruling-and-being-ruled of political life, but that it serves regime purposes. Insofar as international politics does amount to a war of all against all, every ‘each’ in the ‘all’ has a regime; its regime may be better or worse than another; who wins any given war matters, morally.

Holeindre observes that “totalitarianism reversed Clausewitz’s formula both in theory and practice” (23) because it used war as an instrument of terror complementary to its domestic use of terror in an attempt to remake human being and to overcome politics itself. Aron saw that the democratic republics were not helpless in the face of this project, if they refused pacifist surrender and the total war of the tyrants. Nuclear weapons—seemingly the ultimate technological challenge to limitations on war—in fact gave new life to the practice of limited war for political ends in defense of republicanism because, in Aron’s formulation, they made a major war improbable even as the persistence of regime conflict made peace improbable. The increased frequency of small wars under conditions of a nuclear standoff came as no surprise to Aron, who understood small wars as a tactic of the weak against the strong and, simultaneously, as a tactic the strong could encourage in wars fought by their proxy allies among the weak against their strong enemies. Aron saw that it was precisely in alliances between strong states and weak states, or weak non-state groups, that strong states might overbear their strong rivals without destruction in nuclear war.

University of Potsdam historian Matthias Opperman connects Aron’s witness of the disastrous politics of late Weimar Germany with a moral foundation for his newfound anti-pacifism: the ethic of responsibility seen in Max Weber, another thinker he studied in those years. Aron eventually came to reject Weber’s complementary notion of a ‘value-free’ social science, and therewith the Weberian distinction between facts and values. But his focus on sociological problems, taken from Weber, had a double effect: it got him away from naïve notion of historical progress founded upon German Idealism and focused his mind on the concrete, practical problems that a citizen intent on resisting modern tyranny would need to address. At the same time, Aron didn’t identify the crisis of liberalism so much with the underlying principles of modern philosophy, as Leo Strauss (“whom Aron met at the end of his stay in Berlin and whom he greatly admired later on”) would do (34). Instead, he began a lifelong interest in addressing the question he would repeat throughout his life: “What should the cabinet minister do?” Aron inclined to take the statesman’s perspective as more thoroughly dispositive of the right philosophic perspective than a Platonic political philosopher would do.

This statesman’ perspective caused Aron to see Hitler’s strategy much more clearly than many of his contemporaries in Europe and the United States. Hitler had read the English geopolitician Halford Mackinder: He wanted to rule the “Heartland,” the European core of the “World Island” consisting of Europe itself, Asia, and Africa (38). Unlike the ‘realist’ Mackinder, however, Aron never lost sight of the (as it were) moral-political motives for wanting to do such a thing, and Holeindre quotes Aron as saying that “true realism consists nowadays in acknowledging the effect of ideologies on diplomacy and strategy…. Nobody understands the diplomacy of a state without knowing the regime, without scrutinizing the philosophy which motivates the political leaders of that state” (40). In the end, therefore, neither Kantian idealism nor Machiavellianism will suffice. “What tradition teaches,” Aron wrote, “is not cynicism but Aristotelian prudence” (41).

Carlos Gaspar, a professor of international relations at Lusiadan University of Lisbon, shows how Aron exercised such prudence during the long Cold War, in which nationalities were suppressed in the European core within the two enemy blocs but were revivified (and in some cases invented) in the periphery, now free of European imperial rule. The Cold War featured an overall stability punctuated by crises that reinforced the stability of the overall balance of power, but Aron hardly found satisfaction in stability alone. Europe’s subordination to the United States and the Soviet Union rankled, and while he didn’t go so far as de Gaulle did in his invocations of nationality, he too wanted a more united Western Europe—a Europe des patries —to reassert its own interests in its own voice. Like de Gaulle and Churchill, he regarded Franco-German reconciliation as central to this policy. He considered the Soviets’ 1956 invasion of Hungary as the beginning of the end of Soviet legitimacy—and ultimately of its imperial control—in Eastern Europe. The invasion “destroyed the credibility of Soviet communism for the coming generations” (53), and while US-Soviet alignment against Great Britain, France, and Israel in the Suez Crisis of the same year also showed that the two major powers had become “enemy brothers” in maintaining their rival hegemonies, the Soviet hegemon was likely to crack first.

But what has this astute analysis of Cold War practice to do with Aron’s political theory, his praxeology? For this we must turn to his two major books, Peace and War, published in 1962, and Clausewitz: Philosopher of War, published in 1976.

Bryan-Paul Frost of the University of Louisiana-Lafayette emphasizes the sobriety of Aron’s assessment of military strategy and international relations in the era of nuclear weapons. Against many of his contemporaries, Aron judged that “the fundamentals of human nature” and therefore of “international relations” had “not changed” (61). There had indeed been a technological revolution and also what Aron called a global extension of the diplomatic field—meaning that the two major powers had built alliance systems extending to every continent—but those two facts were logically unrelated. The blocs could have formed with or without the new weapons. This meant that the underlying logic of international politics remained what it had been on several previous occasions in human history: a bipolar balance of power. This in turn meant that tactics of deterrence, persuasion, and subversion came into play and that war remained the continuation of politics by other means, even if direct warfare between the two major powers was highly unlikely. “As a civic-minded theorist, Aron had to remind his audience—and especially the practitioners of politics—that the implicit logic of modern diplomacy was not revolutionary and could still be understood in the terms of Clausewitz” (64), a point that had the moral effect of calming citizens down and, as a consequence, enabling them to clear their minds for long-term thinking. Recalling the pacifism of the interwar period and its malign effect on the willingness to defend oneself, Aron also worked to strengthen the resolve of the Western republics. “The morality of prudence is a morality of responsibility” (65); the absolutist morality of pacifism, even under the dire threat of nuclear war, would neither prevent such war nor preserve republican liberty.

Again unlike so many of his peers, Aron did not regard international organizations and international law as the core of peacemaking. Rather, “universal peace” could be achieved only with “the universality of republican regimes, the rigorous homogeneity of the international community, and the renunciation of the recourse to arms,” conditions Aron regarded as highly unlikely to be achieved in either “the near or distant future” (65). The Machiavellian insistence on the need for force in light of the persistence of human struggle and the Kantian desire for collective security and universal peace constituted an antimony that would not disappear “so long as states remain what they are” (66). At the same time, the virtues of moderation and prudence would never be replaced by any scientistic-technological ‘fix’ such as game theory; not only are there too many variables at play for any but the most probabilistic of calculations, but such ‘factors’ as glory, justice, prestige, and religion do not lend themselves to quantification (66-67). International relation can be thought about, rationally, but not in term of rationalism, if that means the application of mathematical formulas. “All political claims inevitably contain a greater or lesser degree of justice, and… these assertions must be properly weighted, assessed, and appreciated by a prospective theorist” (67); such shortcuts to understanding as self-interest or power will not do. Looking back at French history, Aron observed that “Clemenceau sought the security, Napoleon the power, Louis IV the glory of France” (68), a tripartite characterization that Aron did not hesitate to associate with the body (and the soul’s desire for safety), the heart (and its desire to conquer, to be victorious), and the mind (the desire “to spread the idea of which the state represents a unique incarnation” [68]) of France. (This may be the only judicious application of Platonism to international politics.) Because, as in Plato and the other classical theorists, the division of the human soul expresses itself in the several political regimes, and human nature has not changed, a change in regime will likely result in a change in the relations of one country to another. Aron’s example par excellence in this regard remained Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

With fine irony, Frost observes, “Aron stood squarely against the dominant trends in international relations, and this, in part, helps to explain why he had such a limited impact on Anglo-American social science” (69). This is most evident in the central section of Peace and War, where Aron rejects any effort to  “articulat[e] a system of interconnected hypotheses attempting to explain certain limited aspects of international relations” in the manner of Anglophone social scientists but instead points to perennial “variables of political life,” both material and moral (70). By keeping track of several material causes of international action (geography, demography, resources) and moral causes (regimes, civilizations, “human and social nature”), Aron avoided the errors of all monocausal systems, Marxism-Leninism (class) and Nazism (race) being the most lethal in his time (70-71). Instead of system building, Aron favored comparative and historical studies, exemplified by Montesquieu and Tocqueville. “By plunging sociological analysis back into history, Aron prevents his theoretical analysis from becoming too deterministic and abstract”—a Procrustean effort to fit facts into a simple set of supposed laws—”and by stepping back from the historical landscape, Aron avoids the mistake of claiming that international relations display no recurrent patterns of behavior” (72). It might be added that this methodological pluralism goes well with Aron’s social and political liberalism, which provides space for a variety of human ‘types’ without succumbing to moral relativism.

Aron understood Clausewitz as the Montesquieu of military thought: so argues Joel Mouric, professor of history and geography at the University of Western Brittany. Although Ludendorff and Hitler on the Right along with Lenin and Mao Zedong on the Left were “avid readers of Clausewitz,” Aron was far from viewing them a competent readers. Considered in itself war lends itself to anything but moderation, but Aron understood that Clausewitz viewed it as a means to an end. Statesmen should undertake war for strategic purposes, for the sake of political ends, including the physical survival of their nations and the defense of their regimes.

During World War II, Aron worried that the Allies’ policy of unconditional surrender and their concomitant tactic of area bombing of Germany and Japan would stiffen resistance in both countries (he was right about that) and produce broken societies likely to prove fertile of tyranny in the years following the peace (on that he was wrong). During the Korean War he sided with President Truman against General Douglas MacArthur, that seeker of victory over North Korea. Both when right and when wrong, Aron favored limited war over total war as both wiser and more just. This inclination served him especially well during the Cold War, when his influence was at its height. With the two major powers deadlocked by their mutual possession of nuclear weapons, limited wars of attrition on the peripheries of their spheres of influence would proliferate. In such wars, it is better to deal with the small enemy forces by limiting their depredations and not by attempting to bring them to justice. The latter policy will exhaust you. But this patient policy should never incline republican statesmen to imagine that their main enemy will somehow ‘come around’—as seen in the once-fashionable belief that liberal republicanism and communist oligarchy would converge, come together as fellow social democracies by each adopting the socialism of the communists and the representative institutions of the republics. That wasn’t in the cards, and Aron considered any strategy based upon such a synthesis another example of historical determinism—itself a specimen of wishful thinking.

Mouric does a fine scholarly service by noticing that Aron learned from the nineteenth-century German scholar Hans Delbrück, who had launched (and lost) a strategic debate in Germany, taking the side of a limited-war, Clausewitzian strategy against the “strategy of annihilation” favored by other military thinkers (83). It was Delbrück who led Aron back to Clausewitz, who in turn gave Aron his argument against Carl Schmitt, whose military and political thought followed the Ludendorff-Hitler misinterpretation. The policy of Franco-German reconciliation depended on getting Clausewitz right, an insight Aron shared with de Gaulle. “Rehabilitating a Prussian liberal tradition, albeit a more conservative one, Aron supported the regime of the Federal Republic of Germany, which since 1956 he had described as a ‘peaceful democracy.” (85). De Gaulle concurred, and pursued rapprochement with FRG chancellor Konrad Adenauer at the first opportunity. For Aron, support for such a rapprochement followed from Aron’s early decision to abandon existentialist decisionism for Aristotelian prudentialism.

Carlos Gaspar contributes the last essay in the first section of the book, a discussion of Aron’s thoughts on the likely consequences of the end of Cold-War bipolarity. The 1973 Yom Kippur War showed that the apparent US-Soviet condominium seen in the Suez Canal War no longer held. “At the crucial moment, no one remembered the rules of détente that were part of the code of conduct solemnly adopted by the United States and the Soviet Union at their last summit before the conflict” (92). In the years immediately following détente weakened still further, as the Soviets attempted to take advantage of American reversals foreign (Vietnam) and domestic (Watergate). In Gaspar’s Portugal, in nearby Spain, and in Italy, the Communist Party seemed poised to make political gains. Soviet rulers decided that the correlation of forces in the world had shifted in their favor.

While Aron understood that the decline of Western Europe might be hard to reverse in the face of this new correlation, he distinguished sharply between decline and decadence. “Decline, as a decrease in the relative power of a given state, could be measured with quantitative rigor in its material dimension, while decadence is a qualitative change referring to Machiavellian virtù, to the ‘historical vitality’ of a political community, and to the state’s ‘capacity for collective action.'” (93). So, the Europe of 1945 had declined in power but had not become decadent; Europeans still had plenty of fight left in them. But thirty years later Europe and perhaps America had suffered a loss of confidence, moral and intellectual confusion. Unlike decline, decadence can be remedied by an effort within the power of human souls, in part simply by refusing to give in to fear. Aron’s writings from this period—particularly his wryly titled In Defense of Decadent Europe—aimed at strengthening Europeans’ resolve and clarifying their minds.

No more than anyone else did Aron foresee the collapse of the Soviet regime in the twentieth century, although he did expect that collapse in the long run. Looking forward to that moment, he remarked pointedly, “It is my view that the most important and indeed the most neglected question in contemporary International Relations scholarship is: what will the West do when and if the Soviets decline? How we answer this question will perhaps determine whether there will be war or peace in our time” (96).

If the first section of essays shows how Aron shifted from pacifism to just-war doctrine, from existentialism to prudentialism, it doesn’t quite explain the relationship between Aron’s putatively Kantian understanding of rights and that prudentialism. More, it doesn’t explain why the actual operation of reason in Kant’s moral theory, which issues in the categorical imperative, really functions in Aron’s thought. He does not actually seem to invoke the categorical imperative; in that case, where does that leave his alleged Kantianism? We turn to the second and central section of essays, “Theory, History, Philosophy: The Primacy of the Political,” with the hope of finding some suggested answers to this question, which evidently reaches to the core of his political thought.

As a historian, Perrine Simon-Nahum of L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales doesn’t attempt an answer but rather digs back into Aron’s earliest writings, a 1935 study of Weber and his 1938 doctoral dissertation, in which he offered a critique of Hegelianism. Rejecting both positivism and historical teleology, Aron urged an understanding of the course of events seen in terms of the actions of the actors and their motives—taking his bearings from Weberian responsibility, not Hegelian determinism. A historian should attempt to understand the circumstances in which the political actor operated so as to understand the choices available and then to judge whether that actor chose well. “Despite irreducible ambivalences, ambiguities, and contradictions, Aron maintained that intelligibility was within the historian’s grasp” (107). This implies, first, that there must be a human nature that a historian can recognize in a person who lived in another time; it also implies that the historian must take what amounts to a Socratic turn, attempt to know himself, to try to understand the “multiplicity of individual experiences of which each one refers to its own vision of the world.” The historian thus enjoys a certain “interpretive freedom”—an imagining oneself into the souls and circumstances of past actors—but also “an austere restraint that takes the form of modesty, of knowing that one is after all limited by one’s own finite human fund of knowledge” (110). Both that freedom and that restraint or modesty contrast sharply with the assumptions of philosophy-of-history historians, who effectively deny the possibility that one can understand past actors as they understood themselves (on grounds of the relativity of historical knowledge, the supposed impossibility of truly knowing another historical ‘epoch’) and who, at the same time, confidently claim to understand laws of historical development or evolution, conceiving themselves thereby empowered to understand past actors in light of their place in that evolution. Simon-Nahum confirms the observation of previous contributors in remarking that this conception of history (and of social science) brought Aron to Thucydides and Clausewitz.

One might acknowledge the existence of human nature—and therefore of a historiography and a social science founded upon the study of human motives—without deriving moral or political right from it. The question of Aron’s derivation of right, the question of Aron’s stance as a political thinker and indeed philosopher, begins to be addressed more thoroughly in the essay by Institut Catholique Paris political scientist Giulio De Ligio, which is one of the highlights of the volume. Since Plato, the analogy between the order of the soul and the order of the city has attracted philosophic attention. De Ligio writes, “The question of the political regime is at the heart of the work—and one could say the life—of Raymond Aron. The thinking of this French philosopher and sociologist demonstrates how and to what extent this question is at the heart of the human problem qua human problem” (119).

Aron understood human moral and political choices as philosophical—in the sense that they reflect nature—and historical/circumstantial, in that they reflect (in the case of Aron himself) action constrained by the conditions of modernity. Although it had long been known that the poleis of antiquity acted as a direct result of their regimes—there being no meaningful distinction between ‘state’ and ‘society’ in such small places—what about the large modern states, in which civil-social and economic forces evidently rival political actions in their importance? Here De Ligio holds up an important finding: “As [Aron] himself wrote, if his education is neo-Kantian and owes much to German philosophy… his conclusions belong to a different spiritual family, or, one could say, to a tradition that prolongs an older political approach right at the heart of modernity: the school of Montesquieu and Tocqueville” (121). Even Weber, with his ethic of responsibility, fails to see the importance of the political regime to the degree that Montesquieu and Tocqueville saw it. Further, both philosophers carried on the Platonic and Aristotelian practice not merely of classifying and describing regimes but of judging them: Tocqueville, Aron maintained, “does not think that the ‘fact’ of a regime can be understood and described as an abstract apart from its ‘quality.’ The judgment of a regime is intrinsically linked to its description” (122). If sociology as an academic discipline had elevated society above politics, treating politics as epiphenomenal, Aron puts politics back in its place as a realm that is not determined by “more basic” phenomena such as economics or social groups. As in antiquity, the political structure or politeia of a community decisively shapes its bios tis or way of life. This is why two modern societies—say, France and Germany in 1939—might both be described as industrial but nonetheless serve profoundly different ends. To be sure, the size and complexity of modern societies have made nonpolitical features more influential on political action than they were in antiquity. Analysis of a modern regime does not exhaust the description of any modern society. One must still consult mainstream sociologists and the economists to understand such a society more fully, inasmuch as social and economic conditions obviously limit politicians’ conditions of action. But politics remain an independent and also in many ways the decisive element in understanding modern societies, when describing them both structurally and morally.

Aron did abandon one element of the classical approach, the search for the best regime. He retained the Aristotelian element, namely, the insistence that there can be a ‘best regime’ in a given set of circumstances. This again raises the question of the derivation of right. If there is no best regime ‘abstractly’ considered, how does the philosopher recognize the best one in the circumstances of his own time and place? What are the criteria of judgment? De Ligio doesn’t provide a clear answer to this question, although he does observe that Aron identified the existence of certain human virtues, recognizable across historical periods. The definition of corruption remarked by Gaspar evidently points to the absence or derangement of these virtues. If then there is such a thing as human nature for Aron, and if human virtues may be said to amount to instantiations of that nature ‘at its best’—perhaps when it isn’t self-destructive, self-contradictory?—then one might think Aron has a notion of natural right. This would bring him very close to Tocqueville, who defines rights as the obverse of virtues and both as bound up with the natural greatness of man. But this must remain a speculation on the basis of the evidence provided by De Ligio.

Be this as it may, De Ligio forthrightly maintains that “Aron derives from Plato a hermeneutical principle of political life: political regimes are what the men are who give them life” (131). If so (and again as in the Republic) “despotism can arise from license” (131), and a democracy without the virtue of moderation, a democracy that “push[es] too far the application of the principle” peculiar to it, namely egalitarianism, will ruin itself. This is true of all regimes. If Aron (unlike Plato) eschews the quest for the best regime simply or ‘in abstraction,’ he does have some firm notion of the best practicable regime or order, probably within fairly generous parameters allowing for individual proclivities and tastes, of the human soul And that soul then expresses itself in relation to self-expression of the soul or souls that comprise a given regime.

The redoubtable Daniel J. Mahoney of Assumption College in Massachusetts contributes the tenth of the book’s nineteen principal essays. He gives us a somewhat more Burkean Aron than De Ligio. In their “unabashed Machiavellianism,” Nazism and Italian Fascism “mocked the traditional categories of Western civilization,” repudiating “the ‘old virtues’ held dear by bourgeois civilization: ‘respect for the person, respect for the mind… personal autonomy,'” and replacing them with “‘virtues of action, of asceticism, of devotion'” (138). But this is no simple traditionalism, as seen in the title of Aron’s 1944 book, Man against the Tyrants —man as such. Mahoney regards Aron’s moral foundation as located on the crossroad of “biblical, liberal, and Kantian” principles (139). Although Aron never accepted the theology of the Bible, its “ideals and affirmations still spoke to his soul” (140), and these could indeed be reconciled with liberalism and the Kantian refusal to treat man not as a means but only as an end.

Regarding the Stalinist tyranny that the West confronted after the defeat of the tyrants of the Right, Aron “was one of the first to acknowledge the Leninist roots of Stalinist totalitarianism” (140). Stalinism wasn’t a deformation of Leninism (as Trotsky and his followers had claimed) but its culmination in practice: “After 1930, the Soviet regime was totalitarian not only in aspiration but in reality” (140), and even the Nazis could never catch up to the sheer numbers of persons it murdered. As with the Germans, however, so with the Russians; the tyrannical regime did not destroy the fundamental human characteristics of the people, and although Aron “had his doubts about whether a post-Communist Russia would evolve in the direction of English or American democracy,” he did think it could get out from under totalitarianism.

After studying both forms of totalitarianism or modern tyranny, Aron concluded that it featured an institutional marker, namely, the rule of one party, and a teleological one, the rule of ideology, that is, the rule of a comprehensive lie. Pace Karl Popper, a comprehensive lie isn’t the ‘noble lie’  proposed by Plato’s Socrates. Socrates’ lies aim at teaching certain truths about human nature; the myth of the metals, for example, gives citizens the image of his (itself simplified) descriptions of the three parts of the human soul. The modern tyrants’ lies serve to destroy the memory of the very notion of the human soul; instead of pointing toward nature they assault it.

Serge Audier, who teaches philosophy at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, offers a fascinating if not entirely persuasive attempt to find a Machiavellian side to Aron’s thought, although it must immediately be observed that he understands Machiavelli quite differently than De Ligio or Mahoney. Audier rejects Leo Strauss’s interpretation of Machiavelli as the founder of the modern project insofar as he calls upon men generally and the prince especially to master fortune by learning how not to be good; he also rejects the claim that Machiavelli forms part of a tradition of civic republicanism that began with Aristotle—the argument of J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner. While he concurs with Mahoney in saying that the young Aron held something much like Strauss’s view, he contends that Aron gradually changed his opinion before World War II and “proceed[ed] in a new direction” after the war (152).

In Audier’s account, Aron shifted his position after reading James Burnham’s The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, published  in 1943. He was so impressed that he had the volume translated and published in France. Burnham argues that Machiavelli and his followers opposed the tyranny of princes with a new form of republicanism, one that gave free play to political conflict so long as it stayed within legal and institutional bounds. A balanced government, a mixed regime or at least a democracy with many factions in it, all contending for power—a constitution not unlike the one the American Founders enacted in the 1780s—would, in Aron’s words, “preserve freedom by maintaining rivalry within the law” (153) or, as Audier puts it, “private ambitions must be channeled through public institutions” (154). For Burnham, and for Burnham’s Machiavelli, man is anything but the political animal described in Aristotle; he is selfish and contentious.

This gives Audier a different opinion of Aron’s refusal to seek the ‘ideal’ regime or ‘city in speech’ seen in pre-Machiavellian political philosophy. There can be no end to political conflict; the several parts of the city, its various social groups, can never be harmonized. “Like the Florentine, [Aron] does not condemn ambition as such or adopt a moralizing stance” because human ambition is normal, natural; “the whole problem is simply to ensure that such ambition proves useful to the State” (156). Audier goes so far as to say that Machiavelli intends that “channel[ing] human ambitions by law” can “make those ambitions useful to the community” (157). It may be safer to say that Aron and the American Founders that that.

Audier provides us with Aron’s own formulation: “The merits [of the institutionalization of conflict] are immense—and it is here that Machiavellianism intervenes—if you do not seek a perfect regime. If one starts out from the idea that all plans are a reflection of human nature, and democracy is among the worst regimes classified, the democratic system is probably by far the best of the bad regimes, that is to say the best of all possible regimes” (158). That is a witty restatement of the defense of democratic republicanism seen in the American Founders and in their admirer, Tocqueville. The good regimes of Aristotle are no longer possible in the modern world. Aristotle himself seems to have judged that two of them (kingship and aristocracy) were quite improbable in his own world. But under modern, socially egalitarian conditions (the ones Tocqueville describes), Aristotle’s best practicable regime, the mixed regime, is no longer possible, either, inasmuch as there are no stable aristocratic or oligarchic classes to ‘mix’ with the demos. This leaves what Aristotle judged to be the least bad regime, democracy, as the best reliable choice, especially if one founds it on a pluralistic society (Madison’s “interests”) and designs it so that ambitious men—following Pareto, he calls the “the elites”—check and balance one another under the rule of law.

Audier concludes by saying that Aron dealt with Machiavelli the way Machiavelli recommends that princes deal with everyone: Aron used Machiavelli, he did not seek carefully to follow him down the winding path on which Machiavelli leads his readers. “It is pointless to seek from him a true interpretation of the Florentine Secretary”—the ambition of Strauss and Skinner (159). “It is also true that, due to the influence of Burnham and the elite theorists (Pareto, Mosca), Aron probably has a far too liberal and traditional view of Machiavelli, which does not adequately scrutinize the destabilizing force of the desire of the people for freedom in Machiavellian thought” (160). Rather, Aron follows in the tradition of writers who sought to tame, if not the prince—the princes of Aron’s day were the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and taming them was not the solution—but the citizens whose ambitions revolve within the normal range. Audier cites Montesquieu, especially his account of Roman republicanism, and the earlier Cato’s Letters of Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, as the Aronian forebears in the line. A judicious selection of Machiavellian techniques might indeed serve as a defense of freedom in modernity, without necessarily serving Machiavellian ends, just as American constitutionalism, framing the large, many-factioned population cited in Federalist 10, aims at securing natural rights not propounded by Machiavelli.

The essays by De Ligio, Mahoney, and Audier form the core of the central section of the collection, presenting several dimensions of Aron’s many-sided political thought. The final essays of the section, by French sociologist Serge Paugam and Iain Stewart, Lecturer in Modern European History at Queen Mary College, University of London, bring us back to the social and economic aspects of Aron’s argument.

Given the importance of social pluralism to Aron, Paugam’s interest in Aron’s sociological writings from the 1950s makes sense as the follow-on article after Audier. How exactly does Aron understand the social conflicts that he wants republics to channel? Thinking of Marxism and its derivatives, Aron wrote, “Western, especially European, societies are both obsessed with the notion of class and unable to define it” (164). No strictly materialist understanding of social classes will do because the ‘parts’ of society don’t interact like the parts of a chair; they are conscious, not only of their economic or material conditions but of their own and others’ ideas and sentiments respecting philosophic and religious doctrines, political opinions, and other considerations that interact with economic interests without being determined by them. In comparing the then-dominant American and Soviet societies, Aron rightly suspected that Soviet workers no less than American workers regarded heir bosses as less than favorable to their own welfare.

Three social issues concerned Aron at this time: the increasing heterogeneity of the working class; the transformation of social conflict; and the problem of sustained poverty in wealthy societies. Working-class heterogeneity went against the Marxian prediction of an increasingly united and more sizeable working class facing off in sharp dialectic conflict with an ever-shrinking but also increasingly united bourgeoisie. “The worker,” as Paugam puts it, “does not belong solely to a world of workers,” but also belongs to other communities, whether religious or political (166). Such multiple allegiances were resulting not in the proletarianization of the lower bourgeoisie but in the embourgeoisement of the workers—their acceptance of many opinions and sentiments Marxists (and the several ‘bohemian’ movements that had sprung up since the early nineteenth century) scorned as ‘bourgeois,’ such as work discipline, cleanliness, and indeed the godliness cleanliness was said to be next to. The fact of working-class heterogeneity would transform social class into the political arena. intensifying their demands if only because they will have a greater variety of them, but using republican institutions rather than revolutionary violence as the preferred means of pressing those demands. They will become ‘Machiavellianized’ in Burnham’s sense of the term. It would nonetheless be a mistake to assume that poverty will disappear. Although the economist John Kenneth Galbraith and other fashionable authors of the time expected the abolition of poverty, Aron agreed that the social complexity of the working class—with ethnic and religious differences complicating its attempts at economic advancement—would keep poverty alive in the West indefinitely. Paugam regards this last concern as the prelude to, although somewhat different from, the contemporary way in which “the class struggle of yesterday is now merging with a struggle for protection and recognition” (175).

Iain Stewart approaches the economic problem not with sociological analysis but via an account of the collaboration between academic and political socialists, beginning in the 1920s when Aron studied at university. In the 1920s, a group of French socialists established a study group at the École normale supérieure. Modeled on the British Fabian Society, the group linked itself with one of the Socialist Party’s leaders, Marcel Déat. These young Socialists broke with the Marxist-oriented mainstream of the Party, arguing for a policy of electoral appeals to middle-class as well as working-class voters instead of class struggle. They favored a program of gradual nationalization of major companies and economic planning. Upon his return to Germany in 1934, Aron renewed his university-days friendship with one of the most able Socialist academics of the group, Robert Marjolin; they joined in opposing the policies of the Socialist Party government led by Léon Blum, contending that economic redistribution and other reforms wouldn’t work unless the French economy became more productive. Among socialist thinkers, esteem for production as a means of achieving social justice was most prominent in the writings of Saint-Simon, who valorized “industrial civilization” (184). Industrialism could supply the important burst of productive energy needed to sustain social reform.

Thus during the 1940s and 1950s Aron advocated what Anglo-Americans would have recognized as Keynesian or dirigiste economics, sympathetic to (for example) US President Franklin Roosevelt’s famous call for a “New Bill of Rights” including “freedom from want” (181). Aron explicitly criticized the economic libertarianism of Friedrich von Hayek, whose magnum opus, The Constitution of Liberty, Aron criticized at some length when it appeared in 1961. At the same time, as noted also by Mahoney, Aron never succumbed to the easy optimism of 1950s Keynesians, always recognizing that dirigisme could at best amount to “a partial solution that posed its own new challenges to the liberal order” (187) including the potential for bureaucratic sclerosis. It is nonetheless probably fair to say that Aron underestimated the prescience of Tocqueville’s dystopic warning against “soft despotism,” which appears rather more plausible now, more than half a century removed from those days.

In view of the question raised by previous contributors—to what extent does Aron endorse Machiavellianism?—Stewart finds a decidedly apposite passage: “I think [Aron wrote] that democratic regimes are those which have a minimum of respect for the human person [that is, as distinguished from tyrannies, which have no respect for that at all] and do not consider individuals as means of production or objects of propaganda” (181). Respect for the human person might be a Catholic or a Kantian formulation, but it does not figure conspicuously in the doctrines of the smiling Florentine.

Part III consists of six articles on Aron’s understanding of the modern thinkers (several of them philosophers) whose intellectual company he kept most frequently: Kant, Weber, Marx, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Tocqueville. Pierre Hassner of the Johns Hopkins University’s European Center at Bologna contends that Aron “never gave up his commitment to Kant or the Enlightenment” (198), a commitment initiated at university in the 1920s. He did abandon Kant’s belief that the course of events would work itself out into a condition of perpetual peace in Europe—”a happy ending for history” (198). For Aron, rational behavior may or may not someday infuse international politics more thoroughly than it has done—and it might very well become more prevalent than it was in the first half of the twentieth century (a low bar, indeed)—but to any “Knatian conclusions” about the future Aron always appended “a protestation of ignorance and a question mark following the profession of moral faith” (199). Unlike Kant, he invested few hopes in any ‘league of nations.’

The moral dimension of Kantianism finds a larger place in Aron’s thought than the historical dimension. “He says in his Mémoires that he never forgot the categorical imperative of or the ‘Religion within the limits of Reason'” (201)—itself a rather weak endorsement, inasmuch as never forgetting isn’t the quite the same thing as adherence. But unlike Kant, whose political philosophy “is not, strictly speaking, ultimately political” but legal, moral, and historical (200), “the center of [Aron’s] thinking is political” (201). Rationalism, yes: but a prudential rationalism for statesmen guided by a moral rationalism that appears based primarily on a more or less naturalistic conception of “the human person.”

As a sociologist by training, Aron found in Weber crucial elements of his own moral and political thinking, as Scott Nelson and coeditor José Colon show in their essay. “It was in Max Weber’s writings that Aron eventually found the resources and the words to express the relationship between politics and morality. Moreover, Aron also found in Weber an exposition of the tension between knowledge (science) and action (politics). There are genuine trade-offs between a profession that demands the absolute pursuit of truth and one that demands the willingness to compromise not only one’s own morals (anathema to the moralist) but even the truth itself (anathema to the scientist).” (205)  The Weberian distinction between an ethic of conviction and an ethic of responsibility drew Aron’s particular attention. Unlike Machiavelli, Aron saw, Weber did not advise the politician to abandon moral conviction but rather to take responsibility for the consequences of actions that deviated from conviction. “Conviction” moralists—Aron thought Weber was thinking of two kinds, Christians and revolutionaries—inclined either towards pacifist incapability of meeting force with force or ill-judged attempts at treating a good goal “as an absolute value whose price of attainment could never be too high” (207). Aron saw himself as “stand[ing] up for reason and responsibility in the carnival of French political life” (207).

At the same time, Aron rightly worried that “false realists” might twist the ethic of responsibility into “disregard[ing] moral injunctions with impunity” even as “false idealists” might “wantonly blind themselves to the critical role they are playing in contributing to the collapse of the existing order, thereby paving the way for revolutionaries or tyrants to rule” (207). And even a sincere and sober attempt to follow an ethic of responsibility “assume[s] that the actor in question has had the opportunity to consider (or refuse to consider) the potential consequences of his actions” (207)—clearly impossible on many occasions in politics. Weber’s own call for a “charismatic Übermensch who would rescue Germany from Christian servility, revolutionary stupidity, and bureaucratic sterility” had the worst sort of unintended consequences a few decades after he made it (208-209). What is more, insofar as Weber tempered his nationalism with liberalism it was liberalism “not rooted in metaphysics or natural law” or even in utilitarianism but in “the pragmatism of power” (209). Having seen for himself the consequences of this severing of liberalism from any universal principle, which leaves it untethered against nationalist passion if that passion can claim that its very extremism ‘works’ in practice, Aron demurred. Rather like Aristotle (and of course exactly like Kant), Aron insisted that some actions are morally wrong, whatever the circumstances.

For Aron, “the essence of politics… consists of the tensions between the exigencies of the moment, the political morality that seeks to accommodate the citizens’ private moralities”—which often contradict one another—”and the statesman’s own private moralities (some of which are reconcilable with each other, some of which are not), that exist both within and between human beings. The great statesman is he who can navigate his way through this stormy sea of uncertainty—knowing full well that many of his decisions will leave him little-to-no time for reflection and therefore be based entirely on political knack—and arrive at the action that is, given the circumstances, the least detestable both for himself and for the collectivity” (214). No starry utopianism there.

The Aronially-named Sylvie Mesure, a sociologist who serves as Director of Research at the Centre nationale de la recherché scientifique in Paris, addresses Aron’s interpretation of Marx. She concurs with previous contributors in observing that Aron rejected Marxian historical determinism, insisting always on what one of  his avid readers, Henry Kissinger, would call the necessity for choice. Marx’s claim for the foundational character of economics in historical causation and his millenarian faith in a communist future for mankind were equally suspect in Aron’s view.

In the early 1960s Aron revisited Marx in response to the ongoing controversy between Sartre and Louis Althusser. Sartre and his followers maintained that “the young Marx” had been a humanist and a social activist, but the mature Marx’s turn to economics was fully inline with his original humanist leanings. Althusser claimed that an “epistemological break” had occurred, as Marx turned from “ideology” toward hard, empirical economic science. Aron sided with his old, estranged friend Sartre in defending Marx’s intellectual consistency but disagreed that he had ever been a humanist in the sense of a humanitarian. Young and old, Marx adhered to a non-idealist, materialist form of Hegelianism, in which the dialectic of economic class struggle rather than the dialectical unfolding of an ‘Absolute Spirit’ drove ‘History’ forward to its end. It is true, Aron conceded, that the young Marx was more nearly Hegelian than the Marx of Capital, but this was ‘a matter of degree not of kind.’

Mesure concludes by citing Aron’s opinion that Marx was mistaken in his proudest claim: to have discovered “a scientific basis for his theory of the collapse of capitalism” and thus “to theoretically explain the movement of history” (225). He did share with Marx a refusal of complacency in the face of social injustice, remaining a reformist if not a revolutionary throughout his career. Aron also shared with Marx an interest in understanding the thoughts of philosophers and statesmen in their “socio-political context” even as he insisted that understanding an author’s intention is the preliminary step to doing this. That is, Aron exhibited a ‘Marxian’ interest in historical context without reducing thought to an epiphenomenon of its context.

New University of Lisbon philosophy professor Diogo Pires Aurélio brings us back to Machiavelli. Illustrating exactly Mesure’s observation about Aron’s dual interest in a philosopher’s intention and his influence in a given social circumstance, Aurélio points to Aron’s distinction between Machiavelli’s teaching and “Machiavellianism”—that is, the way in which Machiavelli’s teaching was used in the twentieth century. Modern tyranny was one form of such Machiavellianism; Machiavelli, describer and encourager of tyrannical princes, found eager students in Aron’s time. Aron recognized and endorsed several of Machiavelli’s teachings: “human passions do not change throughout history, and thus men and groups come into conflict with one another” (233); within certain limits, nature changes but not always for the better, as everything on earth will decline after its time of flourishing, even and especially human associations; there being no sustained progress in nature, but also no permanent decline, political orders run in cycles The nature of human beings, “nasty and ambitious” (234), makes moral rules ineffective in restraining them; the ruler needs to employ threats of violence and at times violence itself, to be feared more than loved. Modern Machiavellians such as Pareto add to this a distinction between masses and leaders; the latter use force and fraud to dominate the former. With Strauss, Aron saw that The Prince and the Discourses “share the same perspective on politics” (235). It is a perspective that rejects cunning and violence not for moral reasons but only when they fail to secure the rule of the prince or (in republics) the elites; this is what Machiavelli means by saying he seeks the effectual truth.

Machiavelli wants the ruler or rulers to construct (as Aron phrases it) “a strong, flourishing, ordered, and legal state” (235). Unlike the feudal orders of his own time, this state will be centralized; unlike the petty principalities of his Italy, it will be substantial in size and population. It will not, however, be an impersonal administrative state, such as Europeans built later on; Machiavelli’s state belongs to persons, whether the one or the few. But Machiavelli’s refusal to accept any “transcendent purpose” for political action, which results in a political science that attends merely to the acquisition and maintenance of power, might be said to prepare for such an impersonal state by making human beings (and especially rulers) unprecedentedly impersonal, inviting them to become throbbing nerves of ambition, guided by calculating, vulpine brains.

In his contribution to the volume, Serge Audier emphasized the difference between the Machiavelli Aron described in the 1930s and 1940s and the republican Machiavellian he commended, with serious reservations, later on. Aurélio elaborates on this, writing that “the problem with modern Machiavellianism is that it reads The Prince as if it constituted Machiavelli’s entire oeuvre” (236). With Pareto, it also inclines toward progressivism and the leadership principle. Aron’s “moderate Machiavellianism” (39) does indeed extract teachings useful to republican regimes founded in modern states, but Aurélio’s Aron thinks that “the Florentine’s methodology, in spite of his love for liberty, leads to Machiavellianism and gives a rational basis for those who would apply the techniques of tyranny in the twentieth century” (240). Putting it somewhat differently, having seen the defects of Machiavellian republicanism in Germany, Aron became alert to the way it might issue in the tyrannical Machiavellianism of the Nazis. Against the latter Machiavellianism, Aron characteristically argued for the use of the ‘Machiavellian technique of force against force instead of an ineffectual ‘Christian’ pacifism. And while Pareto’s Machiavellian remark that all regimes, whether princely or republican, really amount to the rule of elites, Aurélio quotes Aron: “What is really interesting to see is the constitution of the dominant oligarchy and the relationship between this dominant oligarchy and the great number, or, more precisely still, the capacity of action of this dominant oligarch concerning the mass of citizens, and on the other hand the guarantees given to its citizens concerning government” (241). For Aron (as for Aristotle, one might add), politics means ruling and being ruled, with ‘transcendent’ ends in mind.

All these valuable articles notwithstanding, it remains clear that the two modern political philosophers closest to Aron are Montesquieu and Tocqueville. Fortunately, the editors have found two scholars equal to the responsibility of doing justice to these relationships: Miguel Morgado, a political scientist at Portuguese Catholic University and Aurelian Criautu, a political scientist at Indiana University.

Morgado remarks that Montesquieu and Aron have both attracted the same criticism, a criticism that raises once more a central theme of this collection: Do these thinkers offer “a coherent structure of natural right for the basis of [their] political philosophy” (246)? Or do they silently abandon natural right for elaborate sociological and institutional descripts and analyses? Morgado shows that while both men understand modern societies as being larger and more complex than ancient poleis, they continue to regard the political regime as the primary if not the simply dominant causative factor in modern states and the societies that undergird them. That is to say, they are “political sociologists” (247). They identify three elements of the regime: its “nature” or institutional form; its “principle” or moving passions; and its purpose or predominant idea—for example, political liberty in England (248-249).

The reason critics find Montesquieu and Aron confusing is their recognition that regimes also have specific tasks to fulfill, here and now. They must survive and seek their purpose in geographic, international, and social conditions that may vary over time, organizing and reorganizing themselves accordingly. A republic in France might be very different from a republic in Iraq; for a variety of reasons, a republic in Iraq might prove even harder to secure than a republic in France was, and that is saying a lot. Thus the judgment of regimes in terms of the universal character of natural right might vary considerably depending on the customs and other circumstances of the people it rules. This, it might be added, reminds one of the classical claim that natural right is flexible, not a thing simply to be arrived at by deductive reasoning. It isn’t quite right to say, with Morgado and his Aron, that the political sociology of Montesquieu and Aron “turns Greek absolutism on its head” (251); it is more likely that they are responding to what natural right must look like under the conditions of the modern state—large, centralized, socially pluralistic. Both men share Aristotle’s understanding that, as Aron puts it, “men are only human if they obey and rule humanely” (252)—that is to say, above all, with the virtue of moderation. Political considered, moderation often entails compromise, “a synonym for moderation” (253). But compromise does not exhaust political life. Compromise might paralyze political life, preventing the state from “pursuing a coherent and stable political strategy” (255)—as de Gaulle had argued against the parliamentarism of the Third and Fourth Republics in France.

Morgado ends his comparison of Montesquieu and Aron with a sober reminder of their sense of the limitations of all political regimes, their anti-utopianism. Montesquieu famously commended the regime of commercial republicanism against the military republic seen most spectacularly in Rome. For his part, as we’ve seen, Aron wanted a commercial-industrial society combined with republican political institutions. “For Aron, modern democracies are condemned to be an object of disappointment. They disappoint citizens and scientists because democracies are ‘pedestrian'” (257). Moderate democracy is prosaic, unpoetic. Given the modern-tyrannical alternative, so much the better for their citizens, and for the world.

Aurelian Craiutu observes that Aron had studied Marx and the other principal German political philosophers before seriously engaging Tocqueville. In some respects he had already thought his way towards Tocqueville by thinking about the Germans critically. In contrasting Tocqueville with Marx in a way that favored the former he put Tocqueville back on the French intellectual map while performing a service that the two philosophers themselves never did; although contemporaries, “they ignored each other” (264). Aron was struck by the way Tocqueville, no very close student of political economy and an opponent of historical determinism, nonetheless predicted the future more accurately than Marx. The workers of the world did not unite.

Tocqueville and Aron share a “common concern for safeguarding liberty and reconciling it with the demands for equality in modern democratic societies” (267). To be sure, Aron saw and emphasized the importance of industrialism more than Tocqueville did, but he shared Tocqueville’s insistence (against the socialist Marx but also against the libertarian Hayek) that both “negative” liberty or freedom from constraint and “positive” liberty or freedom to participate in government must be combined in order for citizens of modern societies to sustain the degree of genuinely political life that is possible in modern states. Unlike the economics-centered defenders of socialism or of capitalism, Tocqueville and Aron insisted on the integrity of the political sphere.

Both agreed on the unfortunate role intellectuals tended to play in politics, especially in France, whether in the revolutionary turmoil of 1848 (narrated with some irony by Tocqueville in his Souvenirs) or that of 1968 (as seen in Aron’s La revolution introuvable). Both men raised an eyebrow at the spectacle of intellectuals who inclined to indulge in political passions instead of exercising their, well, intellects. “Aron reiterated Tocqueville’s point… that intellectuals tend to search in politics for what is ingenuous [sic: ingenious?] and new instead of what is true, and are inclined to appreciate good acting, grandiose gesturing, and fine speaking for their own sake and (often) without reference to the facts themselves” (270). Aron added, “To tell the truth, the whole nation shares it a little, and the French public as a whole often takes a literary man’s view of politics” (270). Against this impassioned politics valorizing the eloquent enunciation of what Tocqueville calls a general idea, both men favored strengthening civil association and administrative decentralization, which afford citizens practical experience in self-government, redirecting their minds and hearts toward realities on the ground as perceived and judged by common sense. Moderation and “trust in human freedom” joined with “respect for human dignity” remained the prosaic, nonrevolutionary, and best pathways for citizens whose societies marshaled unprecedented technological power.

Centre Aron research associate Christian Bachelier’s epilogue complements Nicolas Baverez’s account of Aron’s life and works. Bachelier assigns particular importance to the place of Élie Halévy in Aron’s intellectual journey—the critique of pacifism, the esteem for republicanism against then-fashionable claims that ‘the center cannot hold’ against tyrannies Left and Right, the way that those tyrannies end up mimicking one another as the hyper-nationalist fascism appropriated socialist economics and the hyper-socialist communists invoked loyalty to the Glorious Motherland as soon as military threats to their regime arose. Halévy died suddenly in 1937, but Aron remained faithful to the core of his mentor’s insights on ‘totalitarian’ tyranny.

Aron himself attracted many students. Manent recalls that he never sought disciples. His humane pluralism extended to his personal conduct. This Companion continues in the Aronian spirit, giving us a variety of ‘takes’ on Aron urged by scholars drawn from several countries and academic disciplines. In politics and academia today we are seeing less of this spirit. The writers here resist the trend with Aronian resolution, moderation, and intelligence. Their well-informed disagreements may bring readers to a closer study of Aron—to join him, and them, as companions.