Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier: Manifesto for a European Renaissance. 1999. In Tomislav Sunic: Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right. Third edition. London: Arktos Books, 2011.

 

“The French New Right was born in 1968,” the annus mirabilis of the French New Left, which it in some ways resembles, not the least of which being its utopianism. Unlike the New Left, however, which began as a political movement and ended up in think-tanks and universities, the New Right took the path in reverse, beginning as “a think-tank and a school of thought,” aiming at what Benoist and Champetier call “a metapolitical perspective.” By this, they mean a stance “rest[ing] solely on the premise that ideas pay a fundamental role in collective consciousness and, more generally, in human history.” Human will and action shape “History,” but “always” do so “within the framework of convictions, beliefs, and representations which provide meaning and direction.” This begins with calling their movement the French New Right, despite the call for a European renaissance; that renaissance will resist universalisms of all kinds, even any universalism limited to Europe, as seen in such notions as Jean Monnet’s “United States of Europe” or its real-world would-be precursor, the European Union.

The Manifesto‘s first half consists of a critique of the modern West. “The major crisis” of this “age” is “the end of modernity,” modernity as constituted by individualism, massification, desacralization, rationalism in the sense of instrumental reason, the cult of efficiency, and the attempted universalization of all those features or “processes.” Modernity dates from 1700. “In most respects, it represents a secularization of ideas and perspectives borrowed from Christian metaphysics.” That is, Christianity already encouraged individuality “in the notion of individual salvation and of an intimate and privileged relation between an individual and God that surpasses any relation on earth.” Massification or egalitarianism also has a Christian origin “in the idea that redemption is equally available to all mankind, since all are endowed with an individual soul whose absolute value is shared by all humanity.” Christianity promoted desacralization in the sense that it denied the divinity of the cosmos, now relegated to the status of a mere creation of the holy God, a god entirely separate from and superior to that creation. Instrumental rationalism at the service of ‘progress’ imitates the Christian idea of Providence, “that history has an absolute beginning and a necessary end, and that it unfolds globally according to a divine plan.” And, obviously, Christianity is a universalist religion, seeking converts among Jews and Gentiles alike, worldwide. Thus, “today Christianity has unwittingly become the victim of the movement it started,,” “the religion of the way out of religion,” as “modern political life itself is founded on secularized theological concepts,” with its political-philosophic schools “agree[ing] on one issue: that there is a unique and universalizable solution for all social, moral and political problems” whereby humanity, “understood to be the sum of rational individuals,” is “called upon to realize their unity in history,” in the process overcoming unity’s “obstacle,” diversity. Modernity “attempts by every available means to uproot individuals from their individual communities, to subject them to a universal mode of association.” Although the several kinds of socialism, including fascism, communism, and social democracy, have attempted this, “the most efficient means for doing this” in practice, not in ‘theory,’ “has been the marketplace.”

Although “the imagery of modernity is dominated by desires of freedom and equality,” “these two cardinal values have been betrayed” by “the dominance of the global marketplace,” technology, and modern statism. Proclaiming human rights, modernity provides no “means to exercise them” in the face of these ruling forces, all wielded by a small elite, ‘progressing’ by means of pseudoscientific “management of global society” towards ever-increasing soft despotism, while wrecking humanly scaled communities and sucking nature dry. Still worse, “modernity has given birth to the most empty civilization mankind has ever known: the language of advertising has become the paradigm of all social discourse; the primacy of money has imposed the omnipresence of commodities; man has been transformed into an object of exchange in a context of mean hedonism; technology has ensnared the life-world in a network of rationalism,” a world “replete with delinquency, violence and incivility, in which man is at war with himself and against all,” that is, “an unreal world of drugs, virtual reality and media-hyped sports, in which the countryside is abandoned for unlikeable suburbs and monstrous megalopolises, and where the solitary individual merges into an anonymous and hostile crowd, while traditional social, political, cultural or religious mediations become increasingly uncertain and undifferentiated.” One might object that this portrait is more than a little exaggerated, but, then, the document is, after all, a manifesto. Writing in 1999, before the rise of the hypermodern Chinese state had become noticeable to many intellectuals, the authors identify liberalism as “the main enemy,” liberalism as the doctrine of the primacy of quantity over quality, of market economics, and of individualism justified by the assertion of unalienable rights drawn from the falsely claimed asociality of human nature. Market economics especially inserts Darwinism into social thought—incoherently, since Darwinism “says absolutely nothing about the value of what is chosen” by means of social competition. “But man is not satisfied with mere survival.” Marxian socialism, capitalism’s rival, “belongs to the same universe” as an heir of Enlightenment thought (rationalism, universalism, primacy of economics, the labor theory of value, faith in progress towards and imagined “end of history,” a progress won over the dead bodies of competitors). Liberalism undermines genuinely political life, self-government, by reducing representative democracy “to a market in which supply becomes increasingly limited (concentration of programs and convergence of policies) and demand less and less motivated (abstention).” “In its economic, political and moral forms, liberalism represents the central bloc of the ideas of a modernity that is finished.” 

Postmodern life, now upon us, has seen the return of social violence and the multiplication of intra- and supra-state conflicts, including religious warfare, all of which liberals expected to disappear. But postmodernism also sees an increasing concern for the quality of life, the revival of communities, growing opposition to the elites, the politic of group identities, and what to the authors is the welcome decline of established religions, especially of Christianity, modernity’s archē. The New Right would build on these latter trends. 

Benoist and Champetier identify nine “foundations” of modernity. The first two amount to elements of a false anthropology. Modernity either denies the existence of human nature altogether, as seen in Rousseau but also to a more limited extent in Locke’s claim that the human mind is a tabula rasa, or makes it amount to nothing more than “abstract attributes disconnected from the real world and lived experience.” Such notions conduce to thinking of human beings as “infinitely malleable,” things to be remade into the ‘new man’ by means of “the brutal and progressive transformation” of the human social environment, living in a utopia made real by ‘totalitarian’ tyranny and its concentration camps. Liberalism is the same thing, but milder and more gradualist. These moderns are wrong. Human individuals bear the general characteristics of a natural species, along with specific hereditary dispositions which decisively influence their “attitudes and modes of behavior,” blocking the radical transformations moderns envision. Moreover, “man is not just an animal,” one species among many, but a being conscious “of his own consciousness,” capable of “abstract thought, syntactic language, the capacity for symbolism, the aptitude for objective observation and value judgment.” These capacities do “not contradict his nature” but rather extend it “by conferring on him a supplementary and unique identify” conferred upon him by is “social and historical life,” a life shaped by moral and political choices. “The New Right proposes a vision of a well-balanced individual, taking into account both inborn, personal abilities and the social environment,” rejecting “ideologies that emphasize only one of these factors,” whether biological—presumably, such a thing as Nazism—economic (liberalism, socialism) or mechanical (meaning, perhaps, utilitarianism).

Human nature is “neither good nor bad,” but capable of being either, thanks to the openness of choice available to human being and their vulnerability both to chance disaster and to the consequences of their own bad choices. “As an open and imperiled being,” man “is always able to go beyond himself or to debase himself,” and hence needs to construct social and moral rules, along with “institutions and traditions” that “provide a foundation for his existence,” physically, and “give his life meaning and references.” That is, neither human nature nor nature as a whole nor the divine provide such meaning, inasmuch as human nature has no innate moral content and any referent beyond the understanding of the limited human intellect “is by definition unthinkable.” And indeed, although human nature is discernible, it never presents itself except within a given socio-cultural “context.” “In this sense, humanity is irreducibly plural: diversity is part of its very essence,” with various social and political groups living within those contexts, which exist “prior to the way individuals and groups see the world” as “concretely rooted people.” “Man is rooted by nature in his culture,” and cultures themselves change over time, from epoch to epoch. “Thus, the idea of an absolute, universal, and eternal law that ultimately determines moral, religious, or political choices appears unfounded,” an invitation to totalitarianism. These diverse “cultures” exhibit both cooperativeness, even altruism, and competition, including aggression. What the authors call the “great historical constructions” have established “a harmony based on the recognition of the common good, the reciprocity of rights and duties, cooperation and sharing,” all in a tragic (because impermanent, mortal) “tension between these poles of attraction and repulsion.” 

Moving to the aspects of ‘culture’—social, political, economic—the authors deny the existence of any original ‘state of nature’ in which individuals joined to form a social contract. With Aristotle, they regard human societies as resulting from extended families. Societies are indeed consented to, but as ‘givens,’ not as inventions. “Membership in the collective does not destroy individual identity; rather, it is the basis for it,” the way in which individuals think of, feel about, themselves. In such family-derived communities, a “vertical reciprocity of rights and duties, contributions and distributions, obedience and assistance” prevails (as in the family, with its husbands and wives, parents and children), along with “a horizontal reciprocity of gifts, fraternity, friendship, and love.” Diversity thus exists not only from one society to another but within each society, a diversity “constantly threatened either by shortcomings (conformity, lack of differentiation) or excesses (secession, atomization).” In a society, “the whole exceeds the sum of its pats and possesses qualities none of its individual parts have,” a fact now “defeated by modern universalism and individualism, which have associate community with the ideas of submission to hierarchy, entanglement, or parochialism.” Modernity thereby hasn’t “liberated man form his original familial belonging or from local, tribal, corporative or religious attachment” so much as subordinating him with “harsher” and more remote “constraints,” “impersonal and more demanding,” most notably its “statist bureaucracies.” This makes of human societies collections of “individuals who experience each other as strangers,” lacking the “mutual confidence” that would enable them to live without subjection to the supposedly neutral “regulatory authority” of the administrative state, with its market exchanges, habit of submission to “the all-powerful state,” and the “abstract juridical rules” which govern both the market and that submission. “Only a return to communities and to a politics of human dimensions can remedy exclusion or dissolution of the social bond, its reification, and its juridification.”

Genuine politics “cannot be reduced to economics, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, or the sacred.” The moral orientation of politics aims at “a common good…inspired by the collectivity’s values and customs,” not the “individual morality” of one or some of the polity’s members. Political communities have regimes, ways of ruling and of being ruled, but “regimes which refuse to recognize the essence of politics, which deny the plurality of goals or favor depoliticization, are by definition ‘unpolitical.'” That is, they deny Aristotle’s principle, that politics consists of ruling and of being ruled, in turn. Modernity propounds “the illusion of politics as ‘neutral,’ reducing power to managerial efficiency in ruling, and therefore reducing most residents of the polity to the status of being ruled, efficiently. This reduces the government of men to the administration of things, pretending that the public sphere has no “particular vision of the ‘good life.'” But politics is no science, a vehicle for supposedly value-free rationalism and its technologies, but “an art, calling for prudence before everything else,” acknowledging the perennial “uncertainty,” the “plurality of choices” and “decision[s] about goals” that must be arbitrated by rulers wielding ruling offices or institutions with powers understood to be means serving the ends set by the political community. Tellingly, however, the New Rightists endorse the claim of that arch-modern Thomas Hobbes, that “the first aim of all political action is civil peace,” that is, “security and harmony between all members of society” and “protection from foreign danger.” (In this, they follow the thinking of one of their intellectual heroes, Carl Schmitt.) Subordinate to civil peace, such “values” as liberty, equality, unity, diversity, and solidarity” are not self-evident but arbitrary. But New Rightists do not endorse Hobbes’s solution to the political problem, the regime of monarchy for a centralized, if economically liberal, state, the mighty Leviathan whose blood is money.

They prefer democracy, “the only form of government that offers [the individual] participation in public discussions and decisions, as well as the ability to make something of himself and to excel through education.” The democratic regime must exist within a federal state, or a loosely organized empire of the ‘ancient’ sort, consisting of “organized communities and multiple allegiances” which can resist the tyranny of centralization. In such a democratic and variegated state, animated by “the spirit of subsidiarity,” the rulers “are above each citizen individually, but they are always subordinate to the general will expressed by the body of citizens,” the will of the nation. In this regime and state, “politics is not reduced to the level of the state” because “the public person is defined as a complex of groups, families and associations, of local, regional, national or supranational collectivities” existing in “organic continuity.”

Similarly, the economic character of both liberalism and Marxism, and indeed the ‘economism’ they share, cannot sustain “the infrastructure of society.” Economic life rightly understood is useful, but “only that.” Under aristocratic conditions, “one was rich because one was powerful, and not the reverse, power being thus matched by a duty to share and to protect those under one’s care”—by noblesse oblige. “The market is not an ideal model whose abstraction allows universalization,” nor is socialism; on the contrary, “in all pre-modern societies, the economic was embedded and contextualized within other orders of human activity.” Market exchange must always be balanced with reciprocity and redistribution, and vice-versa, avoiding the limitless consumerism of capitalism and the iron cage of socialism. Properly understand, ‘economy’ means oikos-nomos, the law or rule of the household; political economy should reflect that understanding, particularly with respect to, and for, “the harmony and beauty of nature.” That is, the New Right propounds political democracy on an aristocratic civil-social and economic foundation, with the reciprocity of political life pervading all dimensions of the nation.

The reason for this may be seen in the way the authors conceive of ethics (with seeming ‘modernism’) as “the construction of oneself.” But this construction turns out to be no existentialist project but rather an acknowledgement that “the fundamental categories of ethics are universal” (noble and ignoble, good and bad, admirable and despicable, just and unjust, distinctions that “can be found everywhere) are “an anthropological consequence” of human freedom. However, these categories universally develop in non-universal, specific and concrete circumstances of one’s own place and time. “The adage ‘my country, right or wrong’ does not mean that my country is always right, but that it remains my country even when it is wrong,” my home, however misguided it may be. The good citizen “always tries to strive for excellence in each of [the] virtues,” which are universal—generosity, honor, courage, cowardice, moderation, duty, rectitude, unselfishness—and “this will to excellence does not in any way exclude the existence of several modes of life” that find “their place in the city’s hierarchy”—the life of contemplation or philosophy, the life of activity or politics, the life of production or economics. The New Right prefers Aristotelian ethics to such individualist moralities as utilitarianism (Bentham) or ‘deontology’ (Kant), much less the nihilism of Nietzsche. While it is true that “all men have rights,” they “would not know how to be entitled to them as isolated beings; a right expresses a relation of equity, which implies the social,” which gives definition to the right. 

Unlike Thomas Aquinas, the Christian Aristotelian, New Rightists utterly reject the Bible. The modern scientists’ ambition to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate and the consequent “technological explosion of modernity,” bespeaks “the disappearance of ethical, symbolic or religious codes,” but this project finds its origins in “the Biblical imperative” to “replenish and subdue the earth,” which, according to the Manifesto, eventually issued in the Cartesian imperative to master and own nature. But mastery for what? “Technology has given humanity new means of existence, but at the same time it has led to a loss of the reason for living, since the future seems to depend not only on the indefinite extension of the rational mastering of the world” but on the extension of that mastery to human nature itself. “Man is becoming the simple extension of the tools he has created.” This must “reduce men to what they have in common,” a leveling that will bring not self-mastery, but the sniveling Last Man Nietzsche warned against. Politically and militarily, this may be seen in modern Western imperialism, “the Westernization of the planet” animated “by the desire to erase all otherness by imposing on the world a supposedly superior model invariably presented as ‘progress.'”  This has backfired, as “new civilizations are gradually acquiring modern means of power and knowledge without renouncing their historical and cultural heritage for the benefit of Western ideologies and values.” 

The New Rightists hope that this will lead to “a multipolar world of emerging civilizations, civilizations that “will not supplant the ancient local, tribal, provincial or national roots” while nonetheless recognizing “their common humanity.” This may strike one as utopian. One cannot simply acquire modern means of power and knowledge while maintaining tradition in any fundamental sense. Modern technology rests on modern science, modern science on modern philosophy, anti-traditional to the core. “The ‘paganism’ of the New Right articulates nothing more than sympathy for [the] ancient conception of the world” that prevailed in Europe before Christianity and indeed before Socrates—before dualisms religious and philosophic. Sympathy is one thing, practice another.

Accordingly, the authors turn to policies, identifying thirteen points of resistance to modernization and its sham egalitarianism. The first is the opposition of “clear and strong identities” to “indifferentiation and uprooting.” Globalization, they claim, has caused overreactions (“bloody irredentisms, convulsive and chauvinistic nationalism, savage tribalizations”), as the thin universality of a proffered, spurious ‘citizenship of the world’ offends, irritates, and threatens without offering the satisfactions of a real community. “Modernity has not been able to satisfy this need for identity.” Accordingly, the French New Right “affirms the primacy of differences, which are neither transitory features leading to some higher form of unity, nor incidental aspects of private life” but are rather “the very substance of social life.” Politically, this means federalism or subsidiarity within France, which will include the exercise of native ethnic, linguistic, and religious practices—no enclaves for observance of Islamic law in France, therefore. In foreign relations, “the French New Right supports peoples struggling against Western imperialism,” although their principles would seem to require support of peoples struggling against any imperialism (on the basis of “the right to difference”), including those nations which have a tradition of imperialism (China, Russia). Not all traditions support traditionalism.

The French New Right opposes racism, “a theory which postulates that there are qualitative differences between the races, such that, on the whole, one can distinguish races as either ‘superior’ or ‘inferior; that an individual’s value is deduced entirely from the race to which he belongs; or, that race constitutes the central determining factor in human history.” That is, just as the New Left rejected Marxism-Leninism’s scientific socialism, preferring a softer-edged ‘cultural’ Marxism, the New Right rejects the ‘race science’ of the older Nazi Right (and of the early ‘Progressive’ Left). The authors correctly identify the source of ‘scientific’ racism as “scientific positivism”—the very doctrine that has also produced the technologies that menace humanness, worldwide. They also oppose, however, “a universalist” anti-racism in defense of their own “differentialist” anti-racism. “Universalist anti-racism only acknowledges in peoples their common belonging to a particular species,” tending “to consider their specific identities as transitory or of secondary importance,” thus pursuing policies aimed at overcoming, assimilating particular human identities into one mass of ‘humanity.’ Differentialist anti-racism holds to the contrary, “that the irreducible plurality of the human species constitutes a veritable treasure,” refusing “both exclusion and assimilation,” both “apartheid and the melting pot” but instead accepting “the other as Other through a dialogic perspective of mutual enrichment.” This raises the question of the criteria for “enrichment,” which can only mean the enhancement of the universally held virtues already enumerated. 

This enrichment will occur over and via a certain distance, as the New Right opposes immigration “such as one sees today in Europe,” an “undeniably negative phenomenon” consisting of “forced uprooting” by economic necessity, as poor and overpopulated countries send their people to rich countries; there is also a corrupt attraction, as “the attraction of Western civilization and the concomitant depreciation of indigenous cultures” wax “in light of the growing consumer-oriented way of life” that impoverished peoples see from afar and want for themselves. That is, the claim of capitalism’s defenders—that everyone wants more stuff—is at least partially correct. To meet this crisis, the New Right proposes restrictive immigration policies “coupled with increased cooperation with Third World Countries where organic interdependence and traditional ways of life still survive.” The authors do not specify what forms this cooperation will take—presumably, some form of foreign aid that will induce foreigners to stay where they are. They acknowledge that existing foreign populations cannot be deported, and so they offer “a communitarian model,” consistent with subsidiarity, “which would permit them to keep the structures of their collective cultural lives” while “observ[ing] necessary general and common laws”—thereby dissociating “citizenship from nationality.” Obviously, this would not work with serious Muslims, for whom the Sharia law is comprehensive, all other laws abhorrent.

The New Right also opposes ‘sexism,’ albeit not in the way of contemporary feminists. “The distinction of the sexes is the first and most fundamental of natural differences, for the human race only ensures its continuation through this distinction”; “humanity is not one, but rather two.” And “beyond mere biology, difference inscribes itself in gender—masculine and feminine. The authors maintain that “the modern concept of abstract individuals, detached from their sexual identity, stemming from an ‘indifferentialist’ ideology which neutralizes sexual differences, is just as prejudicial against women as traditional sexism which, for centuries, considered women as incomplete men.” (It should be noticed that there are limits to their traditionalism.) The belief that gender differences derive from “a social construct” only reproduces the masculinist-modern adherence to allegedly universal and actually abstract “values.” The New Right accordingly “upholds specifically feminine rights,” including “the right to virginity to maternity, to abortion.” (Why the right to virginity is a specifically feminine right is not clear.) They evidently prefer the specifically feminine “right” to abortion to the universal right to life. [1] Not for them the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply.

It goes almost without saying that the New Right opposes rule by the ‘New Class,’ the class of professional managers identified and described by James Burnham in the United States and Miloslav Djilas in the communist regimes. “This New Class produces and reproduces everywhere the same type of person: cold-blooded specialists, rationality detached from day-to-day realities,” guided by “abstract individualism, utilitarian beliefs, a superficial humanitarianism, indifference to history, and obvious lack of culture, isolation from the real world, the sacrifice of the real to the virtual, an inclination to corruption, nepotism and to buying votes,” all aimed at “the globalization of world-wide domination by themselves. This results in the depersonalization of rulers, lessening “their sense of responsibility” for those they rule even as it widens the scope of that rule and augments the power of it. Meanwhile, “the public feels indifferent toward or angry at a managerial elite which does not even speak the same language as they do,” preferring a technical jargon to ordinary words. The solution, again (as it was for the New Left), communitarianism. Local communities should “make decisions by and for themselves in all those matters which concern them directly, and all members would have to participate at every stage of the deliberations and of the democratic decision-making,” refusing to “cede to State power to intervene except in those matters for which [those communities] are not able or competent to make decisions.” Because that would obviously lead to a finally irreconcilable tug-of-war between localities and states, the result would likely be either the reimposition of statism or the breakup of modern states—the latter being the presumed goal of New Rightists.

Like all Rightists, the authors look with disfavor at “Jacobinism,” by which they mean the modern nation-state. They observe that the nation-state predated the Jacobins themselves, originating in the Treaty of Westphalia, which settled “the first Thirty Years’ War,” the great European war (sparked by the Protestant rebellions against Roman Catholicism) and “marked the establishment of the nation-state,” and specifically of the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of European states, “as the dominant mode of political organization.” The second Thirty Years’ War, consisting of the twentieth century’s world wars, “signaled, to the contrary, the start of the disintegration of the nation-state,” demonstrating that “the nation-state is now too big to manage little problems and too small to address big ones.” Human beings must therefore not only maintain their human identities in small communities, but those communities must be protected politically by associating in “large cultures and civilizations capable of organizing themselves into autonomous entities and of acquiring enough power to resist outside interference”—a civilization-based Westphalianism. Thus, European civilization “can remake itself, not by the negation, but by the recognition of historical cultures,” within and without. This new, federal Europe should ally itself with Russia, presumably in order to resist the United States on the one side, China on the other. (The rulers of Russia and China evidently have other ideas.) “The existing states must federalize themselves from within, in order to better federalize with each other.” The federal government would govern diplomacy, military affairs, “big economic issues” (assisted by a central bank managing a single currency), “fundamental legal questions,” and environmental matters. That is, the New Right aims at Gaullism without the nation-state: a European federation consisting not of modern states but of largely self-governing localities and allied with Russia (although De Gaulle’s message to Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin: “Come, let us build Europe together,” implied that Russia would separate into a European sector and an Asia sector, the former part of the envisioned European federation, the latter abandoned to Asians). 

This leaves the regime question as the seventh, central policy consideration. The authors reiterate their support for “democracy” or popular sovereignty on the grounds that democracy is “the system best suited to take care of a society’s pluralism” by peacefully resolving conflicts. Democracy inclines to resolve conflicts peacefully because every citizen knows that today’s minority may be tomorrow’s majority. New Rightists caution that democratic equality “is not an anthropological principle (it tells us nothing about the nature of man) but rather the true principle of civic equality, “the idea of a body of citizens politically united into a people.” Their presumed objection to America’s “all men are created equal” (apart from the suggestion of a Creator-God) must be its abstract character, as distinguished from the “substantial equality” of democratic citizenship. “The essential idea of democracy is neither that of the individual nor of humanity, but rather the idea of a body of citizens politically united into a people,” governing itself “through its representatives” with “the opportunity to be politically present through its action and participation in public life.” 

Further, political revolution or regime change is now “obsolete,” inasmuch as “political parties are almost all reformists,” not revolutionaries, and “most governments are more or less impotent,” anyway, scarcely worth the effort it would take to seize control of them. “In a world of networks,” of globalization, “revolt may be possible, but not revolution.” And so, as with the New Left, the New Right advocates “participatory democracy” beneath the modern state, undermining the modern state—a “radically decentralized form of democracy, beginning from the bottom, thereby giving to each citizens a role in the choice and control of his destiny.” This decentralized democracy must “impose” the “widest separation possible between wealth and political power.” This sounds like a rather formidable task, and the authors therefore turn to policies governing the conditions of work, which is the basis of wealth.

The French word for work, travail, derives from the Medieval Latin trepalium, torture. It “never occupied a central position in ancient or traditional societies, including those which never practiced slavery”; “it is modernity which, through its productivist goal of totally mobilizing all resources, has made of work a value in itself, the principal mode of socialization, an illusory for of emancipation and of the autonomy of the individual.” Work has been commodified, its measure now being money. “The possibility of receiving certain services freely and then reciprocating in some way has totally disappeared in a world where nothing has any value, but everything has a price,” a “salaried society” in which technological advances cut workers off from their frayed lifeline. The Biblical punishment of laboring by the sweat of your brow will no longer hold, however, if technology is used to release workers from the daily grind, “to gradually dissociate work from income” by establishing a fixed minimum income “for every citizen from birth until death and without asking anything in return.” One might ask, why is this not the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate? But evidently, this repurposing of technology is intended by the New Rightists to open people to the active political life that in antiquity was largely reserved for the aristocracy. They do not envision a society of couch potatoes, although (absent strict penalties for non-participation in civic affairs) that is the likely result.

Following Aristotle’s distinction between economics, the management of material goods for “the satisfaction of man’s needs,” and chrematistics, production for the sake of money-making, the New Rightists reject the prevailing chrematistic model for political economy, as it gives over such economies “uncertain and even precarious” financial markets. Moreover, “economic thought is couched in mathematical formulas which claim to be scientific by excluding any factor that cannot be quantified,” thereby telling us “nothing about the actual condition of a society.” To reverse this, they would tax all international financial transactions, cancel the debt of Third World countries, and end the international system of the division of labor whereby some countries produce raw materials to be sold for refinement or use elsewhere. International environmental laws should be strengthened. If this would lead to the ruin of capitalism, that is the point. In its place, partnerships, mutual societies, and cooperatives “based on shared responsibility, voluntary membership,” and a spirit of non-profit should be encouraged.

Lest their communitarianism seem implausible, the authors point to “the existence today of a whole web of organizations supportive of deliberative and well-functioning communities which are forming every level of social life: the family, the neighborhood, the village, the city, the professions and in leisure pursuits,” apart from the “gigantism” of globalization. “Only responsible individuals in responsible communities can establish a social justice which is not synonymous with welfare.” Families and local communities that seek to revitalize “the popular traditions that modernity has largely caused to decline,” traditions “inculat[ing] a sense of life’s cycles,” can “nourish symbolic imagination” and “create a social bond.” Such traditions will not be identical to those of the past, but those of the past themselves metamorphosed over time, constantly renewed. Such a renewed humanism, linking morality, society, politics, and a sense of beauty will resist “the aesthetic of the ugly” that pervades the modern “megalopolis,” the “urban environment” now “spoiled by the law of maximum financial return on investment and cold practicality.” And human structures would be integrated into a respect for nature animated by the principle of “immanent transcendence” that “reveals nature as a partner and not as an adversary or object,” denying the Christian and classical-humanist claim that man enjoys “unique importance” in the cosmos, a claim that opened the dystopic vista of the “economic hubris and Promethean technology” which ruined any “sense of balance and harmony” of man in nature. The same principle of human social diversity should be extended to all of nature, to a respect for “biodiversity.” 

The New Right concludes with a call for a concomitant intellectual diversity against those “whose purpose is to excommunicate all those who diverge in any way from the currently dominant ideological dogmas,” a “new form of treachery” relying upon “the tyranny of public opinion, as fashioned by the media,” taking “the form of cleansing hysteria, enervating mawkishness or selective indignation” aimed at ‘exclud[ing] the possibility of radically changing society or even the possibility of an open discussion of the ultimate goals of collective action,” reducing “democratic debate” to nothing: “One no longer discusses, one denounces. One no longer reasons, one accuses. One no longer proves, one imposes.” “The traditional rules of civilized debate” disappear, along with civility generally. “The New Right advocates a return to critical thinking and strongly supports total freedom of expression.”

It is then fair to say that the New Right wants the benefits of ‘closed’ or traditional political societies with the benefits of ‘open’ or modern liberal societies. It is also fair to call this utopian, as it was fair to call the New Left utopian, decades ago.

 

Note

1. For a discussion of abortion, see “Abortion Wrongs” on this website under “Bible Notes.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America. Volume I, Part II, chapter 9: “Principal Causes Tending to Maintain a Democratic Republic in the United States.”   Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. and Delba Winthrop translation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.

 

Founding a democratic republican regime is one thing. The American Founders had done that. Maintaining it is another, as Benjamin Franklin famously remarked upon emerging from the final session of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and as a sober young American attorney named Abraham Lincoln considered in his “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum” in Springfield, Illinois, some two generations later.

Writing a couple of years before Lincoln spoke, Alexis de Tocqueville understood that his fellow European hesitated to found democratic republics because they did not see how such regimes could sustain themselves in Europe, where geopolitical, constitutional, and civil-social circumstances differed substantially from those prevailing in North America. By then, Tocqueville remarked, Americans faced no formidable enemies, needed to fight no major wars, and consequently afforded no opportunities for some native Napoleon to hunger for military glory and move against republicanism. The American capital was no Paris, no Rome; a centralized government can fall prey to mobs, with ‘the democracy’ threatening the government—whether monarchic, as Parisians had seen in 1789 and would see again in 1848, or republican, as the Romans had seen in the military coup of Julius Caesar. And North America is much bigger than Europe; on such a large continent, “nature itself works for the people,” giving them an outlet for their restless ambitions. Dissatisfied with your lot in life? If you’re an American, go West, young man; set yourself up as a farmer, there’s no future in revolution. 

Europeans enjoyed none of these advantages. Politically, they enabled the American Founders to constitute their national government as a federation, not as a centralized state. America’s strong township institutions, established long before the founding, had taught the people “the art of being free,” habits of mind and heart consistent with self-government from the village to the nation. Americans had anchored their civil and criminal courts in the counties, close to the people, who could be confident that they would be judged by their peers. And in democratic America, everyone was your peer.

Most important, American hearts were animated by the principles of a “democratic and republican religion”; as he had earlier maintained, the first movement toward equality of condition was Christianity itself, teaching human equality before God. At the same time, American minds were enlightened by an education that was eminently practical, with the ‘Three Rs’ enabling citizens to read their Bibles for moral guidance, to read their newspapers for political information and for expressing their own opinions, and to calculate sums in business.

In all, “American legislators had come, not without success, to oppose the idea of rights to sentiments of envy; to the continuous movements of the political world, the immobility of religious morality; the experience of the people, to its political ignorance, and its habit of business, to the enthusiasm of its desires.” It was true that American confronted one potentially ruinous dilemma absent from Europe: race-based slavery, the theme of the final section of Tocqueville’s first volume—one distinct from the problem of the overall civil-social equality, the democracy, in America. Europeans, however, faced the reverse problem: no slavery, but no obvious solution to the questions raised by democracy.

On that front, Europeans enjoyed none of the advantages Americans possessed. Democracy was advancing in their societies as aristocracies weakened. But democracy, social and civic equality, need not issue in republicanism, in the protection of natural and civil rights. Napoleon had demonstrated this, only a quarter-century before Tocqueville ventured to the United States. “The organization and establishment of democracy among Christians is the great political problem of our time.” Indeed, “the question I have raised,” the question of what regime democracy will have, “interests not only the United States, but the entire world; not one nation, but all men.”

Why? Under the civil-social condition of democracy, with no aristocrats standing between the people and the centralized state, one could see not only an absolute monarchy along the lines of Louis XIV’s France, but a new form of absolutism, a new despotism “with features unknown to our fathers.” The old absolutist monarchies retained a still-formidable aristocratic class. Firstborn sons inherited the estate, ruling but also protecting the peasants who worked their land, as their ancestors had done or centuries. Second-born sons entered the clerical aristocracy, the Roman Catholic Church, exerting influence on peasants, monarchs, and their fellow aristocrats alike. Under the old regime, wealthy merchants in townships and cities also commanded their own sources of revenue and manpower, independent of monarchs and aristocrats alike. Even under the rule of the Bourbons, then, there was “a love of freedom in souls,” among honor-loving monarchs, aristocrats, and merchants, all jealous of their prerogatives and capable of defending them. They ruled peasants and urban workers who understood that they, too, could one day see the face of God.

But in the ever-advancing European civil-social democracy of Tocqueville’s century, the Enlightenment philosophes and their intellectual heirs had undermined faith in God; “nothing above man any longer sustains man.” And democratic men find themselves in a leveled society in which all classes mix together, as “the individual disappears more and more into the crowd,” readily “lost in the mist of the common obscurity,” and therefore no longer held responsible for his actions.” (In America, not long afterwards, Edgar Allan Poe would write his satirical short story, “The Man of the Crowd.”) 

“When each citizen, being equally powerless, equally poor, equally isolated, can only oppose his individual weakness to the organized force of the government,” a regime of despotism would take on the harshness of late Roman imperialism, “those frightful centuries of Roman tyranny, when mores were corrupt, memories effaced, habits destroyed, opinions wavering, and freedom, chased out of the laws, no longer knew where to take refuge to find an asylum; when nothing any longer stood guarantee for citizens and citizens no longer stood guarantee for themselves,” where “one would see men make sport of human nature.”

In the event, many Europeans would come under tyrannies even worse than those Tocqueville foresaw, regimes in which making sport of human nature meant hunting it down in death camps and world wars, resulting in tens of millions dead, killed by regimes where the modern state, armed with technologies permitting surveillance of its subjects, ended civil and political liberty for those who survived the onslaught, spurring the invention of a new word, ‘totalitarianism.’

“Is this not worth thinking about? If men had to arrive, in effect, at the point where it would be necessary to make them all free or all slaves, all equal in rights or all deprived of rights; if those who governed societies were reduced to this alternative of gradually raising the crowd up to themselves or of letting all citizens fall below the level of humanity, would this not be enough to overcome many doubts, to reassure consciences well, and to prepare each to make great sacrifice readily?” For “if one does not in time succeed in founding the peaceful empire of the greatest number among us, democratic republics instead of democratic despotisms, “we shall arrive sooner or later at the unlimited power of one alone.”

Against atheist ideologies, Tocqueville therefore called upon Europeans to renew their respect for Christianity. Against overbearing military and political ambition, he commended a spirit of peaceful commerce, of the ‘bourgeois’ life detested by aristocrats and socialists alike. Against the “sentiments of envy” he opposed the idea of individual and civil rights. Against government centralization, he urged praised federalism and the practical experience that local self-government provides to citizens. Against the threat of foreign wars, a strong executive, a constitutional monarch empowered to defend the realm could meet the threats without extinguishing civil and political liberty. And against the alienation of his fellow aristocrats, many of them resentful of the rise of democracy, Tocqueville warned against futile dreams of reinstituting feudalism, urging them rather to guide democracy, advise the new citizens, moderating their passions by teaching them how better to govern—as Tocqueville himself did in writing Democracy in America.

 

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

1. For a consideration of Maurras’s thought, see “The Monarchist Kulturkampf of Charles Maurras,” on this website under “Nations.”
2. See “Aron on de Gaulle: Wartime and Postwar” and “Aron on de Gaulle: The Fifth Republic,” on this website under “Nations.”