Nathan Orlando: Raymond Aron and His Dialogues in an Age of Ideologies. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2023.
This review was originally published in Perspectives on Political Science, Volume 52, Number 4, October 2023.
A fully ‘credentialed’ graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, a longtime professor of sociology at the Sorbonne, Raymond Aron (1905-1983) nonetheless wrote about politics for scholarly and general reader in exactly the same way: free of jargon, full of common sense. He wrote that way because he thought of politics that way—politically. Aristotle defines politics as the relation of reciprocal ruling and being ruled. Whether addressing his fellow scholars or those who read his newspaper articles, he always spoke as one citizen to another.
In thinking this way, Aron avoided the technicist temptation, with its futile attempt to reduce political science to a set of mathematical equations and graphs, and the even more futile and demonstratively dangerous temptation to reduce political theory to ideology. As Nathan Orlando puts it in this impressive, book, “political scientists of both mindsets dream of a formula such that political action could become simply a matter of inputting the relevant variables into the transhistorical, immaculate equation”—whether expressed in numbers or in formulaic words—and “thereby obviating the need for fallible human judgment.” Political thought needs political theory, which can provide a framework for making political choices, so long as the theorist denies himself the hubristic pleasure of supposing that his ideas solve political problems. With Aristotle, Aron knew that “it is not always ignorance but sometimes the very nature of the subject matter that determines the nature of a theory”; since politics isn’t chemistry or physics, subject to strictly controlled experimentation upon substances that don’t ‘talk back,’ no political theory can ‘print out’ and answer to such questions as war or peace, republic or principality. Insofar as one can discern a theory in Aron’s political thought, it is in large measure “a theory about the limits of theory.” he offers “not a set of ready-made solutions to all the problems of political life but a path to find solutions to a given dilemma.”
Accordingly, in considering the political conditions of mid-twentieth century Europe, Aron engaged not in monologues but dialogues, in some cases engaging political thinkers and statesmen who were reluctant to dialogue with him. He became accustomed to such dialogues early on, having rejected the neo-Kantian philosophy of his university professors in the 1920s, the more sinister philosophic determinism (‘Left’ and ‘Right) he encountered in Germany in the early 1930s, and the economically sound but insufficiently political political economy of Hayek in the 1940s. Although an admirer of the great republican monologist, Charles de Gaulle, he remained independent of Gaullism; in his dialogue with the General, he received few direct responses to his criticisms but knew that his silent interlocutor regarded him as un homme sérieux, the only contemporary political writer worth reading. In his Socratic role, “buzzing like a gadfly,” Aron targeted “comprehensive doctrines, secular religions, demagogues, and all simple, indiscriminate theories that promise miraculous solutions to the problems of human life,” preferring the sobriety of Tocqueville to the systematic rationalism of the ‘high moderns’ and the no less dogmatic irrationalism of the ‘postmoderns.’
Many of what would become called the postmodernist themes were sounded by Jean-Paul Sartre, Aron’s classmate at the École. After graduation from university and completion of his military service, Aron accepted academic appointments in Germany, first in Cologne and then in Berlin. Sartre, who had failed his examinations, remained in France but continued his study of philosophy. Both began as idealist, neo-Kantian ‘men of the Left.’ Aron studied Marx, Weber, Husserl, and Heidegger at the same time Hitler undertook his meteoric ascent to supreme power. On the theoretical as well as the practical level, German erased Aron’s naivete. Upon his return to France, it was Aron who brought Husserl to the attention of Sartre; “if Sartre is the father of modem existentialism, Aron played the matchmaker.” That the “human eye cannot see itself,” requiring “a perspective outside of itself by which to see itself,” is the “essential insight of existentialism.” Aron and Sartre discovered themselves in this initial dialogue with one another. But they discovered radically different persons. Aron took from the Germans both a sense of the importance of dialogue to the uncovering of reality and a powerful understanding what happens in politics when politicians abandon dialogue for dictatorship, in both the political and the literal sense of the word. The result of that abandonment is tyranny. Modern tyranny seizes upon the claim that history, conceived as the course of events, is going somewhere, its course determined by historical laws, themselves conceived as ‘dialectical.’ But this dialectic involves not only the clash of opinions, as seen in Socrates’ dialogues, but the clash of actions; according to historicists, the course of events consists of thoughts and actions that unfold in a predictable and inevitable sequence, giving absolute authority to those who understand the laws of history over those who must consent to follow the commands of this vanguard. Aron saw that the two most powerful parties in Germany, the Nazis and the Communists, made the same kind of claim to rule, one basing the historical dialectic on ‘class consciousness,’ the other on ‘race consciousness.’ The weakest German party was animated by the same sort of neo-Kantian idealism Aron had seen in France; its regime, the Weimar Republic, could not stand up to the parties of tyranny.
Aron recoiled from all three parties, all three ideologies. For him, the attempt to replace an impotent idealism with a fusion of idealism and realism was no grand philosophic ‘synthesis’ but merely a chimera. Instead, while remaining mindful of such an ideal or “universal” principle as justice, one must consider political actions primarily in the light of practical rather than theoretical reasoning. Moralism in politics “demands perfection”; it commands us to follow the absolute truth and let the world fall. Practical politics “accepts compromise as inevitable in political life,” given the reciprocity of ruling and being ruled as the core of political life. “The moral critic sleeps well. But he is useless to anyone but himself.” The practical critic and the practical politician reach out to others in dialogue and friendship, seeking reasonable if not abstractly rational settlements of concrete political problems. Aron wrote in that spirit, seeking to engage and persuade, not to announce and demand, much less command. At the same time, the partisan conflicts he witnessed in Germany alerted him to the crucial importance of regime politics, politics consisting of disputes over a nation’s purposes and its way of life, a politics the mild parliamentarians of interwar Europe had hoped they had removed from the landscape.
With Husserl and Marx now in hand, Sartre, by contrast, spent the 1930s and 1940s engaged in a “quixotic attempt to wed existentialism to Marxism.” He never really studied either politics or economics and, while abandoning neo-Kantianism he retained the tone of a strict, even fervent, moralist. Dismissing Kant’s ideals or transcendent principles as illusory, he became even “less tolerant of moral shortcomings rather than more.” He began with Nietzschean assumption that god is dead—not only the God of the Bible but the ‘god’ of transcendentalist philosophy, the categorical imperative. If God is dead, everything is permissible. There is no duty, whether Christian or Kantian. Nor is there any human nature that can serve as a moral standard. But this radical freedom implies radical responsibility. “In living, we each craft our own essence”; existentialist “authenticity” is “to embrace this freedom.” “For Sartre, all the world is a series of evocative paintings that means something particular to each observer, with no impression closer to the truth than any other.” On the one hand, this requires constant self-assertion, constant self-invention, a sort of permanent revolution (to borrow a phrase from Trotsky, later enacted by Mao); on the other hand, since we only understand ourselves by seeing ourselves in the eyes of others, this also requires the recognition of those others while denying that others’ existence is any more stable than one’s own. In Sartre’s view, political struggle was entirely ad hominem, a matter of conflicts among persons, and a succession of Manichean” or uncompromising conflicts at that, since any compromise must be inauthentic, a poor-spirited concession to someone who has espoused some view other than one’s own. This accounts for Sartre’s detestation of “the bourgeois West,” with its commercial-republican inclination to split differences, to come to reasonable accommodations among citizens. Sartre thus wavers from endorsing anti anti-Western political actor, very much including sanguinary tyrants, to the anarchism of the French students during their rebellion of May 1968.
Thus, “for the first time in the history of philosophy, Sartre takes as a model for dialectic not the dialogue but individual or even solitary consciousness,” whereby each “self” thinks and defines its own existence. “The role of the interlocutor is to conform rather than to contribute.” As a result, Sartre’s writings became more and more impenetrable, whereas Aron’s writings remained clear and eminently readable throughout his career. Goodwill between the two men “became a casualty of ideology.” The friendship ended when Aron (briefly) dared to collaborate with the Gaullists, who defended republicanism against both fascism and communism.
Although Sartre called Marxism “the unsurpassable philosophy of our time,” his attempt to, well, surpass it by wedding existentialism to it ran into an irresolvable contradiction. “The existentialist prizes the radical, inalienable freedom of the self, realized in dialectic.” “But dialectical materialism,” the core of Marxism, “holds that the subject—bourgeois and proletarian alike—is determined by the relations of productive forces out of his control.” There can be no ‘responsibility’ in the Sartrian sense; consistent with his determinism, Marx refrains from blaming the capitalist for thinking and acting as he does. In his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre vainly attempts to square the circle, transferring the dialectic from socioeconomic classes to individuals. So relocated, the struggle becomes the individual’s fight to rest the pull of what Sartre calls “the practico-inert,” the “everyday comfort and complacency” which chains us “within the banality of bourgeois routine and its trappings.” Human freedom id dialectical, the practico-inert anti-dialectical. According to Sartre, human life has always been a struggle against the scarcity of resources. Yet, even as human beings move from scarcity to some degree of prosperity, unfreedom persists. The individual by himself cannot effectively resist this dead weight of the practico-inert, but when he freely joins a “fused group” of fellow reels, “as the French did during the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and the Revolution that followed,” then “each member [voluntarily] thinks and acts as any other,” and freedom triumphs. This is the link between Sartrian individual freedom and Sartrian socialism. The initial, unifying surge of revolutionary fervor can, moreover, be sustained: “The totality of the group is guaranteed, in the final account, by terror”—the guillotine being the weapon of choice in the 1790s. But that, too, is freedom since the individual has freely pledged, Sartre writes, to “instill terror within” himself by telling his fellow revolutionaries, “You must kill me if I secede.” Although he seems not to recognize it, Sartre has radicalized the ‘bourgeois’ social contract of Thomas Hobbes, whereby the sovereign monarch wields death, the king of terrors, over his subjects.
The Kremlin was not amused. Sartre had no more studied Marx’s Capital than Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and it was on the economic determinism of Marx that the Politburo hung its collective (and collectivist) hat. Sartre consoled himself by railing against the “deliberate moral heinousness” of the West, preferring to judge the West by its defects, its supposed “moral perversity,” while judging the Communist regimes “on their lofty aspirations which their shortcomings ought not,” in his view, “overshadow.” After all, Communist crimes aim at building socialism. But even this could not reconcile real, existing Communism to existentialism, as Sartre himself began to see. Even terrorizing purges couldn’t last forever. Just as the revolutionary fervor of the Bolsheviks ossified into the rule of a new ruling class of Party bureaucrats, so Sartre’s oath-bound “fused group” will, Aron predicted “ossify over time as struggle gives way to routine,” causing the group to fall back into “the very practico-inert against which the struggle began.” For Sartre, then, the permanent revolution really must be permanent, endlessly renewed. ‘History’ will have no end; it is a cycle. But if so, why “did any of these choices or those making them actually matter?” Were the choices really free, at all? Was the free self-immolation of the individual into the group not meaningless?
Aron was not more impressed by Sartre’s intellectual legerdemain than the Communists. He considered “the major fact of our age” to be “neither socialism, nor capitalism, nor the intervention of the state, nor free enterprise,” but “the monstrous development of technology and industry,” seen in all political regimes and economic systems. The commercial-republican West and the socialist-tyrannical East both pursued “the same ends: the maximization of consumer, commercial, and military goods and services.” In this struggle, by the 1970s the victory of the West was obvious, as Aron argued in his ironically titled 1977 book, In Defense of Decadent Europe. Marx’s pseudo-scientific claims of the inevitable collapse of ‘capitalism’ having been falsified, Sartre was trying to marry a corpse. And both versions of Marxism led to rule by terror, by mass-murder, although Sartre’s version skipped the revolutionary stage and went right to the farce—May ’68. The problem was not only a matter of unutterably bad practical judgment; it involved, preeminently, a theoretical error. “The freedom of the individual requires that future history remain both unknown and unknowable, at least in full.” Neither personal freedom nor political liberty can be fully tethered to determinism. At the same time, those who seek such freedom and such liberty need to take heed of the realities in front of them rather than the dream they imagine to be ahead of them.” “To defer blame for political acts until the arrival of the kingdom to come is to abdicate political judgment in favor of faith and to sacrifice present political goods”—to say nothing of living human beings—to “hypothetical ones.” “Liberal democracy has not completely removed tragedy from the human condition, but things are not nearly bad enough to justify gambling away every juridical and logical barrier to unlimited despotism in the hope of making things marginally better.” Secular religion of the totalitarian stripe teaches that you must break an egg in order to make an omelet, but the omelet is spoiled by the violence of the breaking. Non-secular religions usually incline to take care that means fit ends, praising the prudence of serpents along with the innocence of doves and leaving the severer punishments to the superior judgment of God.
With Friedrich Hayek, Aron found himself in dialogue with a fellow liberal, if not a fellow liberal democrat, a firm ally not only in the struggle against Marxism but against the statist dirigisme of John Maynard Keyes. Keynes and his school defined freedom as the overcoming of necessity—obviously drawing from Bacon’s “conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate”—a conquest centering on the accumulation of power in the form of wealth. That is, power defined ‘econonomistically’ betokens true human freedom. Hayek re-centers the meaning of freedom on its classical foundation: scope for reasoned action, “independence of the arbitrary will of another.” Aron shares this orientation, writing and speaking in order to lead his fellow citizens “down the path of political wisdom” by bringing them to think with him, not to obey rhetorical appeals to ‘the right side of History.’ The two men “shared a common understanding of human agency in history”; in the course of events, thoughtful actions can make a difference. We are not awash in ‘process.’
At the same time, reasoning must not overreach its powers, becoming rationalism. Hayek distinguishes the Scottish from the French Enlightenment. The latter “posits the unlimited potential of human reason to overcome all obstacles and accidents, to incorporate all into its order,” as indeed the Keynesians inclined to do. The Scottish Enlightenment, seen preeminently in the writings of Adam Smith, understands reason not as systematic but as the more limited pursuit of prosperity based on conditions readily seen, not supposedly foreseen—this, further limited by the precepts of conscience, as described in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. A shared “humbling recognition of the limits of human reason led Hayek and Aron to the same conclusion about the nature of governments, both socialist and pluralistic: they are not and cannot be omnipotent in governing human affairs.” This rationally discernible understanding of reason’s limits and the humility it encourages contrasts with the hubris of ideology.
Paradoxically, it was the success of liberal economics and politics that was undermining liberalism in the years following the Second World War. Aron noticed two closely related maladies: first (in an insight borrowed from Tocqueville), “the better things get, the more frustrated individuals become with the imperfections that remain, that conditions are not better still”; second (in an insight borrowed from Joseph Schumpeter, but seen as far back as the Bible), the virtues that build prosperity—thrift, public spiritedness—decline as prosperity increases. In the postwar years, to point out the dangers of ‘the affluent society’ was to go against the grain of prevailing sentiment in the democracies Aron saw “a certain kinship” with Hayek, “this man who chooses to defy the demos for the sake of the demos.”
Hayek understands freedom’s opposite, coercion, as a narrowing of the individual’s choices back by the threat of harm. “For Hayek, coercion is the great evil to be avoided not simply as an intrinsic or independent iniquity but because it disrupts the ability for man to make use of his rationality,” the characteristic that makes him a human being. On the contrary, “the possibilities for the individual should remained as unrestricted and open to the unforeseen as possible.” To achieve this, Hayek proposes the rule of law, which differs from coercion because it is promulgated not hidden, and it is impersonal. Law provides the individual with information about the conditions under which the individual can act, giving him foreknowledge of what will or will not happen if he does what he plans to do. Law gives him “the predictability upon which to base future conduct.” Therefore, a democratic regime may compromise the rule of law, since democracy is a procedure, a mode of governing, and as such animated by the arbitrary will of the majority, which is unpredictable.
Aron takes Hayek’s point, but demurs. “Non-coercion appears to Aron to be an insufficient standard by which to measure freedom.” It does not take into account the moral and political complexities of affluent, industrial societies, which constrain citizens in ways that mere equality under the law cannot address. In modern states, political liberty, participation in the framing of the laws that govern us, has become indispensable to the maintenance of individual freedom. Moreover, modern political economies can constrain the freedom of action of industrial workers; Marx was right about that, if about little else. Marx wrongly dismisses “formal freedoms”—political liberty—in favor of “real” freedoms—protection against unemployment and other ills of the business cycle and of factory-worker “wage slavery.” “Formal freedoms” will not suffice “when the ability to exercise them is lacking.” Both kinds of freedom must be respected; “the two types of freedom exist in dialogue” among citizens who stand ready to fit one with the other. For Aron, the United States of his time, the American way of life, had achieved a decent reconciliation, to the degree possible, of these “various desires for freedom.”
Behind laws, one always finds a regime, and a regime consists not only of a way of life but of persons, rulers, the institutions by which they rule, and the purposes they pursue by ruling. A government of laws is strictly impossible, only a government in accordance with laws. Only persons can govern, and they are governing other persons. In applying laws, even ‘strict constructionist’ judges need to exercise equity, prudential judgment of particular individuals whose circumstances differ from case to case; individuals need equal protection under the laws, not sameness of application of the laws. “Even were it possible to expunge the human element of political life, politics without men becomes an automated system, a machine focused upon efficiency that more than likely sublimates all other priorities to economic progress”—understandably enough in Hayek, “an economist by training” who “attempt[s] to fit his political philosophy into his economic categories.” But as Aron insists, “Politics is never reducible to economics,” whether Marxist or liberal. “The soldier who throws himself onto a grenade, the voter who agrees to higher taxes, the jury that convicts a gang member who promises vengeance, these do not pass muster for economic rationality.” Surprisingly, Hayek’s denigration of politics, his attempt to replace it with the rule of law, parallels the anti-political character of the administrative state he detests, replacing the government of persons with the administration of things. On the contrary, Aron argues, “Politics as usual constitutes the primary recourse against the administrative state.”
“Aron makes the radical suggestion that deriving law from the dialogue of men is not only not a tragedy of the human condition but the only way to approach some issues,” the only way to acknowledge that politics addresses the persistence of human imperfection. “The search for the transcendent, perfect code will leave us wanting.” And Tocqueville is right (in this, neither man is more French): Political liberty opens the individual human soul to a joie de vivre unattainable under the anti-political regimes of modern tyranny or the impersonal “rule of law.” This can “only be doubted by minds captive to fanaticism or prejudice.” In Aron’s words, “democracy is morally superior to despotism not because, say, its economic system is better”—though it is—or “because it is more creative and generally productive”—but “because it comes up with better human beings” under the conditions of modern statism. Within the framework of the modern state, government of and by the people, ruling one another reciprocally, politically, is now the best way to achieve government for the people.
In Charles de Gaulle, Aron addressed no theorist devoid of any sense of practical politics. As Aron saw it, de Gaulle’s mistakes owed to his inadequate political theory, which skewed his excellent political judgment. De Gaulle, the ardent French nationalist, at times took his nationalism too far.”
Aron cautioned his readers not to mistake Gaullist nationalism as either a form of biological pseudo-science (as seen in Hitler) or as a species of misguided metaphysics (as propounded by Hegel). For de Gaulle, a nationality does consist of the “spirit” of a people, but not in the unfolding of some supposed ‘Absolute Spirit.’ Nationality results instead from ruling institutions, moeurs or ways of life, and the historical experience of a people, along with its purpose or purposes—in the case of France, famously, la grandeur. That is, nationality closely resembles what Aristotle calls a regime, with “spirit” meaning what Aristotle means by ethos. This question of the French regime had wracked French politics for a century and a half, with partisans of Legitimist monarchism (absolutists and constitutionalists), Bonapartist despotism, republicanism (military or commercial), socialism (democratic or communist), and oligarchy (‘authoritarian’ or fascist), vying for rule. Implicated in the ‘Who rules?’ question was the ‘way of life’ questions, since “France was the last country in Western Europe to cease eulogizing the yeoman farmer, to accept the city as a benign rather than devouring monster and, in short, the last to modernize.” More precisely, however, France was the last to modernize its civil society but among the first to modernize its state, which it did under the Bourbons in the seventeenth century. Added to these dilemmas of regime and the relation between modern state and civil society was France’s geopolitical circumstance. Locate squarely on the Great European Plain stretching from “the Atlantic to the Urals,” as de Gaulle put it, more than once, a militarily powerful Franc might succumb to the lure of imperialism, while a weak France might succumb to the imperial ambitions of others. The Russians were far away, with imperial ambitions that did not read so far west, but once Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns had unified the many German states, France was outnumbered and outgunned by its next-door neighbor.
Call it patriotism, nationality, or nationalism, de Gaulle saw the way forward for the French in the proud, spirited invocation of Frenchness, backed institutionally by a strong executive elected by the people, not the weak parliamentarism that had failed Franc and Germany. Hence the Fifth Republic, for which he acted as the founder. “Nationalism, he hoped could provide [the] cohesion necessary for France, battered by waves of military and social upheaval in the first half of the twentieth century”—and indeed for a hundred twenty years before that—to “regain control of her destiny”—her self-government—in “the second half.”
Aron saw, understood, and concurred in most of this. Throughout the 1930s, both men had warned against French failure to take German ambitions seriously. During their exile in London, Aron worked on La France Libre, the Gaullist newspaper, which had built up more subscribers than any other monthly publication in Britain by the end of the war. De Gaulle wasn’t entirely happy with Aron’s journalistic touch, which he regarded as too analytical, insufficiently ardent for the times. But the break came in 1943, when Aron published an article titled. “L’Ombre de Bonaparte,” in which he suggested that “the growing personality cult” surrounding the Free French leader might result in the ruin of French republicanism, after the war. He was especially troubled by de Gaulle’s claim to symbolize or embody France itself; he had already overridden the rule of law by dismissing the Vichy regime the parliamentarians had surrendered to, in the wake of the Nazi conquest. Having asserted his own claim to rule, having become “the arbiter of what was and what was not ‘eternal France,'” de Gaulle, at least in the minds of some member of his entourage in exile, began to resemble Louis Napoleon—or even Louis XIV, with his worrisome claim, “L’État, c’est moi.” “Human nature being what it is, it would have been difficult not to conflate the nation with its guardian, guarantor, promulgator, and chief of government himself.”
Aron’s suspicions heightened after the Nazis took over southern France beginning in November 1942, where the Vichy regime had ruled (under Nazi supervision) for the previous two years. The London Gaullists worried that the Vichyites might take their regime to Algeria and set up their gown government in exile in competition with Free France. As Orlando summarizes the matter, “during this pivotal reconfiguration of forces, General de Gaulle chose self-interest over national interest,” fearing that the doddering Marshal Pétain, figurehead leader of the Vichyites, might “find his backbone and do the right thing.” “Where the roads between self-interest and national interest diverged, the General failed to make the necessary distinction and chose himself over France.”
But did he? De Gaulle viewed the insinuation with indignation, and rightly so. De Gaulle was no monarchist, Bonapartist or otherwise, and the Vichyites were no republicans. What is more, and worse, the charge of Bonapartism was precisely the accusation leveled against de Gaulle by President Roosevelt and his State Department throughout the war. De Gaulle suspected the Americans of wanting France to return to a weak, parliamentary form of republicanism that Washington could readily influence. (One might add that Roosevelt himself hardly favored a legislature-centered regime in his own country.) In de Gaulle’s eyes, Aron’s article added another bucket of water to the American grist mill. The problem was that in 1943, Aron knew de Gaulle too little to know that. His concern was understandable; it might have been allayed precisely by an Aron-style dialogue between the two men—this one in person, not in print—but that never happened.
When de Gaulle voluntarily left the government in the year after the end of the war, Aron was reassured of the General’s republican bona fides. His fears renewed in 1958, however, when the crisis of French rule in Algeria threatened the Fourth Republic. De Gaulle lost no time in swooping in, shouldering aside the hapless parliamentarians threatened by a military coup orchestrated by Algeria-based military officers. Admittedly, as Aron wrote, de Gaulle “has the soul of a paternal monarch or of a prince-president, not of a tyrant.” Still, in a role analogous to that of the dictator-savior-legislators of the Roman republic, de Gaulle founded a republic Aron judged to grant too much power to the president, over-correcting the parliamentary republicanism that had failed the country every time it had been put to a serious geopolitical test. As he frequently did, Aron preferred the American system of mutually checking, balanced powers, however much that had been compromised by the likes of Roosevelt. Aron thus continued to uphold dialogue, not executive monologue, as the sine qua non of the republican regime and indeed of genuine politics.
To emphasize the need for a strong executive in the new republic, de Gaulle attempted to stake out an independent stance, the vindication of French sovereignty or self-government and the assertion of French grandeur in his foreign policy. This involved moves designed to inspire national sentiments not only in France but throughout the world, undermining (as he hoped) the rival Cold War hegemons, the United States and the Soviet Union. That is, de Gaulle, who understood very well that France could no longer be grand in the manner of Louis XIV or Napoleon I, could still act greatly by bringing every nation to take on the moral and political responsibility of self-government, against imperialism. At the same time, he hoped to build Europe into a federation, not an empire of sovereign nations, “l’Europe des patries.” Ultimately, this would include Russia itself; at one point, he startled Premier Alexei Kosygin with the abrupt invitation, “Come, let us build Europe together.” (The firm Communist Party ideologue demurred.) De Gaulle took this to be an achievable project, if only in the long run, because he saw that nations outlive their rulers and ruling institutions of the moment. Sooner or later, he believed, the nations will prevail. France would reach for a new type of greatness, the greatness that comes from leading the nations to a new order of geopolitics beyond both Realpolitik and imperialism.
While that last claim is empirically true, if French nationality consists of a regime in the profound Aristotelian sense of the word, not simply in politicians and institutions that evanesce, would regime conflicts not persist among self-governing nations? De Gaulle knew that they would, which is why he saw to it that (to take the most striking example) France built a nuclear arsenal that could be aimed in all directions. Aron considered these long-range strategies and tactics a threat to France in the present. To destabilize the Atlantic Alliance in the name of French self-government and greatness might well make de Gaulle’s farsighted policy impossible, causing it to stumble long before it could be realized.
In response to these criticisms particularly a 1961 article quite prematurely titled, “Adieu to Gaullism,” de Gaulle took the trouble to write to Aron in 1963. “At bottom,” he said, “everything: ‘Europe,’ the ‘Atlantic Community,’ ‘NATO,’ ‘armaments,’ and so on, comes down to a single question, should France be France?” Yes, Aron, replied, but all of those things that confine France now also indispensably protect her, here and now. Given not only the power of the Soviet Union and the nature of its regime, France needs her mighty ally, however its dominance may chafe. And the fact that de Gaulle had entwined grandeur with himself—to be sure, as an element of a republican founding—only gave Aron further pause. “Aron, given l=to less lofty visions and more moderate expectations, recognized that France could be France without greatness. and that, both prudentially and practically, she must be.” That is, Aron associated French greatness with great power, which it obviously no longer had, nuclear arms notwithstanding. De Gaulle, however, never supposed that France would fully recover the power wielded in previous centuries; for him, greatness could now be achieved by policy, enunciated more in words than in action, policy foreign and domestic, both in the service of spirited self-government, in France and in all countries.
Given the largely rhetorical character of de Gaulle’s enterprise, at least in his foreign policy, Aron objected to the rhetoric itself. “By his maverick pronouncements, he gave the Soviet bloc every reason to overestimate its support in the West.” De Gaulle also encouraged the growing movement of left-wing ‘Third Worldism,’ which set France on a course bizarrely in tune with the contemporary fulminations of the neo-Marxist Frantz Fanon. “And perhaps most of all,” de Gaulle’s rhetoric, Aron wrote, “did not shake the Soviet bloc, but he did trouble the Western bloc, which was by nature more stable,” being ruled by democratically elected politicians, not Kremlin oligarchs. True, de Gaulle’s actions in the intermittent Cold War crises spoke louder, at those moments, than his words—President Johnson never forgot de Gaulle’s backing during the Cuban missile showdown, when he was Kennedy’s vice president—de Gaulle’s rhetorical “oversimplications, so oft repeated an so vociferously expressed, endangered the Western allies unnecessarily and courted unacceptable risks”; “by attempting to carve out a role in global politics separate from but equal to that of the two Super Powers, de Gaulle’s politics of grandeur screened France from reality, to the peril of all,” not because de Gaulle didn’t know the score but by riding on an implausible pretense, by becoming an implausible mythmaker. As Orlando writes, “De Gaulle had a fine, prudential line to walk between timorous acceptance of the given”—the sort of poor-spiritedness he had excoriated as far back as the 1930s—and “pernicious audacity toward his romantic vision.” In Aron’s judgment, de Gaulle stepped over that line too often. In Orlando’s judgment, “Aron’s firm grip on the actual counterbalanced de Gaulle’s vivid imagination,” opposing his prose to the General’s poetry. True, de Gaulle never soared off into the clouds with ideologues like Sartre, or even into the poetry-at-the-service-of-the-prosaic seen in Hayek. But he went a little too far in that direction. “The prosaic and the fantastic must go hand in hand in the realm of politics, neither fully capturing the human adventure.”
Orlando takes de Gaulle’s break with Israel over its initiation of the Six-Day War in 1967 as the most illustrative instance of the Gaullist “civil religion” of nationalism “put to the test.” The incident posed an “underlying question: can one be both a Jew and a Frenchman?”
In the aftermath of Israel’s spectacular victory against Arab armies massed on its borders, de Gaulle, hitherto a firm supporter of the Jewish state held a press conference in which he complained that its government had ignored his warning that whichever side truck first would be regarded by franc as the aggressor. “France’s voice was unheeded,” he intoned, adding that since Israel’s founding the presence of such an “elite people, self-assured and dominating” in the Middle East might well cause more trouble in an already unstable region. He called for the Great Powers, very much including France, to impose a peace settlement including internationally recognized borders, but only after the United States removed its troops from Vietnam—a seemingly irrelevant condition that perplexed more than a few observers.
Orlando provides a careful analysis of de Gaulle’s rationale and of Aron’s critique. In the 1950s, de Gaulle had decried Israel’s founding as “a historical necessity,” going so far as to say that the main problem with it was that the country was too small to be readily defended, that it needed ready access to the Red Sea, and that it should enjoy some degree of control over Jerusalem. These were the results of the 1967 war: Why did de Gaulle reverse himself? Orlando sees that in the 1950s France and Israel were closely aligned, France having supported Israel during the 1956 Suez Canal War, unlike the United States or the Soviet Union, then competing for Egyptian favor. That is, Israel then “constituted one point in the constellation of the Gaullist vision for potential foreign policy.” Not so, by 1967. This time, the Americans were backing Israel and alliance with the Arab states had become more attractive to France, which had relinquished its imperial holding in every Muslim country it had occupied. Aron saw that de Gaulle was simply pursuing France’s “new national interest,” part of his “broader campaign of appealing to nationalism, worldwide. It was another demonstration of French independence from the Americans, a demonstration with no material cost either to France or to Israel, since the Israeli victory was a fait accompli. This also explains de Gaulle’s demand for American withdrawal from Vietnam; he promoted national self-determination for the Vietnamese, even at the risk of a communist regime there, while again charting an independent course from Washington.
Aron understood all this but dissented. Given the worldwide rivalry of the Great Powers, there could be no coherent and lasting settlement of Arab-Israeli borders brokered by them. Since France wasn’t really a Great Power, far from being a go-between at some future peace conference, it would be ignored, if not excluded altogether. Further, if the assertion of national interest amounts to an imperative for any government, was Israel not acting in its own national interest by launching a preemptive strike against the far more numerous Arab armies? And was this not doubly true, given the fact that any Israeli loss would have meant the erasure of Israel, whereas Arab defeats in the past, present, and future left the Arab countries intact? Finally, did the Israelis not plainly see that it “could not rely on any other state” to defend it in a timely way? As a Jew, Aron well knew that Jews in Europe had often been tolerated in their host countries, but often persecuted. Why would Gentile nations leap to their defense now that they had a state of their own?
The history of European anti-Semitism also brought Aron to object to de Gaulle’s remark about the elite and dominating people, although not in any facile way. Aron understood that in de Gaulle’s mid “elite, self-assured, and dominating” was a compliment, albeit a double-edged one in this context. Just as he had dismissed charges that de Gaulle was a fascist, so he dismissed charges that he personally was anti-Semitic, while deploring the comfort such a remark would give to those who were—very much including certain elements among the French and substantial portions of the Arab populations. As Aron remarked, the word dominateur has a negative connotation, and had been deployed against Jews by elements of the French Right in the 1930s. De Gaulle had no animus against Jews, but he did resent “the outpouring of support among French Jews for Israel’s actions.” Whose side were they on: France, as embodied by de Gaulle, or a foreign state, even if that state consisted of their fellow Jews, many of whom had left Europe in the wake of the Holocaust.
In this “we see the ultimate expression of de Gaulle’s nationalism,” an all-or-nothing concept that precluded any sympathy for any people that defied French policy. In Aron’s understanding of Gaullist nationalism, “the unswerving love of France and France alone can and should fill the horizon of one’s imagination and identity.” Himself a thoroughly ‘secularized’ Jew, who declared “I am French…before I am Jewish,” and indeed an anti-Zionist in the 1930s and ’40s, Aron viewed de Gaulle’s assumption with profound unease. “In suggesting that the Jewishness of the Jew inherently sets him at odds with the state, that Jewishness creates the necessary and sufficient condition for disloyalty and, by implication, therefore ought to be severed from his being as a French citizen, the General transgressed the limits of what a nation can and should ask of its citizens.” Important as patriotism is, it surely must not constitute the fullest expression of a human being’s soul.
Therefore, “a liberal state must accept that each person can have both a nation-state and a religion simultaneously.” It is one thing to demand loyalty, to stand ready to punish treason. Dissent from national policy usually does not qualify as treason, as it surely did not in this case; nor does sympathy for a foreign nation. De Gaulle also should have been more careful at directing such a criticism at Jews, a little more than a decade after Jewish survivors had been released from German concentration camps, which gave a rather more harsh example of “domineering.” “Taken to the extreme, nationalism can obscure all else—especially prudence—from consideration, just as communism had done for Sartre.” (De Gaulle is said to have remarked, “Sartre, too, is France,” but for the down-to-earth Aron, that was precisely the problem.) So, yes, “de Gaulle suggests an important dictum with which Aron concurs; dual political identities ought to be forbidden because they deny a fundamental premise of political life.” De Gaulle rightly reprimanded “Israelis of the diaspora,” but he wrongly reprimanded Jews who were French citizens. Israel, a secular and democratic state, is not the same as the Jewish people as a religious or, more broadly, ‘cultural’ identity.
“What then is nationalism, ideally?” Aron acknowledged what de Gaulle accomplished while evoking his version of it: a new and better constitution for France; divestment of the last important and highly troublesome imperial territories; construction of a nuclear deterrent force; modernization of the economy; restoration of some of France’s lost international prestige; facing down no fewer than four threats of civil war. The major powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, held themselves together at least in part with shared (in the case of the Soviet, imposed) ideas; France had no such resource, as many of its factions cashed over rival ideas. De Gaulle “rallie[d] his people to a flag—with himself as its bearer—rather than a creed”; “because a state in the world lives more precariously than a transcendent idea, de Gaulle’s (lack of) margin for error forces him to walk a narrower line,” and so did his kind of nationalism. “By uniting a sharply factionalized nation behind his very person, General de Gaulle risk[ed] disaster with each and every decision. But neither could he avoid indecision.” Indecision was what had brought down several of France’s parliamentary republics. In Aron’s last analysis, “de Gaulle did more with less than any Frenchman could have dared hope.”
Raymond Aron’s political science was intentionally embedded in concrete political circumstances, as those circumstances arose. It resisted easily summarized grand generalizations. But, as Orlando writes, “The West did not need a Marx to outline a new philosophy of history. The West did not need to demand of its thinkers a philosophical uniformity. In order to stymie the Soviet Union, the West needed only to be.” That is, it needed the power not of refutation of example, and example that endured. This had been so, from George Washington to Charles de Gaulle when it comes to statesmen (would you rather be ruled by Napoleon or Lenin?), and even more so in the prosperity of its civil societies and, indeed, their joie de vivre. (Even de Gaulle, no boulevardier, faulted the Soviet Union for its lugubrious atmosphere.)
Aron rightly insisted that the dialogic character of Western civil societies made the West stronger than the Soviet Union, which, as he wrote, “paralyze[d] knowledge even while claiming to ‘totalize’ it.” The West’s “confidence in the governed” triumphed over the Communists” “refusal of dialogue” even as its adepts droned on about ‘the dialectic.’ He continued: “A philosopher is first of all responsible to philosophy”; “he would cease to deserve the name of philosopher only on the day that he came to share the fanaticism or skepticism of ideologues, the day he subscribed to inquisition by theologian-judges.” It is the philosopher’s “civic duty, his duty to society,” to pursue dialogue, first of all with himself, then with others. That is why philosophy must and can be political philosophy, ruling and being ruled by the better arguments, as tested in dialogue. the Socratic gadfly practices such political philosophy.
Political philosophy is also ‘politic’ philosophy. as Orlando finely describes him, “Aron stood for political prudence. As a result, he regularly stood alone. But he was never content to remain so” He “endeavored to dissuade his friends from their excesses,” and if he did not convince his friends he may well have dissuaded many of his fellow citizens from going along with those excesses. “He showed the broader citizenry how to do politics in an age of ideologies, how to return to the public realm,” how to recover citizen liberty from those who claimed to rule on the basis of one or another species of historical determinism. He rested his hope not in “the process of history but…in the rational capacity of man and in a regime that allows him to exercise it.” In so doing he “impar[ed] to posterity a paradigm that shows us how we might confront our own dilemmas and interlocutors in our own time.”
With his first book Nathan Orlando brings himself forward as a political thinker in the line of Aron. Long may he continue in it.
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