On Raymond Aron today
One oddity about about the reception of Raymond Aron (1905 – 1983), the French cold-war liberal, is that it’s usually Straussians, Schmittians or Burnham-ite (of the 1940s variety) intellectuals that really extoll him (these are in no sense liberals, not even in the European sense). Cherniss’ Liberalism in Dark Times was an important exception to that rule, but I found the chapter on Aron least memorable of the lot.+ If you want to see what I have in mind in the first sentence above read Mark Lilla’s Preface and Manent’s Epilogue, to Liberty and Equality, a translation (very nicely done by Samuel Zeitlin of the notes to) a lecture delivered on April 4, 1978 (apparently his last one at Collège de France).*
I don’t mean to suggest that normative egalitarians — of the sort that populate political philosophy/theory — ought to read him. He has little to offer them. But the question is to what degree liberals that wish to take the realities of politics and political life not the least in the context of interstate strife seriously should privilege the study of Aron (over, say, Weber, Knight, Lippmann, or even Shklar). About that some other time.
Part of the problem in recovering anything from Aron’s thought is the way he historicizes himself. He is so self-aware of the historical specificity of his thought — and the fragility of the political circumstances that give rise to it — that what’s original in his views resists projection into different times and places. But this may be instructive, if he gets the diagnosis of his own age is right.
Here’s how he puts it:
[T]oday liberalism tends to define itself, in a manner perhaps regrettable, essentially by its opposition to totalitarianism. In the past, liberalism was founded on philosophic doctrines. Today, I am inclined to believe that liberalism (because this doctrine is ascribed to me) justifies itself in a negative or defensive, sometimes aggressive manner, as an alternative to totalitarianism, an alternative validated by historical experience. In fact, in the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century liberalism rediscovered all the enemies which it had combatted in the course of its history. pp. 34-5
This strikes me as helpful in explaining why the resolutely non-normative liberalism of that period is suddenly aging so badly. (That’s no defense of the normative liberalism that dominates in our political philosophy.) The dangers that liberal democracies face today are non-trivial, but in fact, not totalitarian in character. And in so far as totalitarianism still exist (and arguably it does in, say, China), it operates by having absorbed many liberal insights such that liberals cannot define themselves intrinsically by opposition to it.
I don’t mean to be original here. Aron’s lecture and my previous paragraph hint at (recall) the prescient insight that Fukuyama — also much indebted to Strauss, Schmitt, and Burnham — articulated in his (1989) essay, "The End of History?" I would paraphrase this point that political arguments that rest on historical experience are intrinsically fragile not just because of cohort effects (eye witnesses to history die), but also because that experience will be filtered through highly contested and contestable interpretations (not the least by strategic agents who will have an interest in contesting them). Even the end of history (when based on historical experience) is not its necessary true end.
In his last lecture, Aron does not point us to the ‘philosophical doctrines’ that may aid in re-founding and reconstituting liberalism.** We will have to do our thinking for ourselves.
+There is good scholarly work on Burnham’s influence on Aron by Hugo Drochon.
*I bought it because I am very interested in Foucault’s lectures that very month at the same place.
**I agree with Manent that Aron’s earlier criticism of Hayek tendency toward depoliticizing is instructive (and presumably can be extended to Rawls and Nozick).