Aron was brilliant intellectual. But he kicked me out of his office at L'Express when I called Heidegger a Nazi. (Well, let's just say he abruptly ended what had until that moment been a cordial conversation. I was working on a dissertation about German intellectual exiles. I was interested in a forgotten figure named Paul-Ludiwg Landsberg. We talked for a bit about various figures. Aron said that he believed that Heidegger was the most brilliant of the lot. I dissented. He asked why. I switched to English and explained my preference for Adorno. Then I repeated something Hbaermas had said a few weeks earlier in a seminar I attended—that Heidegger's distinction between small-b "being" and capital-B "Being" hinted at his barely concealed authoritarianism. Suddenly, our conversation was over.)
What a great story. Mich appreciated. I cannot say anything about his philosophical writings simply b/c I do not know enough about philosophy. But I like the story; the abruptness with which he ended the meeting is telling.
"Heidegger's distinction between small-b "being" and capital-B "Being" hinted at his barely concealed authoritarianism" ... interesting, can you say more about this?
Not much more to say really. I attended Habermas' lectures at the Collège de France (1982? 83?). A friend and colleague introduced me to Habermas, who invited me to a seminar he was giving at the Ecole des haute etudes en sciences sociales. Habermas' lectures served as the basis for his book, "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity." He has a chapter in there about Heidegger. Habermas writes: "In a tone that is still not entirely free of admiration, Heidegger characterizes the overman in accord with the image of the ideal type of the SA-man." (p. 132) He elaborates over the next several pages, explaining how Heidegger distinguishes between Being and beings, but he does not repeat the specific comment he made in the seminar.
Thanks a lot for your recollections. I read "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity" a long time ago, too long to remember any details. But I got interested in again because I want to better understand the democratic decline we are living through. I always think there is a lot to learn from those who have lived in the 1940s and drawn lessons from their experience.
I agree whole-heartedly. I devote more time than I can say trying to understand the present moment. I am one of those sophisticates who believed he had outgrown Marx—I assumed that tehcnocrats had figured out how to keep the system humming along without severe crisis—until 2008! But even the crisis of 2007-2009 and its aftermath had not prepared me for what was to come. And since my graduate work focused on 20th-century Europe, especially France & Germany in the 1930s, that tends to be the first place I look for parallels. And I was alarmed by what I saw. My field was intellectual/cultural history, not politics or economics, so I have my biases and my limitations. I find quite a lot of interesting material on Substack. In addition to this one, I highly recommend John Ganz's "UnPopular Front" and William Hogeland's "Bad History." Ganz was on of the fist writers I noticed besides me who was drawing comparisons between the thirties and the present. Hogeland is useful to me because I am so ignorant of he early days of the American Republic and he is so relentless in exposing the pieties and myths Americans are so steeped in when it comes to the Constitution and its framers.
I come from the other side, my field is math and software engineering. But my overall trajectory is somewhat similar. I spent part of last year rereading books from the 1930s and 40s, Karl Polanyi, Hannah Arendt, Horkheimer and Adorno, Karl Popper. They all advance different explanations for what happened and I would love to have the time to synthesize them, in particular Polanyi with Popper. And then of course there is the big question of what are the relevant differences today. That brings it closer to my field as technology obviously changed.
Branko, your characterization of the book's style and flaws is entirely just. There is an English abridgment (I am responsible for the cuts, but someone else did the translation). Abridging the text was both easy and difficult: easy, because as you say he included much trivial and extraneous material, but difficult, because it was hard to assemble a coherent and persuasive text from the pieces that remained. It was not a well-judged effort. Aron simply couldn't write about himself with the incisiveness he brought to other thinkers.
Thank you so much. It was a hard book to read. At times, engaging, interesting, smart; but then ponderous, self-centered, "hard slog".. On balance, I have to say that reluctantly, my opinion of Aron went down after reading the memoirs. As you see from the review, I loved his lectures. I read them in the 1970s in Belgrade. Then I read his excellent intellectual histories of Weber, Marx, Pareto etc. And then, more recently, parts of Peace and War. But I was unprepared for this kind of self-organized Festschrift.
"Self-organized Festschrift" is an excellent description. And like you, I was puzzled by his inclusion of so many letters acknowledging receipt of his work by one famous person or another but without any engagement with the substance. Why did he think it was important to include these? There seemed to be a certain anxiety about his place in the world, perhaps because he was overshadowed for so many years by Sartre and dismissed as a "mere journalist."
Dear Arthur, I think the organization of the book is wrong. Take A's attitude towards de Gulle. Very interesting, and rather convincing critique; but one has to piece it over the years and pages. If he had a chapter on de Gaulle, he could have made in one place a strong critique of his rejection of any legality of the Vichy regime, quasi unconstitutional assumption of powers in 1958 & erratic behavior in 1968; all of which might stem from the same political views, or perhaps personality traits.
Speaking of Aron and his time, reminds me of a sacral personality of the 20th century (also a friend of de Gaulle, Trotsky and others) who wrote about Western civilization with incredible insight and wisdom. (For myself I read her over and over again as her work is so deep as well as mysterious.)
Your reviews are superb. Charming, fascinating, as well as fair and erudite. Would very much like to know how you respond to her. Perhaps one day... Am speaking of Simone Weil.
Entretien flamboyant oú Aron explique - explicite - sa position sur l’indépendance de l’Algérie. Un régal et c’est un vieux pieds noir d’époque qui vous le dit 😀.
I bought the book second-hand, in a 1984 edition by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, translated into Italian by Oreste del Buono — a great journalist, writer, literary critic, and translator. What struck me was that, although it was used, apart from a faint and almost unnoticeable pencil signature on the first page, the book was practically untouched. On page 48, I understood why. It isn’t a Mémoires; it’s an academic monologue in which the human, lived dimension is almost nonexistent, except as a reflection of Aron’s reactions to praise or criticism he received. Emil Cioran used to say that the only books worth reading are memoirs and biographies. But he forgot to add: “It depends on the man (or the woman).”
You are right. It is not a memoir in its usual sense. It is only in part a description of one's intellectual journey, but rather a description of others' views on one's intellectual journey. Aron is a great thinker but it is a superfluous book.
«or that high growth was in fact a low-quality growth, such that if each pair of shoes could last just a year, huge annual production of shoes (which by the way was true for the Soviet Union) implied scarcely any improvement in welfare.»
Perhaps some middle class people like Aron or our blogger think that everybody else in "capitalist" countries has always been able to wear long lasting quality shoes, the sort that costs $200-$600 a pair nowadays.
Recently it occurred to me that like even in the recent past many people could not afford proper shoes and used instead clogs, and the modern equivalent of clogs is sneakers/trainers that fall apart after one year. Indeed the sort of shoes that most people in the USA/UK can afford to buy are in "budget shoe" stores like Foot Locker or Burlington in the USA or Sports Direct or Shoe Zone in the UK.
Indeed just yesterday I noticed that some "proper looking" shoes I had bought in one of those shops has started falling apart after a little more than 6 months of use (turns out that the heel is hollow to save on rubber).
A lot of propaganda spread by the likes of Aron in the past compared the living standards of middle-class people in the nicer parts of the USA with those of the lower classes in the USSR, when a fairer comparison would have been with the lower classes in sterling "capitalist" countries like Spain or Korea-South or Argentina.
Great and insightful review of the memoirs of an author who many of us knew of but had not read in original (I confess). It makes me interested to read the book despite Branko's well documented criticism.
I'm not sure that there's much to be gained by trying to "synthesize" various thinkers' ideas. Just take what you find useful from each. I would be interested in rereading Polanyi.
«questioned the utility, for ordinary citizens, of such increases in GDP that come through production of thousands of tanks»
George Kennan "At a Century's Ending: Reflections 1982-1995" "Part II: Cold War in Full Bloom" page 118 (1997) ISBN 0-393-31609-2
“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”
I guess that american military keynesianism is a lot better :-)
«or thousands of tractors that fall in disrepair quicky after being produced.»
“How John Deere Hijacked Copyright Law To Keep You From Tinkering With Your Tractor Hackers are helping tractor owners “jailbreak” their equipment in order to repair it.”
I guess using the DMCA to prevent "unauthorized repairs" is a lot better :-)
«He also emphasized inefficiency of planned investment—the fact that became quite obvious in the 1970s but was not seen by many ten or more years earlier.»
"Animal spirits" investment instead in the railroad era etc, including recently in the dot.com boom and the MBS boom, does a lot better in the USA :-).
Or perhaps Aron and others seem to be gullible purveyors or receivers of propaganda.
Aron was brilliant intellectual. But he kicked me out of his office at L'Express when I called Heidegger a Nazi. (Well, let's just say he abruptly ended what had until that moment been a cordial conversation. I was working on a dissertation about German intellectual exiles. I was interested in a forgotten figure named Paul-Ludiwg Landsberg. We talked for a bit about various figures. Aron said that he believed that Heidegger was the most brilliant of the lot. I dissented. He asked why. I switched to English and explained my preference for Adorno. Then I repeated something Hbaermas had said a few weeks earlier in a seminar I attended—that Heidegger's distinction between small-b "being" and capital-B "Being" hinted at his barely concealed authoritarianism. Suddenly, our conversation was over.)
What a great story. Mich appreciated. I cannot say anything about his philosophical writings simply b/c I do not know enough about philosophy. But I like the story; the abruptness with which he ended the meeting is telling.
"Heidegger's distinction between small-b "being" and capital-B "Being" hinted at his barely concealed authoritarianism" ... interesting, can you say more about this?
Not much more to say really. I attended Habermas' lectures at the Collège de France (1982? 83?). A friend and colleague introduced me to Habermas, who invited me to a seminar he was giving at the Ecole des haute etudes en sciences sociales. Habermas' lectures served as the basis for his book, "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity." He has a chapter in there about Heidegger. Habermas writes: "In a tone that is still not entirely free of admiration, Heidegger characterizes the overman in accord with the image of the ideal type of the SA-man." (p. 132) He elaborates over the next several pages, explaining how Heidegger distinguishes between Being and beings, but he does not repeat the specific comment he made in the seminar.
I hope that's somewhat helpful.
Thanks a lot for your recollections. I read "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity" a long time ago, too long to remember any details. But I got interested in again because I want to better understand the democratic decline we are living through. I always think there is a lot to learn from those who have lived in the 1940s and drawn lessons from their experience.
I agree whole-heartedly. I devote more time than I can say trying to understand the present moment. I am one of those sophisticates who believed he had outgrown Marx—I assumed that tehcnocrats had figured out how to keep the system humming along without severe crisis—until 2008! But even the crisis of 2007-2009 and its aftermath had not prepared me for what was to come. And since my graduate work focused on 20th-century Europe, especially France & Germany in the 1930s, that tends to be the first place I look for parallels. And I was alarmed by what I saw. My field was intellectual/cultural history, not politics or economics, so I have my biases and my limitations. I find quite a lot of interesting material on Substack. In addition to this one, I highly recommend John Ganz's "UnPopular Front" and William Hogeland's "Bad History." Ganz was on of the fist writers I noticed besides me who was drawing comparisons between the thirties and the present. Hogeland is useful to me because I am so ignorant of he early days of the American Republic and he is so relentless in exposing the pieties and myths Americans are so steeped in when it comes to the Constitution and its framers.
I come from the other side, my field is math and software engineering. But my overall trajectory is somewhat similar. I spent part of last year rereading books from the 1930s and 40s, Karl Polanyi, Hannah Arendt, Horkheimer and Adorno, Karl Popper. They all advance different explanations for what happened and I would love to have the time to synthesize them, in particular Polanyi with Popper. And then of course there is the big question of what are the relevant differences today. That brings it closer to my field as technology obviously changed.
Some reading suggestions on Democracy -
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Schumpeter
Triumph of broken promises by Fritz Bartel
Against Political equality by Tongdong Bai
Human Nature in Politics by Graham Wallas
Branko, your characterization of the book's style and flaws is entirely just. There is an English abridgment (I am responsible for the cuts, but someone else did the translation). Abridging the text was both easy and difficult: easy, because as you say he included much trivial and extraneous material, but difficult, because it was hard to assemble a coherent and persuasive text from the pieces that remained. It was not a well-judged effort. Aron simply couldn't write about himself with the incisiveness he brought to other thinkers.
Thank you so much. It was a hard book to read. At times, engaging, interesting, smart; but then ponderous, self-centered, "hard slog".. On balance, I have to say that reluctantly, my opinion of Aron went down after reading the memoirs. As you see from the review, I loved his lectures. I read them in the 1970s in Belgrade. Then I read his excellent intellectual histories of Weber, Marx, Pareto etc. And then, more recently, parts of Peace and War. But I was unprepared for this kind of self-organized Festschrift.
"Self-organized Festschrift" is an excellent description. And like you, I was puzzled by his inclusion of so many letters acknowledging receipt of his work by one famous person or another but without any engagement with the substance. Why did he think it was important to include these? There seemed to be a certain anxiety about his place in the world, perhaps because he was overshadowed for so many years by Sartre and dismissed as a "mere journalist."
Dear Arthur, I think the organization of the book is wrong. Take A's attitude towards de Gulle. Very interesting, and rather convincing critique; but one has to piece it over the years and pages. If he had a chapter on de Gaulle, he could have made in one place a strong critique of his rejection of any legality of the Vichy regime, quasi unconstitutional assumption of powers in 1958 & erratic behavior in 1968; all of which might stem from the same political views, or perhaps personality traits.
Yes, in abridging, I wanted to re-organize the book.
Speaking of Aron and his time, reminds me of a sacral personality of the 20th century (also a friend of de Gaulle, Trotsky and others) who wrote about Western civilization with incredible insight and wisdom. (For myself I read her over and over again as her work is so deep as well as mysterious.)
Your reviews are superb. Charming, fascinating, as well as fair and erudite. Would very much like to know how you respond to her. Perhaps one day... Am speaking of Simone Weil.
Thanks.
I wish I had read her. I read so much *about* her but never anything by her. Clearly, an omission...
Honnête synthèse de Wikipedia : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Trag%C3%A9die_alg%C3%A9rienne?wprov=sfti1
https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/video/i00018821/raymond-aron-a-propos-de-la-guerre-d-algerie
Entretien flamboyant oú Aron explique - explicite - sa position sur l’indépendance de l’Algérie. Un régal et c’est un vieux pieds noir d’époque qui vous le dit 😀.
I bought the book second-hand, in a 1984 edition by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, translated into Italian by Oreste del Buono — a great journalist, writer, literary critic, and translator. What struck me was that, although it was used, apart from a faint and almost unnoticeable pencil signature on the first page, the book was practically untouched. On page 48, I understood why. It isn’t a Mémoires; it’s an academic monologue in which the human, lived dimension is almost nonexistent, except as a reflection of Aron’s reactions to praise or criticism he received. Emil Cioran used to say that the only books worth reading are memoirs and biographies. But he forgot to add: “It depends on the man (or the woman).”
You are right. It is not a memoir in its usual sense. It is only in part a description of one's intellectual journey, but rather a description of others' views on one's intellectual journey. Aron is a great thinker but it is a superfluous book.
«or that high growth was in fact a low-quality growth, such that if each pair of shoes could last just a year, huge annual production of shoes (which by the way was true for the Soviet Union) implied scarcely any improvement in welfare.»
Perhaps some middle class people like Aron or our blogger think that everybody else in "capitalist" countries has always been able to wear long lasting quality shoes, the sort that costs $200-$600 a pair nowadays.
Recently it occurred to me that like even in the recent past many people could not afford proper shoes and used instead clogs, and the modern equivalent of clogs is sneakers/trainers that fall apart after one year. Indeed the sort of shoes that most people in the USA/UK can afford to buy are in "budget shoe" stores like Foot Locker or Burlington in the USA or Sports Direct or Shoe Zone in the UK.
Indeed just yesterday I noticed that some "proper looking" shoes I had bought in one of those shops has started falling apart after a little more than 6 months of use (turns out that the heel is hollow to save on rubber).
A lot of propaganda spread by the likes of Aron in the past compared the living standards of middle-class people in the nicer parts of the USA with those of the lower classes in the USSR, when a fairer comparison would have been with the lower classes in sterling "capitalist" countries like Spain or Korea-South or Argentina.
Great review and discussion.
Thank you!
Great and insightful review of the memoirs of an author who many of us knew of but had not read in original (I confess). It makes me interested to read the book despite Branko's well documented criticism.
It is a hard-slog of a book. It becomes a contest of endurance: who will prevail: another 100 pages or one's stubbornness.
Thanks a lot, while I had heard the name, I didnt know much about Raymond Aron. Very interesting.
I'm not sure that there's much to be gained by trying to "synthesize" various thinkers' ideas. Just take what you find useful from each. I would be interested in rereading Polanyi.
Oops! I was responding to someone else's comment here. I must have mis-posted. Apologies.
«questioned the utility, for ordinary citizens, of such increases in GDP that come through production of thousands of tanks»
George Kennan "At a Century's Ending: Reflections 1982-1995" "Part II: Cold War in Full Bloom" page 118 (1997) ISBN 0-393-31609-2
“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”
I guess that american military keynesianism is a lot better :-)
«or thousands of tractors that fall in disrepair quicky after being produced.»
https://reason.com/2024/01/08/how-john-deere-hijacked-copyright-law-to-keep-you-from-tinkering-with-your-tractor/
“How John Deere Hijacked Copyright Law To Keep You From Tinkering With Your Tractor Hackers are helping tractor owners “jailbreak” their equipment in order to repair it.”
I guess using the DMCA to prevent "unauthorized repairs" is a lot better :-)
«He also emphasized inefficiency of planned investment—the fact that became quite obvious in the 1970s but was not seen by many ten or more years earlier.»
"Animal spirits" investment instead in the railroad era etc, including recently in the dot.com boom and the MBS boom, does a lot better in the USA :-).
Or perhaps Aron and others seem to be gullible purveyors or receivers of propaganda.
Mem warm 😊