“J’avais toujours raison”

A review of Raymond Aron’s "Memoires" (a long read)

Raymond Aron, born in 1905 and died in 1983, was among the leading French and world public intellectuals, liberal thinkers and sociologists of the second half of the 20^th century. His work touched practically all social sciences and humanities. Having trained as a philosopher (focused on German philosophy), he wrote on Kant, Hegel and Heidegger; then when in the 1940s, he began to have much greater interest in international affairs, he wrote seminal pieces in that area whose culmination was probably the enormous Peace and War: Theory of International Relations, published in French in 1962 and in English in 1966, and highly acclaimed by many, including Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger. During l’État Français in Vichy and subsequent German occupation of the entire France, Aron was in exile in London, politically close to de Gaulle and his Free French Forces. Aron’s liberalism led him, especially after 1945, to strong anti-communist positions, and to the final break with his high-school comrade Jean-Paul Sartre, to difficult relations with many French leftists and communists, and to the fight with famous young socialists like Pierre Bourdieu or seasoned political scientists like Maurice Duverger.

His sociological work on the industrial society of Soviet and capitalist type was, in my opinion, outstanding. When in the 1970s I read the three volumes of his lectures delivered at the Sorbonne in the late 1950-early 1960s (18 Lectures on Industrial Society, La lutte des classes: Nouvelles leçons sur les sociétés industrielles; Democratie et totalitarisme) I was absolutely impressed. And remain so to this day. Aron also produced first-rate studies of political thinkers and sociologists: Durkheim, Machiavelli, Marx, Montesquieu, Pareto, Weber and Tocqueville. They are a pleasure to read and I re-read some of them recently when I was drafting Visions of Inequality. I would place Aron’s intellectual portraits along those written by Keynes in Essays in Biography, both in terms of insight into the way of thinking of different writers and the relationship between their lives and ideas.

Aron’s combination of academic career and journalism is also worth noting. For a decade after World War II he worked only as a journalist, mostly in Le Figaro, a right-wing pro-Catholic daily, but even when he moved to a full academic career, he continued to discuss politics and economics in daily and weekly media. For a sociologist of the 1960s, he was extremely well versed in economics; in fact, he started thinking and writing about economics during the Great Depression. After 1968, his break with the leftists, communists and (as he calls them) para-communists became final and irrevocable. He remained somewhat of a consigliere to various French political leaders, but it is not obvious that they, in real politics, paid too much attention to Raymond Aron. His relations with de Gaulle continued being frosty and distant.

As this long, and yet incomplete, sketch of life shows, Aron, in his long career, not only was a witness to the most important political events in the West over some sixty years, but he had known personally almost everyone who was someone in French, British, German and American social sciences and politics: from the philosophers like Leon Brunschvics, Alexandre Kojève, Alain, and Henri Bergson in his youth, to de Gaulle, Leon Blum, André Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Paul Nizan, Roger Martin du Gard, Lionel Robbins, Friedrich Hayek, James Burnham in his student year and during the war; to the hundreds of others after World War II (from George Kennan to Pierre Bourdieu, his assistant).

So, his was an extraordinary career and he was an extraordinary man. But what can we say more specifically about the book of his memoirs published just after he died, and on which, given that it is 1,000 pages long (in small font and almost without margins) and contains hundreds of quotes from his publications, and from the writings of the multitudes who praised or criticized him, Aron must have been working for years? Many documents cited in the book, or brief anecdotes, had to be preserved over time, the former in their physical form, the latter as mental checks or as short written notes.

I will look at this immense book from three angles: style of writing; political opinions, and academic contributions. These three vantage points yield very different results.

The style. For a quintessentially French social scientist and writer (et qui se veut tel), the book is written is an extraordinary pedestrian style, in very uninspiring prose. (This is perhaps at its most obvious in Aron’s totally unoriginal discussion of the 1968 events in France and elsewhere.) There are no sentences or paragraphs worthy citing as such, containing striking, unusual or original observations or ideas. Perhaps I was hoping to find in Aron’s Mémoires reflections like those in Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre tombe or Tocqueville’s Souvenirs [of 1848]”. There is none of it. While the two last memoirs are written with verve and scintillating elegance, cynicism and use of ridicule (especially by Chateaubriand), Aron’s writing is throughout flat and seemingly dispassionate. Even the extraordinary circumstances of his querelle with Sartre and Beauvoir, or later with Bourdieu, are not discussed head-on. There is no portrait of these people, some of whom he had known since they were teenagers (Sartre) or in their twenties (Nizan, Malraux). Aron avoids face-to-face disagreements even in the book. He avoids to give an opinion on the individuals with whom he had quarreled, or even on those with whom he had agreed. He substitutes the life-and-work portraits that he has so skillfully written of Marx and Machiavelli, for, in the case of the people whom he had personally known, unpleasant innuendos: Sartre has stolen one of Aron’s ideas, without acknowledgment, for his famous L’être et le néant—said in a half-sentence (p. 174); avoids the company of men because he is unwilling to listen and discuss, and –implicitly— because women, and not men, adore him; writes “perfidious” attacks and claims to admire only Dos Passos, “in a faraway America” in order to deprecate “his [French] peers and rivals” (pp. 6012-3); Bourdieu, “an expert in university intrigues”, p. 441; Duverger, psychoanalyzing Aron, not discussing his opinions.

This does not redound to Aron’s greater glory. Rather than fighting with his various ideological opponents indirectly, through ruse and evasion, it would have braver if he had presented portraits of such people, warts and all. The reader gets the impression of falseness of writing, or of poorly concealed huge personal pride. Vanity is displayed in citations, at times endless, of parts of own books and articles, some of them presumably of very little significance, written in the mid-1930s in various newspapers. But vanity requires that they be cited, and false humility leads Aron to dissect them with a pretended objectivity, by going literally over individual sentences, claiming that some were too optimistic, others were exactly right, the third, showed their quality only with the passage of time and so on. This faux-criticism has, in reality, an exactly opposite purpose: to display how he was always right.

But if the book lacks grandeur (a characteristic so prized by French authors), does it have humor? No, almost none; no lightness and ease; barely any irony. Everything is written in the most serious possible manner. Even his very early writings (when Aron was in his twenties) are treated as important philosophical texts, so much so that a purely formal letter of acknowledgement by an important philosopher of the time, having received Aron’s new book (but not having had the time to read it), is cited by the now-old Aron with undisguised pride. One wonders why and how did he collect such, strictly speaking, trivial letters, and then kept them despite the war, occupation, exile in England, change of location in France between Toulouse, Bordeaux and Paris. For some reason, the twenty-year old Raymond already knew that he would become famous and write memoirs at his ripe age.

Politics. Half of the book deals with politics; perhaps even more if we include under politics, the discussion about the economic efficiency of capitalism vs. communism, or the critique of lack of freedom in communist countries. But even without that, French and European politics, from around the mid-1920s to the 1980s play an enormous role. Aron prides himself of having remained throughout faithful to his liberal (in the European sense) and cosmopolitan beliefs. While in some cases, he might have done so, there are many others where this could be questioned—even based on his own telling. I will look at several such cases.

Rhineland, 1936. Among the events that occurred between 1933 and 1939, Hitler’s military reoccupation of the Rhineland is unambiguously decried. The French government is criticized for not sending the Army to expel the Germans. The legal ground for that would be the Treaty of Locarno (demilitarization of the Rhineland). But there are several problems with this argument. In fact, Aron at length writes about the inequities of the Versailles Peace Treaty, including the ban on German army’s deployment in the Rhineland (p.51). But if it was inequitable, why is now German remilitarization of own territory a crime? Further, it was more than naïve—even on Aron’s own reckoning, especially since he knew Germany so well—that the Wehrmacht would overthrow Hitler at the moment when he enjoyed 70-80 percent popular support at home, and started the undoing of a treaty, widely reviled and perceived as unjust in Germany.

Spain, 1936-39. On the Spanish civil war, Aron is mostly coy. Not that he does not mention it, but he cannot bring himself to support the Republicans because he would then side with the Soviets and communists, nor to support Francoists because they are Nazi allies. Avoiding to take sides, he was in fact probably supportive of Leon Blum’s and British non-interference which indeed meant the victory for Franco.

On Munich, 1938, similar ambivalence. Aron is not in favor of appeasement, but neither is he in favor of a war, especially it if would be a war waged together with the Soviets whom he despises and of whom he is extraordinary suspicious. So simply more handwaving and nothing else—other than the invocation of French democratic allies in Eastern Europe who are being abandoned. But who are these democratic allies? Except for Czechoslovakia, nobody was. Poland was ruled by a rightist single-party military regime, Romania, Greece and Yugoslavia by autocratic kings. Other East European countries were Germany’s allies, and indeed Poland and Hungary gladly took part in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. So where are France’s democratic allies who were abandoned in Munich?

Let us move to decolonization.

Indochina 1946-54. Aron is in favor of independence for Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos but with the proviso of them staying within the Communauté Francaise. What does independence within the French Union really mean? The argument for this continued quasi-colonialism is geopolitical. If Indochina remains in close relations with France, Soviet “puppet” Ho Chi Ming will not be able to come to power, and thus freedom will be preserved in Asia. Obviously, such argument in favor of continued colonialism is so threadbare today that it is embarrassing even to mention it.

Suez, 1956. The situation gets worse here. In principle, Aron was against a military action against Egypt, but since Nasser was behaving in a “provocative manner” (nationalization of a canal in his own country was a provocation!) and was supporting independence of Algeria, the French and the English had the right to react. The Suez invasion by France, UK and Israel, happened exactly at the same time as Soviet invasion crushed Hungarian revolution. Aron fails to notice that the same international politics argument that he uses to defend the attack on Suez can be used (and was used) by Soviets to justify their suppression of Hungarians. And then, bizarrely, “We shall not find in Suez the solution of the problems of Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. Our only hope, our only chance, is that the strike [le coup] against the man who incarnates Islamic fundamentalism [presumably Nasser] will give to our interlocutors the idea of supreme courage conveyed by that message” (i.e. by the military strike). (p. 451; my translation).

Algeria, 1958-65, on which he was spectacularly right…and brave. Whether by having seen the futility of trying to maintain the French Empire or by reading the sense of history and nation-building, Aron was willing to accept Algeria’s independence, even to urge for it. He writes an early book, La tragédie algérienne, in 1957 advocating Algerian independence. While in the case of Indochina there was a subterfuge whereby the right to self-determination was in principle accepted but limits on its political significance were placed by the demand that new countries be part of a broader Western coalition, nothing of the kind remains a decade later. Aron is unambiguously in favor of ending the war and granting independence regardless of the expected French exodus. His position is extraordinarily courageous because it puts him at odds with all who supported him before. The left is not going to run to his rescue when he had already, and at many occasions, abjured it; the right is furious at his treason. This was his best moment.

French Ost-politik, 1960s. More or less generalized critique of de Gaulle’s policies (from his denial of any legitimacy to the Vichy regime to his assumption of plebiscitary powers in 1958) takes a very strong and precise turn in Aron’s disagreement with de Gaulle’s overtures towards the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He explains them “by the psychology of the General more than by the political analysis” (p. 555), thus introducing Grand Homme psychological explanation that he elsewhere ridicules. The critique extends to the West German Ost politik and even to the Helsinki Accords and eminently sensible Giscard d’Estaing desire to increase trade with the Soviet Union. Aron was shown to have been wrong. It was precisely the economic and political contacts with the Communist regimes in the East (many of whom with dubious loyalty to the Kremlin) that led to the transformation of Eastern Europe and to the rise of Gorbachev. Aron’s implacable anti-Sovietism shows here its practical limits and blindness: to ward off the “menace’ of Communism over Western Europe, much more prudent and productive was the policy of détente than that of obscurantist anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism advocated by Aron.

It is too easy a critique, and I will mention it in only one sentence: this book which deals so much with international relations pronounces almost no words of China, India, Indonesia, Africa, non-alignment, New International Economic Order, Bandung, Mao, Chou Enlai, Gandhi, Nehru, Nkhrumah, Kaunda, Sukarno…The “world” is limited to two Big Powers, and three lesser European powers.

Like many a politician and political scientist, Aron no more could –despite his claims—maintain a consistent ideological position. Things were difficult and murky: domestic politics interacted with international, ideals had to be bent, pis-aller preferred to the neat solutions, principles forgotten in order to be perhaps later applied. Nothing of that is surprising,. But nothing of that is accepted—even half-way—by Aron.

Academic writings. Since Aron writes or reproduces in excruciating detail almost all his writings, we are lucky that he covers his most important contributions too. The chapters that I found most interesting are these dealing with his teaching of sociology, engagement with canonic authors, and the discussion of modern industrial societies, market- or plan-based. As I already mentioned, I think that these were excellent writings. I will not discuss them here except to note that Aron was among the first who rightly understood the problem of economic planning and production in Soviet-type economies. He did not do it from the Hayekian point of view, but rather questioned the utility, for ordinary citizens, of such increases in GDP that come through production of thousands of tanks or thousands of tractors that fall in disrepair quicky after being produced. 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. Aron’s concern was, and in this he was, I think, closer to truth than Hayek, that high growth rates posted by Soviet-type economies may not be fake by themselves; but that they included things that made little difference to the welfare of the population, 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.

Aron mentions that in his three books (based on his Sorbonne lectures) he was less critical of the Soviet-type societies than in his other writings and in his intimate thinking. I found this precise scientific neutrality most attractive. To analyze Soviet-type societies as class-based using Marxist concepts (control over the means of production, privileged position in the distribution of the surplus value) and also as governed by an elite, here following Pareto, was a great strength of the three books. The contrast Marx-Pareto illuminated the issues much better than using only one or the other author alone. Important was also Aron’s introduction of the concept of the industrial society which in order to grow –the goal shared by both types of modern industrial societies—had to “solve” the same economic problems: how to organize production, how to stimulate people to work, how to distribute the products of that work.

Aron’s contribution to the theory of theory of international relations is in two books: Le Grand Schisme (1948), and later, a monumental, Peace and War. It is interesting that he acknowledges (p. 386) that one of the key concepts introduced in Peace and War, of heterogeneous and homogeneous political systems—the first where the states, whether at peace or war, are based on the same principle of legitimacy, and the second, where the principles of legitimacy themselves differ—comes from a doctoral dissertation by a Greek political scientist Panagis Papaligouras. In Mémoires, most of the discussion of Peace and War refers to nuclear issues: the power of deterrence, mutually assured destruction, flexible response etc., including the review of the meaning of French independent nuclear-armed force de frappe. The topics of theory of inter-state relations and sociology that form the most important parts of Peace and War are barely mentioned. It comes somewhat as a surprise (at least to me) that despite numerous accolades and private meetings accorded to the author of Peace and War, the book had a rather limited success in the United States, both among the academics and policy-makers.

I would end the review with a personal note. Aron’s Mémoires is not a book I would recommend to read, in its entirety, to anyone who is not fully dedicated to either a study of minutiae of French political, or intellectual, history of the 20^th century. It is not a fun or easy book to read. It provokes feelings of frustration even among its well-intentioned and keen readers. One cannot not ask himself how an extremely intelligent person, with such unparalleled erudition and experience of politics, academia and journalism would think that the best way to present himself to posterity would be to write a book of 1,000 pages where 600 pages are selections from the most obscure to the most famous of his own writings? Are memoirs supposed to be collected works? The reader realizes that he is an unwilling participant in a project of self-aggrandizement and self-centerdness; that the vanity of the author is so enormous and has taken over everything to the detriment of the author’s own interests themselves; or—that the author’s inability to understand normal human interests and passions is so great, that one inevitably asks: if there is such a lack of empathy, how could we trust that the author was able to present to us veritable motivations of various political actors he had encountered during his long and illustrious career?

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PS. I was unaware of the new edition of Aron’s Mémoires until I saw it displayed in a bookstore in Geneva. It was not hard to tempt me to buy the book.