Raymond Aron: The outsider as outsider

Abstract

R aymond Aron was the outstanding Western intellectual of the postwar period. Unique among French political and philosophical luminaries, Aron never suspended his critical judgment, nor permitted himself the psychological luxury of full, passionate participation in the mass movements of our time. For his pains, he was excluded from the salons of the stylish Parisian intelligentsia, was rarely accorded the respect and attention that his prodigious output and moral and intellectual rigor merited, and for the most part only received his just rewards abroad: in England, Germany, the United States and Israel. It was only at the end of his life that Aron became fashionable in France, and for the past several years French literati have attempted to discover how it was that this great prophet found so little honor in his own land. To have maintained a sense of balance, and true independence of spirit during the course of the twentieth century would be a remarkable achievement in any country. It is all the more impressive for a Frenchman, since the French fancy themselves the great creators of intellectual fashion and philosophical standards. Those who place themselves outside the conventional wisdom in France are regarded not only as intellectually inadequate, but morally suspect as well. Aron was not spared such attacks, and his refusal to join the postwar hysteria of existentialism, structuralism, gauchisme and other similarly failed visions, led to his exclusion from the "progressive" press. He was considered an anomaly at the Sorbonne (that he was permitted to teach there at all was frequently the object of attack from his critics), and was branded a "fascist" by the Communist party, by fellow-traveling intellectuals, and by the followers of Jean-Paul Sartre (some of whom fell into one or both of the previous categories). One should not exaggerate the sociointellectual travails of Raymond Aron; he lacked neither the opportunity for an enormously successful career nor access to millions of readers. His true achievement was not so much overcoming the snobbery of his more stylish contemporaries but rather in resisting intellectual temptation. When fascism enthralled so many Europeans, Aron first rejected the "revolutionary" appeal, then went into exile in Great Britain, where he supported the Gaullist government in exile and reflected on the great philosophical tradition of Germany. Later, he was even able to maintain a rigorously critical objectivity toward his own hero, General de Gaulle, first when de Gaulle's foreign policy led France toward a closer relationship with the Soviet Union and later when de Gaulle made remarks about the Jews that stirred Aron's wrath (one of the few times in his professional life when Aron wrote with spontaneous passion). If we are to judge political and philosophical thinkers by Nietzsche's high standard according to which the mark of the educated man is his refusal to react at once to stimuli, Raymond Aron earned exceptional marks, for he always kept his distance from the hue and cry around him. His exceptional sense of political and philosophical balance and objectivity prompted John Leonard to write in the New York Times that "Raymond Aron is that ultimate inconvenience: the man who stays sober at your saturnalia and who will afterward give everybody else an intellectual hang-over."