Aron
directed by Elisabeth Dutartre-Michaut
Editions de L’Herne, 272 p., €33
There is something disturbing about going back to the writings of Raymond Aron (1905-1983), when in Eastern Europe war has just made a sensational entrance again. The work of the philosopher and sociologist, former professor at the College de France and figure of liberal thought, merges with the history of the XXe century, of which he was a powerful analyst, both as a researcher and as a journalist, columnist for thirty years in Figarothen to L’Express.
watchful spirit, “moderate with excess” according to his expression, the man was an unfailing defender of liberalism and democracy, although without illusions about their weaknesses. He strove to chart a concrete political path to freedom and pluralism, with a keen awareness of the opacity of history, the contingency of action, and the power of irrational forces.
This rich volume, which brings together the work of some twenty researchers, highlights the career of Raymond Aron, the diversity of his centers of interest, his angles of approach and the topicality of his thought. It makes the Aron “style” tangible, a subtle alliance of theoretical knowledge – in history, philosophy, sociology, science of international relations… – and attention to the individual.
“Engaged Spectator”Raymond Aron liked to define the “ideal commentator” like “an enlightened and skeptical scientist, not a prisoner of theories, even of his own theories, who retains a taste for the singular, a consent to pragmatism and a smile of common sense. »
Freedom, a rare privilege
A brilliant student, a young man marked by the rise of Nazism during a stay in Germany (1930-1933), Aron was very early aware of the dangers of totalitarianism and the challenge they represent for democracies. Involved in the Resistance since 1940, editor-in-chief of Free France in London, after the war, he never stopped thinking about history in the making.
Fascinated by Marx but slayer of Marxism, he very quickly denounced the crimes of Stalinism. He structured the thought of democracy, attentive, beyond the incantations on values, to the role of institutions, to the respect of legality, to the participation of all, to the representative system, to civil peace, but also to justice. social, as demonstrated by an original article by Serge Paugam.
→ CRITICAL. “A French enigma”, saving the Jews in France in 1940
A reasoned defender of Atlanticism, a critical Gaullist, taking a stand for Algerian independence in 1957, he was also a great theoretician of international relations and in particular of the Cold War, which he summed up in the famous formula: “Peace impossible, war improbable”.
A lesson in endurance
It is necessary to hear again in our days darkened by the war in Ukraine his way of evoking freedom in the West as arare privilege in time and space, its concern for the democratic disenchantment within democracies themselves and its call to implement heroism and work to resist totalitarian regimes. “I believe in the final victory of democracies, but on one condition, it is that they want it”he declared in June 1939.
Even today, Aron gives the Democrats a lesson in endurance. “I believe that everything is always in question, that everything is always to be saved. That nothing is definitively acquired, and that there will never be rest on earth for men of good will.he declared gravely in an interview in 1969.