PARTISAN REVIEW
but it is certainly significant. A Marxist might define it as the provisional
rationalization of an unconvinced petty bourgeois, that is of somebody
who tries to persuade himself that taking a petty bourgeois position in
practical and intellectual matters might offer some protection against
history. Polemically, the Marxist might even be right, but actually he
would miss the point just the same. The point being that the rejection
of extremes, the insistence on doubt, and a certain suspension of judg–
ment, are today too widespread in France to be just a class affair. One
can indicate with perfect assurance the locus where a Frenchman's
judgment comes to a stop: it is the perspective of a Third World War.
If
pacifism means confidence that war can be avoided through a
popular initiative of some kind, nobody is a pacifist today in France.
As a mood, "neutralism" is certainly widespread, but, as soon as it at–
tempts to be a practical solution, it sounds improbable and rhetorical.
ActualIy, most people feel that, the situation being what it is, there is
little space left for individual attitudes, except the line that separates
resignation to from acceptance of, the inevitable. The inevitable, after
all, might not be war. In the interval, there is suspense, an atmosphere
in which fanatical screams, dogmatic attitudes, final assertions are
simply not in order.
What is true is that there are very few people in France today who
try to rise to a comprehensive view of events. One of these few is
Raymond Aron. As a political journalist and a political man, Aron has
taken a resolute anti-Stalinist and pro-American stand. That is, I feel,
what gives a particular significance to a series of articles on the prob–
lem of war which Aron, the historian and the philosopher, has been
publishing in
La table ronde
and
La Liberti de l'esprit.
These articles
are fragments from a book to be published shortly under the title
L es
guerres en chaine
(War as a Chain Reaction).
We all know the pages of the
Antidiihring
in which Engels, after
having outlined a history of warfare from the discovery of firearms up
to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, expresses the singularly optimistic
view that conscription, plus the industrialization of modern warfare,
will necessarily bring about, by way of dialectics, the transformation
of the "Army of the Prince" into the "Army of the People," hence "the
end of militarism." An analysis of the development of two World Wars
leads Aron to a view that is quite the opposite of Engels'. In his opinion,
the logical consequences of conscription and industrialization were
stopped twice in modern times (after the Napoleonic and the Franco–
Prussian wars) by political, not economic, factors. Until, in 1914, came
the "technical surprise."
