446
PARTISAN REVIE W
of war, we witness the insurrection not of the workers against the owners
of the means of production, but on one hand of the peoples of ancient
culture humiliated by the mysterious forces of the creators of the
machines, and, on the other hand, of the miserable crowds confusedly
aware of the incapacity of their traditional rulers to build a modern
State. . . . The wars of the first half of the twentieth century have
ripened a catastrophe which,
if
compared to the catastrophes of yester–
day, would be what the atomic bomb is in comparison to the 420 shell.
"Nothing allows us to say, not even after the fact," Aron concludes,
"that things could only happen the way they actually happened. . . .
We can find reasonable explanations.... We can see causes ... but
we can't suppress the interval between the circumstances and their final
outcome : it is men, or rather certain men, who by their action or their
failure to act, have made this history which they did not want." H ence,
one surmises, between the circumstances and the outcome (or, as Aron
puts it, between "the obvious necessity to stop the chain reactions of
violence and the growing difficulty of establishing a peaceful order")
there is stilI room today for man's initiative. The only mortal sin is
fatalistic action, or failure to act.
Obviously, Aron does not in the least think that his considerations on
total war are in contradiction with the political position to which he
adhercs, namely that of unconditional resistance to Stalinism and sup–
port of De Gaulle. In fact, he considers Stalin the consistent repre–
sentative of the principle of total and unlimited violence ("Permanent
revolution today means permanent war," he has written in another
article). Tormented as he is by the perspective of a third war, Aron
does not believe that there would be much sense in letting oneself be
drawn by anguish into faltering: the kind of reasoning that consists,
since the issues are overpowering and frightful, in narrowing them to
the point where they are tame enough to permit at least a verbal
solution. At the same time, if Aron is pro-American it is, among other
things, because he considers that the Atlantic community, based as it
is on interests that cannot be unified by force, rpust of necessity have
an empirical policy, a policy, that is, that offers at least a chance of
escaping ideological determinism and its catastrophic consequence, global
war.
Since Aron's essay has been published only in fragments, it would
indeed be indiscreet to draw too many conclusions from it.
It
is certainly
permissible, nevertheless, to give Aron's consideratons as one example
of the way the French mind reacts to the strain of the present emer–
gency-with no blinking at what may become fatal, but also with a
