338
PARTISAN REVIEW
DEFENDING DEMOCRACY
HISTORY, TRUTH, LmERTY: SELECTED WRITINGS OF RAYMOND
ARON. Edited
by
Franciszek Draus, with a memoir
by
Edward Shils. University
of Chicago Press. $34.95.
It is both daunting and dangerous to write a review of
Raymond Aron's work. Here is a figure who wrote hundreds ofjour–
nalistic articles for
Le Figaro, l'Express, Commentaire,
an equal number
of articles and essays for professional journals, and several dozen
books , at least some of which , starting with
The Opium of the Intellec–
tuals,
helped to shape post-World War Two thinking. As E .A. Shils
stated , "No academic of this century-certainly no academic social
scientist , with the possible exception ofJohn Maynard Keynes-was
so widely known and appreciated as Raymond Aron." Certainly, no
other social scientist has been so universally honored in his lifetime.
At the time of his death in October 1983 , he had received as many
emoluments and awards as he had book titles to his credit-no easy
feat even in this age of easy academic celebration. Yet, even for
those who admired him, questions remain as to the lasting nature of
his intellectual achievement, and whether it is equal to his political
acumen or moral probity .
History, Truth, Liberty
is the second collection of Raymond
Aron's essays to appear recently . The first,
Politics and History,
was
published several years earlier. A third collection of essays, prom–
ised for this year, is to be called
Sociologists, Power and Modernity.
Doubtless , still others will follow.
The reason for this posthumous outpouring, I would argue,
apart from his towering importance as a scholar, is Aron's qualities
as an essayist. For he is stylistically as much a child of Montaigne as
of Tocqueville substantively. Each of the twelve essays in this
volume , for example, contains more or less well-defined examples of
pitfalls to be avoided if not always paths to be followed.
So much was Aron an essayist, even a journalist in the best
sense of the word, that a large-scale effort, such as
Peace and War: A
Theory of International R elations,
was less than successful. Details
drawn from the current events of the late 1950s and early 1960s kept
getting in the way of Aron's Clausewitz-like effort at synthesis. In
part this is due to Aron's innate liberalism that was far deeper than
any imputed conservatism. In any context other than France, this
