BOOKS
339
would readily have been recognized. But in an ideological environ–
ment often defined by the polarities of an abstracted Marxism and a
crude if concrete Gaullism, Aron's essentially prudent and mediat–
ing efforts seemed an alien and intrusive force in French politics. But
liberalism entered into the sinews of his analysis, as when he notes in
his essay "On the Morality of Prudence" that "we have tried to make
the analysis of international relations independent of moral judg–
ments and metaphysical concepts" - in other words, apart from the
very linkage that is the shank of all conservative ideology.
It
is important to have these selections from the work of Aron,
if for no other reason than to rescue him from the iconographic tradi–
tion to which he is increasingly subject. Essays and introductions on
Aron's thought tell us a great deal about his dedication to French na–
tional interests and to Judaic tradition, his indomitable will in the
face of personal misfortune, public obloquy, his
pessimisteJovial
and .
his
optimiste triste.
But in this display of necrophilia it is all too easy to
lose sight of the actual themes to which Aron repeatedly returned;
the strengths that made him such a powerful moral voice; and, alas,
the weaknesses that made him more widely renowned as commen–
tator than as synthesizer.
The core of
History, Truth, Liberty
is less concept-oriented than
people-saturated. Thus, in the essay "Tocqueville and Marx" we are
given the brilliant insight that a "purely political revolution, one that
does not modify the social infrastructure, does not allow man to
realize himself because it confuses the genuine man with the worker
locked into his particularity and because man is in conformity with
his essence . . . . " Aron comes down on the side of democratic
liberalism; the trinitarianism of bourgeois citizenship, technological
efficiency, and the right of every individual to personal choice. The
struggle between liberal democracy and socialist construction is seen
as an historical dialogue between Tocqueville and Marx. But this is
a contemporary French reading of the past. In England, the same
struggle was locked in the bosom ofJohn Stuart Mill, who embodied
both liberal and socialist principles. In Russia, different varieties
and strains of socialist politics embodied this struggle over the goals
of democracy, with well-known disastrous consequences. In the
United States liberal and conservative struggles were conducted as if
socialism were an exotic European import. This is not to say that
Aron was wrong in his judgments, but that his formulations were all
too often limited as well as informed by continental considerations.
The chapters analyzing the West and the East illustrate Aron's
