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PARTISAN REVIEW
yet there is something enticing about total answers that relieves one
of the need to live with complexity.
Few of the great minds of the century have remained entirely
immune to the temptation. The
trahison des clercs
was almost com–
plete. One of those who resisted was Raymond Aron. Aron and
Sperber were friends. They met in the mid-1930s through Andre
Malraux. Aron ascribed what he called Sperber's yielding to tempta–
tion to his having experienced "the total collapse of a world" and
added, in his tribute of 1976, the slightly puzzling comment that
Sperber's "perspective on the Marxist tragedy met with both my in–
stinctive liberalism and the beliefs of Soviet dissidents."
I admire Aron for his resistance of the temptations of the age
and for his writings. But it is hard to deny that the quality for which
he is often praised also raises a question: Aron was a "dispassionate"
author. The "committed observer" was committed to nothing as
much as to observation. He rarely took sides, though some would
argue that when he did, as in his books on Algeria, he was at his
best. The totalitarian temptation never touched him. But I am not
sure that he was its best analyst. He was horrified as he stood
Unter
den Linden
with Golo Mann and watched the burning of unwanted
books by the Nazis. Hitler made him discover his own Jewishness.
He despised Stalin and Stalinism. Yet somehow he failed to identify
the deeper sources of totalitarianism. Indeed, in his
Eighteen Lectures
on Industrial Society
he speaks about the United States and the Soviet
Union as if they were subject to the same forces of industrialism.
Colin Clark and Jean Fourastie, the great generalizers of modern
socioeconomic development, occupy prime place in Aron's analysis,
and political differences between countries are introduced almost as
an afterthought. As a result, Aron fails to explain the vicious force of
totalitarianism.
In one sense , this failure is not just the weakness of an in–
dividual but also the result of a melancholy weakness of social sci–
ence . This autumn the German Sociological Association will meet in
Zurich to discuss the question of why the recent debate about Ausch–
witz, Stalin, and the uniqueness of Nazi crimes is an "historian's
debate" rather than one of social scientists. The answer is, I believe ,
simple but serious. Social scientists look for general trends, and
somehow totalitarianism, and more particularly National Socialism,
do not fit such generalizations. This is notably the case if one sub–
scribes, explicitly or by implication , to the notion that moderniza–
tion, including the spirit of the Enlightenment as well as the reality
