RAYMOND ARON
21
my scattered remarks on social groups, the
Zusarll1nenhiinge
in Dilthey's
expression, within which we are all integrated.
The debate, which is certainly not new, can already be found, with a
different vocabulary, at the center of the dialogue between Durkheim and
Tarde, between those whom Karl Popper calls
holi~ts
and the proponents of
methodological individualism (Hayek, for example). It takes another form
when sociologists present society functioning by itself, with individuals as
nothing but cogs, prisoners of an inflexible determinism. The courses I pre–
sented at the College de France tended to clarify both the nature of social
groups and of the modalities ofexplanation, individualist or holist.
At the same time, I would have extended the
Introduction
and
History
and the Dialectic oj ViolenCf.
When a sociologist studies the
Junctioning
of a
society (or of a sector of a society), he immobilizes, so to speak, his object; he
does not remove it from the process of development, but he grasps it at a
particular moment. The more his attention is fixed on an immobilized phe–
nomenon for methodological reasons, the less he is concerned with
imperceptible changes affecting it or, on occasion, suddenly transforming it. I
would have liked to connect system and history with one another. In
The
Imperial Republir,
I pointed out the relative independence of international
political relations from the world market rather than the connections between
the two. Perhaps the scholarly and academic career of each individual is
largely determined by social circumstances that constrain individuals. But
whoever has lived in the century of Hitler and Stalin must be permanently
blind to history ifhe denies the role of "heroes" and sees only the unfolding of
a global, inflexible, and predictable determinism, where his contemporaries
hear the sound, see the fury , and seek the meaning.
In our age of economy and of war, I should have - and perhaps I still
will- sketched the equivalent of Spengler's
Jahre der Entscheidung,
or rather
sketch out a skeptical philosophy of history for the end of the twentieth cen–
tury. The two great wars of the century. the first preparing the way for the
second, were leading to a third. This apparently logical sequence was inter–
rupted by the technical innovation of nuclear weapons. Perhaps the great
powers will never use these weapons against one another, because probable
destruction so far exceeds the possible benefits of a victory.
Enough regrets. Assuming that someone takes the trouble to read me
in the future, he will discover the analyses, aspirations, and doubts that filled
the consciousness of a man who was impregnated by history: a French citi–
zen, but aJew whom a semifree French government had excluded from his
country through a statute based on racial criteria; a citizen of a France that
was a member of the European Community, one of the fou r centers of world
science and the world economy, incapable of defending itself, hesitating be-
