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PARTISAN REVIEW
limited by them, always risks decline, risks misunderstanding the demands of
collective security.
It
is convenient to argue that man preferred, and would still prefer, a
sovereign separated from those who resemble him by the past that he em–
bodies and the feeling that his subjects, in the course of centuries, have
learned to offer to him. If one coldly compares the advantages and defects
among various regimes, while considering all theoretically possible regimes, I
do not know whether I would grant the first rank to the democracies of Eu–
rope or America. But what other system in the West could enjoy legitimacy?
One-party states, in this view, would last only through scarcely veiled vio–
lence, and through the sullen resignation of the population. The countries of
Eastern Europe provide us with a demonstration of that fact.
Even in politics, the debate over historicism retains an abstract, almost
artificial character. If one raises the question of whether one should deplore
the fact that humanity did not cease its development with neolithic societies or
the Greek city-states, the answer seems to me impossible and the question
devoid of meaning. The animal-man was programmed by his genetic inheri–
tance for cultural evolution. At the various stages of this evolution, the orga–
nization oflife in common took on various forms. This diversity in itself does
not pose a problem. What does create a problem, in the eyes of "historicists,"
is that evil in one place becomes good in another. Truth on this side of the
Pyrenees, falsehood on the other.
Sociologists proclaim the diversity of languages and customs, the wealth
of diverse human expressions. In the name of what value, according to what
criteria can we choose among these "societies," giving each one a place at a
particular level of the hierarchy, considering one of them as the best or as
exemplary? In the same vein, Max Weber said: Which of the two cultures,
French and German, is superior to the other? I reply: Why pose the ques–
tion? To choose between them? Or to place one above the other?
It is true that diversity risks leading us into skepticism, if good and evil
are reversed from one society to another. I do not at all think that this is
true. Honesty, frankness, generosity, gentleness, and friendship do not
change signs from one century to the next, from one continent to another, or
by crossing borders. Of course, the same conduct can be considered aggres–
sive in one group and healthily competitive in another. Neither behavior nor
success is appreciated everywhere according to the same criteria. Within a
particular society, there is no single image of the exemplary man. The knight,
the priest, the intellectual do not aspire to the same kind of excellence. Ev–
erything that depends on culture, as ethnologists have defined it, is outside
universalistic judgement. Anyone who would formulate such ajudgement
would necessarily belong to one of those cultures. There is no observer
