RAYMOND ARON
29
tween the Sorbonne of my youth and the Sorbonne that exploded in 1968, a
more traditional professor, more prosaically and rigorously following the path
from analysis to sociological explanation, would have done no better than I.
Better for some, worse for most. Professionals emphasize technical training of
sociologists all the more because they know its limits and, in the last analysis,
its facile quality.
The question I asked myself more than once has to do with the moral
or political content of my teaching, understood in the broadest sense. I have
alluded to my contacts with the students of the Ecole Normale Superieure of
Saint-Cloud. A few months ago, in 1982, when this book was almost finished ,
I received from a former student at that school a few pages of a little book
that he did not intend to publish, a book of memoirs in which I appear.
Here we are in the twilight of a curtained hall of the Sorbonne,
for a meeting of the
Socitill jm1/(aise de J!hilosophie
chaired by an
Olympian Leon Brunschvieg, with an enormous forehead and a gaze
that seems to penetrate beneath appearances. Raymond Aron - in an
awkward body, with a face like a mask: elephant ears, prominent
nose, a mouth both ironic and bitter - has just made a presentation ,
with cool detachment, on relativity in history, the fragility of dellloc–
racy, the uncertainty of the future of humanity, views that provoke
the massive Victor Basch. Basch, his whole body trembling, proclaims
with a tribune's voice his unshakable conviction: freedom was born in
Greece, it has constantly enlightened man in his progress, it is a light
that will never go out; it will carry the day. His interlocutor replies with
cold courtesy that nothing is determined in advance, that nothing is
definitively established, that at most one might consider (but this con–
cession is made grudgingly, almost wearily) that in the very long term ,
perhaps, I'eason and morality might win out through their coherence,
more effective and more solid than passion and violence... . It is ob–
viously Raymond Amn who is right. 8
8.1 showed the portrait I have quoted
to
another f()rmer student of Saint-Cloud. This other
"C1outard," who has since become a university professor, had attended neither my thesis
defense nor the session of the
Societe jmn(oisf de philosophie,
but he remembered me as a
professor. He wrote: "At Saint-Cloud, before. during, and after classes, your features and
your attitude were what they were but with something more that is missing from this por–
trait, your smile, your kindness. your good humor. It is lI'ue that you did not go to the
Societe
dtphilosophie
to be nice, but to defend your convictions. The fact remains that if I accept the
'ironic' mouth , I strongly challenge the bitter mouth. I have trouble finding an appropriate
