RAYMOND ARON
35
attention on secular religions did I miss the essential point? Was I wrong or
unlucky in taking economics and war as subjects of reflection, as the principal
phenomena of our time? I have just proposed a choice between error and
bad luck. In fact, how could I have chosen otherwise? When I reached his–
torical consciousness, the Great Depression was exacerbating German na–
tionalism, driving Hitler to power, and Europe toward catastrophe. Marxism
in power in Moscow, an antiproletarian revolution in Berlin, those are the
events that dictated the direction of my research. I wanted to become the
contemporary historian of those revolutions and those wars.
Bad luck. Did the inspiration I found in German historicism, in Karl
Marx and Max Weber, turn me away from the right path, that of Durkheim
and Tarde? Does my generation, "polluted" by German ideas, which Jean–
Paul Sartre transfigured with incomparable brilliance, already belong to the
past? This may be true, and I feel no bitterness about it. The best sociolo–
gists, however, use both Marx and Weber, both purified of their political
passions, which conceal their complementary character from the scientific
point of view.
Personally, I do not think that my passage through German culture,
followed by my study of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, turned me
away from France. Before 1939, Germany was our fate. Until the defeat of
the Third Reich in 1945, ideas that had come fi"om Germany had penetrated
world history. Racism belonged no more
to
Germany than to other Euro–
pean countries, but Hegel, Marx, and their epigones, Nietzsche and his cri–
tique of ideologies, informed, illustrated, shed light on the great conflicts for
world domination.
After the twilight of the Germanic gods, American-style democracy,
pragmatic, without metaphysics, in search of semantic rigor, confronted noth–
ing but a bastardized version of the Hegelian-Marxist tradition. The techni–
cization of the planet was stimulated with a new impulse. Marxist myths fi–
nally dissipated almost by themselves, in the light of the facts. Even the
change in the economic climate since 1973 (or perhaps a few years earlier)
has not renewed perspectives on the future of humanity.
I see few reasons for optimism when I look at the present. The Euro–
peans are in the process of committing suicide by means of their low birth–
rate. Peoples that do not reproduce themselves are condemned to growing
old, and are therefore haunted by the state of mind of abdication, a
''fin de
swele"
sensibility. They can compensate for losses with foreigners, as they
did during the thirty postwar years of prosperity, but they thereby risk in–
creasing tension between immigrants and workers threatened with unem–
ployment. The democratic-liberal synthesis and the mixed economy are
threatened, probably by the end of the century, by the slowing of growth,
