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position behind the scenes, Aron found himself carried into the spotlight
during his later years. Sartre, long regarded as an oracular figure, suddenly,
in retrospect (and in the words of his adversaries) appeared as a sort of
incongruous Pythia who had dispensed diagnosis and prognosis always out
of season. This late role reversal gave way to a war of images now carried
on by a new generation with a new identity-another factor making our
study more difficult, but also one of its reasons for being.
Jean-Paul Sartre's destiny was indeed a singular one: after some thirty
years of brilliant prominence (the "Sartre Years," from the Liberation to
the middle of the 1970s), he was expedi tiously relegated, as it were, to
posthumous quarantine. Yet beyond this sort of ritual murder familiar in
the intellectual community, for the last fifteen years or so the "Sartre
Question" has arisen, as his passage from sun illuminating the ideological
landscape to a (momentarily or permanently) faded star is the most tangi–
ble sign of changes in the intellectual constellation, of a shift in its points
of reference-a veritable Copernican revolution at the center of the intel–
lectual sphere. Another such sign, to be sure, is the late, then posthumous,
glory of Raymond Aron, whose own fate was no less unusual.
This being the case, to confine oneself to analysis of this hall of mir–
rors would be extremely restrictive. The two men have independent
existences of their own, including political roles that they contemplated
and assumed. We might examine their respective meditations on the histo–
ry of their times, and the ties that they created with their age through
various forms of engagement. During his life, Aron explicitly formulated
the essential nature of contact with history. There is an often-mentioned
phrase in the epilogue of his
Memoirs:
"If someone were to take the trou–
ble to read my works in the future, he would discover the analyses,
aspirations, and doubts of a man impregnated with history." What is more,
history also reverberates through his philosophical works. Upon remitting
his rapier as a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences on
January 15, 1965, Raymond Aron described his stay "on the banks of the
Rhine" at the beginning of the thirties: "During the course of my pas–
sionate reading of Hegel, Marx, and Max Weber, I conceived of the project
that has remained my own: to think history as it comes into being
(penser
l'histoire en train de se fa ire)
."
Sartre's relation to history is a more difficult subject from the very out–
set, since it takes its ground in a polemical environment. In the lovely
phrase ofJacques Audiberti, Sartre was a "night watchman on every face of
intelligence's rampart." The phrase can of course be used both by partisans
and adversaries of the philosopher. The one group asserts the watchman's
unfailing vigilance and the stern role he played in many battles. The oth–
ers tend to stress that there is danger in delay when the lookout makes his
