The short twentieth century, beginning with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in July 1914 and culminating in the collapse of communist totalitarianism in the annus mirabilis 1989, is now behind us even if its intellectual substance has not been adequately digested by our intellectual and political elites. The end of the cold war and the implosion of European communism even led some to proclaim “the end of history” as if the hyperbolic wars and totalitarian regimes of the century were mere parentheses, a disturbing if temporary blip in the forward march of humanity. Today, commentators too often oscillate between pessimistic despair and progressivist complacency, between Spenglerian nightmares about “the clash of civilizations” and neo-Hegelian fantasies about “the end of History.” What is needed instead is reliable judgment rooted in a balanced appreciation of the profound forces at work in the modern world. Among the best guides to understanding the short twentieth century is Raymond Aron (1905–1983), the great French political thinker, sociologist, and philosopher, who provided the surest commentaries on the events of the century even as they were unfolding. His writings combine meditative reflections on the contemporary world with astute commentaries on “history-in-the-making.” He wrote authoritatively about politics and war, economics and political philosophy. His judgment was humane and sure-footed, rooted in common sense and in the best available information about the nature of modern societies. He effortlessly combined the modern social sci- entist’s attention to particulars with the phronesis that Aristotle says is the hallmark of the true statesman. He was a realist without being a cynic and a (conservative) liberal who never succumbed to ideological abstractions.

One of Aron’s great intellectual ambitions was to write a “history of the twentieth century” that would make sense of the contradictions that marked that century: the coexistence of hyperbolic wars and totalitarian states and ideologies with undoubted “progress” in the economic, scientific, and sometimes even the political realm. This book remained unfinished although it was undoubtedly present in a dispersed form in the over forty books as well as the thousands of articles and newspaper columns that Aron wrote between the 1930s and his death in the final years of the cold war. In 1996, the French publisher Plon released Une Histoire du XXe Siècle, a nearly-thousand-page annotated anthology of Aron’s writings which illustrated the extent to which Aron had in fact succeeded in providing a comprehensive and authoritative history of the twentieth century. The writings in this valuable anthology were carefully selected by a group of distinguished scholars associated with the Societé des Amis de Raymond Aron including Christian Bachelier, Pierre Hassner, Jean-Claude Casanova, and Pierre Manent. The Dawn of Universal History[1] reproduces about forty percent of the original while still managing to convey the main lines of Aron’s analysis of the twentieth century. Its major lacuna is the complete exclusion of the section entitled “French Problems.” This is to be regretted since this extensive section in the original included Aron’s commentaries on de Gaulle’s efforts to “re-found” France and Aron’s devastating dissection of the “common program” of the Left, so disastrously implemented by President Mitterrand between 1981 and 1983. The French “Union of the Left” attempted, in Aron’s memorable phrase, to “square the circle” by combining massive nationalizations and state-enforced redistribution with efforts at establishing full employment and enhanced economic productivity. One suspects that the publisher does not believe that a contemporary American audience has much interest in European politics, even if the drama of French politics from the French Revolution until the establishment of the Fifth French Republic has been at the center of universal history. It is one more illustration of the growing gap between Europe and the United States and does nothing to heal “the transatlantic misunderstanding.”

The book beautifully explores the decline of the European nation-state, the fall of colonial empires, and the rise of the two peripheral “continent-states,” the United States and the Soviet Union. The second section of the book, “From Sarajevo to Hiroshima,” provides the single best account of the “wars in chain reaction” that unfolded after 1914 and culminated in the “bellicose peace” which was the Cold War. Despite a reputation for “icy clarity” (the phrase is Mauriac’s), Aron’s writing in this section is infused with the dignified pathos of a humane liberal chronicling the self-destruction of bourgeois Europe. The old bourgeois order was overwhelmed by the “technical surprise” (the dominance of defensive warfare that contributed to the drawn out character of the First World War) and the subsequent rise of illiberal regimes of the Left and Right in Russia, Italy, and Germany in 1917, 1921, and 1933, respectively. Aron makes this history intelligible without succumbing to what he calls “the retrospective illusion of inevitability.” He knows that “what has happened has happened and cannot not have been, but how easily it could have been otherwise!” Aron’s balanced judgment about men and things is tied to a philosophy of history that attempts to account for both the profound necessities at work in the contemporary world (the tendency toward total war in an industrial age, the “organization of enthusiasm” and the nationalization of life that accompanies war in a democratic age) and the margins of liberty that are still available to citizens and statesmen. If the British and French had prevented the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 or stood up to Hitler at the time of the Munich crisis in 1938, it is at least possible that the German military would have thwarted Hitler’s insane imperial designs and spared Europe and the world a terrible catastrophe. And without Churchill, it is not clear that the British would have had the moral will to hold out alone against Hitler. Aron reminds us that the search for historical intelligibility must respect human liberty and not ignore the stakes and decisions as they were understood by the principal actors at the time.

I have called Aron a “conservative liberal,” a perspective that infuses the remarkable writings on “The Secular Religions” in section three of this book. Aron believed that liberal rationalism must renew itself: it was no longer credible to affirm the progressivist identification of scientific with moral and political progress. Aron had little sympathy for the “myth of revolution” and did not hesitate to point out that the liberal democracies were the conservative powers and the totalitarian states the revolutionary ones. In their struggle against the “secular religions,” the democracies were defending not only the liberal and “formal” freedoms—the full range of political and economic liberties—but also the spiritual heritage of a civilization that predated enlightenment rationalism. This self-described unbeliever, this “de-Judaized Jew,” knew that in the struggles with the pagan barbarism of Nazism and hyper-rationalist communist ideology, nothing less than liberal and Christian civilization were at stake. Pluralism and respect for the spiritual nature of man have sources richer and deeper than philosophical modernity. Aron eloquently highlights the “liberalism” at the heart of an older European civilization and the way that it was threatened by the ideological search for unanimity:  

Life in the West, with its distinctions between temporal and spiritual power, Pope and emperor, national church and Pope, nobility and bourgeoisie, is made up of tensions not so much overcome as managed, a process that calls for effort, struggle, and creativity. Soviet society aims at unanimity: It no longer permits rivalry between the temporal and spiritual powers, between social classes, or between the society and the state.

The dream for a society without conflicts is the greatest chimera—it attacks the principle of vitality and creativity at the heart of western civilization. Aron equally rejected the “pessimistic” reduction of human beings to beasts of prey by totalitarians of the Right and the violence and tyranny imposed in the name of Historical Reason. His magisterial 1944 essay on “The Future of Secular Religions,” translated into English for the first time, is a moving dissection of totalitarian nihilism and a call for the reconstruction of a liberalism that can provide the masses with faith in freedom and the future of man. True liberals understand the human need for “devotion to a more than human task” while teaching us “to first respect the virtues of mere humanity.” These wise words capture the grandeur and distinctiveness of Aronian liberalism.

In his otherwise competent (if somewhat uninspired) introduction to the book, the historian Tony Judt makes the egregious claim that while Aron was unabashedly anti-Soviet, he found “little to admire in its main competitor,” the United States. This may be true of Tony Judt but it was not the case with the remarkably pro-American Aron. He knew that America was not a universal model in every respect, but he admired its liberty, its dynamism, and the myriad sacrifices Americans had made on behalf of European liberty. He had nothing but contempt for the academic “revisionists” who blamed the Cold War on the United States while displaying empathetic understanding for the security requirements of Stalinist Russia. Even Aron’s criticisms of American involvement in Vietnam are presented with sympathy for the genuine dilemmas confronting America’s leaders, and without the slightest trace of indulgence for America’s totalitarian enemies. Aron respected “the Imperial Republic” even when he criticized it for its persistent oscillation between disengagement and a crusading spirit. Writing in 1972 about America’s imperial role, he wryly notes: “the East Europeans acclaim the president of the United States: They are sorry that they, too, do not live in the sphere of influence and responsibility of ‘imperialism.’ Where are the countries in which Leonid Brezhnev would be acclaimed?” So much for Judt’s tendentious suggestion of some fundamental Aronian distaste for American civilization. Judt also claims that Aron’s “vigorous anti-communism” was “strikingly moderate.” This is true if by “moderate” one means principled and unrelenting but never fanatical or doctrinaire. But Judt goes on to identify Aron’s position with “George Kennan in later years” despite the fact that at the end of his life Aron was an unrelenting critic of the later Kennan’s indulgence toward the Soviet Union and his unquestioning support for détente. Judt subtly removes the conservatism from Aron’s conservative liberalism in an attempt to make him more palatable to the readers of The New York Review of Books.

Tony Judt is right, however, to note that Raymond Aron rejected the very idea of “the end of history” long before that concept became fashionable in the United States. He knew and respected Alexandre Kojève (alas, he never suspected him of being a Soviet spy) and was familiar with this idea decades before it was popularized by Francis Fukuyama. He knew that the modern world was undergoing a “mutation” of sorts, that science, industry, and democratic ideology were transforming the world in new and radically unprecedented ways. But he also appreciated what he called in the title essay “the durability of the traditional aspect of history—the rise and fall of empires, rivalry between regimes, and the beneficial or baleful exploits of great men.” Aron prudently oscillated between a Thucydidean understanding of the permanence of human nature and power politics and a Kantian affirmation of the real steps toward democratic pacification in the contemporary liberal world. His determined effort to do justice to both the new features of modernity and the constancies of historical and political experience, and his ultimate refusal to succumb to either historical pessimism or optimism, make him a trustworthy guide to the momentous twentieth century. His voice is marked by clarity of language and thought, and his judgment by a humane regard for human liberty. This book is a must read for every opponent of totalitarianism and partisan of a chastened or mature liberalism.

Notes
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1. The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness of the Twentieth Century, by Raymond Aron, translated by Barbara Bray; Basic Books, 520 pages, $35. Go back to the text.