Raymond Aron was a worthy heir to the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Writing with a force and lucidity which no other Frenchman of his generation could equal, he stood for democracy in the dangerous decades of the Nazi and Communist threats to the West and its civilization. It is a reflection of the times that the Columbia Encyclopedia, which lays claim to authority, has space for assorted Nazi and Communist dupes and sympathizers, but not for him.
Twenty years ago, Aron founded Commentaire, a journal to promote democratic values through debate at the highest intellectual level. To celebrate this anniversary, today’s editors (Aron died in 1983) have invited contributors to comment on two principal themes: the present situation in France and whether it is valid to equate Communism with Nazism.1 Regarding the former, they ask specifically, “Do you feel sorrow, resignation, anger, satisfaction or joy? Or again, shame or pride?”
The contributors, between seventy and eighty of them, include Jean-François Revel, Marc Fumaroli, Alain Besançon, and others with established international reputations. Taken together, they are a formidable body of professors and opinion-makers, maestros of the think-tank, and almost without exception products of the celebrated colleges of specialized education which have hardly any parallels in other countries. One of them, Antoine Jeancourt-Galignani, is a banker as well as an economic advisor to the mayor of Shanghai: a portent of the world to come. The discipline of their training does them justice. Their responses are prodigies
