A Witness - The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century - Book Review

National Review, Nov 11, 2002 by Brian C. Anderson

The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century, by Raymond Aron (Basic, 544 pp., $35)

Jean-Paul Sartre's apologias for Stalin and Mao; Michel Foucault's praise for Iran's Islamic revolutionaries; the recent Parisian bestseller that claimed September 11 was an elaborate right-wing hoax- all too often, France's intellectual life has shown contempt for the hard-won decencies of liberal democracy and become infatuated with madness and tyranny. Yet one giant of 20th-century French thought always stood rocklike against the nonsense that swirled around him: the philosopher and social thinker Raymond Aron.

In an amazingly productive career that spanned from the late 1930s until his death in 1983, Aron defended liberty and reason against their totalitarian and irrationalist enemies with every word he wrote. He was the anti-Sartre, the anti-Foucault. Where they were swept away by deadly romantic enthusiasms, he remained ironic, sensible, ever aware of the tragic turns of history and the fragility of free societies. And how much he wrote! He authored more than 40 books, on subjects ranging from international relations to the discontents of modernity. In addition to his scholarly outpourings, he was one of the premier political journalists in European history, writing weekly commentary for Le Figaro, L'Express, and other newspapers and magazines-liberal as well as conservative. Aron's influence as thinker and teacher (first at the Sorbonne and later at the College de France) helped spark a resurgence in serious French political thought, such as one finds in the work of his students (including the brilliant political philosopher Pierre Manent) and in the pages of the prestigious quarterly journal he founded, Commentaire.

This new collection of Aron's writings, much of it translated for the first time, is an abridgement of a book assembled by his friends and former students and published in France a few years ago. A history of the 20th century-the age of extremes-it is also a gateway to Aron's mind, and a work of arresting timeliness.

The collection gets its title from a 1961 essay, included here as a final chapter, in which Aron seeks to unravel the mystery of his times- the bloodiest in human history. In the essay, Aron distinguishes between what is unique to modern history and the permanent features of human nature. The 20th century witnessed the rapid acceleration of "history as process": the radical human, social, and technological changes-originating with European civilization in the 18th and 19th centuries (as described by observers like Tocqueville and Marx) but eventually affecting the rest of humanity-that have accompanied the democratic and industrial revolutions. Yet though history as process sometimes seems to sweep away whole societies, revealing man as a mere plaything of events and tendencies beyond his control, Aron argues that "traditional" history-the permanence of political conflict, the importance of great and notorious men and women, the abiding influence of national genius-remains as essential as it was in Thucydides' era. Like Tocqueville, with whom he felt a strong kinship, and unlike Marxian determinists, Aron saw history as partly destiny and partly open to man's free choice.

This dual structure of modern history meant that politics was crucial- Aron even spoke of its "primacy"-but also that it didn't take place in a vacuum. At the heart of the political world, Aron believed, is a condition of political scarcity. Statesmen always confront limited options: Not all good things go together, and often they oppose one another; sometimes, it is a matter of choosing among evils. Any theory of political life that didn't put this truth front and center was, Aron maintained, "literary" politics at best; at worst, it could undermine the real goods of the human world. Few modern political thinkers have exhibited such a feel for the importance of political action. The philosopher Allan Bloom was right to celebrate Aron's "statesmanlike prudence."

Nowhere was the dance of process and traditional history more evident than in the apocalyptic wars of the 20th century. In a long section of The Dawn of Universal History entitled "From Sarajevo to Hiroshima," Aron describes the "technological surprise" of modern democratic and industrial warfare. On the eve of World War I, Europe's leaders thought they were undertaking an "ordinary" war that a few big battles would decide. They tragically discovered that in an age of democracy (in which conscription was the norm) and of industry (in which science and modern production techniques applied to the means of destruction) "wars tend naturally to expand into total wars." The line between combatants and noncombatants blurred. The stakes of war now included the very survival of communities. The logic of total war transformed nations into social factories, dedicated to supporting the war effort. The need to maintain the social factory required what one French historian called "the organization of enthusiasm"-incessant, soul-shrinking propaganda. These vast forces left the old bourgeois order in ruins and were responsible in part for the 20th century's barbarism.