Raymond Aron, who died in Paris last October at the age of seventy-eight, was one of the great intellectuals of Europe’s liberal tradition, and France’s most lucid political writer in this century. An extraordinarily versatile scholar—he was at once philosopher, historian, and sociologist—Aron was also a prolific commentator on contemporary politics. As a political columnist for Le Figaro and later for L’Express, Aron helped to shape the sensibilities of a generation of moderate French politicians; as a polemical essayist, he was one of postwar Europe’s clearest and most powerful voices—perhaps the most powerful—for reason, for moderation, and for firmness in the defense of political liberty.

For much of the past decade it has been common parlance in France to describe Aron as the one eminent intellectual of his generation who did not fall into grievous errors on the major public issues. His memoirs, published only weeks before his death, were enthusiastically received, and rose at once to the top of the French best-seller lists—one further sign that Raymond Aron had moved to the center of public esteem.

He was not always so appreciated. For most of his career, Aron was at odds with the prevailing intellectual temper in France, his views largely rejected. “Better wrong with Sartre than right with Aron,” was long a catchword in French Left circles; Jean-Paul Sartre, who had been Aron’s close friend and a fellow student of German phenomenology during the 1930’s, after their passage through the Ecole Normale Supérieure, eventually found Aron’s anti-Communism intolerable, and added his own insults. Characteristically, Aron replied with irony and with critiques of Sartre’s philosophical works that were both incisive and good-natured. At the end of his life, Aron was hailed not only for being consistently right, but for puncturing the ideological constructions of his opponents with a remarkable fairness, for raising ideological debate in France to a higher level.

Raymond Aron’s achievements were diverse, and his battle against totalitarianism was only one element of his life’s work. But it was a central one. Aron was marked for life by his experience as a young teacher in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power; thereafter he never ceased to feel the fragility of the regimes that embodied liberal values.

When he returned to France after World War II (he had joined the Gaullists in London in 1940, and edited a Resistance journal), he recognized right away that the extension of Soviet power into the center of Europe and the strength and ambition of the West European Communist parties demanded from West Europeans a fundamental and unavoidable political choice: they could either be for the continued extension of Communist revolution or against it. No intellectual in the postwar era contributed more wise teaching or more incisive analysis to the questions of what that choice meant and what were the prudent and realistic policies it implied.

The point of departure for Aron’s analysis of industrial society was that both Communist and liberal democratic regimes claimed many of the same values: economic growth, the rejection of hereditary inequalities, universal citizenship. To Aron, this suggested that specific aspects of life under each type of regime—the standard of living of the various classes, the choices open to individuals, the forms of class struggle—could be the subject of objective comparison, which he undertook in his sociological trilogy Eighteen Lessons on Industrial Society, Class Struggle, and Democracy and Totalitarianism (given as courses at the Sorbonne from 1955 to 1958 and published 1962-66).

In using Marxist concepts (such as class struggle) Aron was paying his respects to a thinker whose genius he respected, whose good intentions he acknowledged, and whose work he came back to again and again throughout his life. He had begun his own study of Marx in the early 1930’s, well before most of his contemporaries in France; he knew very well what he was rejecting.

Aron argued (in Main Currents of Sociological Thought, 1960-62) that out of Marx’s prophetic vision of history there flowed, quite naturally, political tragedy. To imagine, as Marx had, that the working class could take over the dominant functions within capitalist society in a manner analogous to the rise to power of the commercial bourgeoisie during the 18th century was, Aron maintained, to engage in an exercise in prophecy rather than sociology. The position and nature of the two classes differed in all essentials: one was a privileged minority which had created new ways of organizing production within feudal society; the other, an underprivileged majority, was compelled to submit to a production system directed by a ruling elite of capitalists and managers. Marx, then, had placed at the center of his theory of history an analogy of such sociological implausibility that it could be resolved only by myth—a myth which Lenin would come along to provide: that the Communist party represented the proletariat in the fulfillment of its historic mission.

Aron objected to another central tenet of Marx’s sociology: the contention that a society’s political order was essentially no more than a reflection of its economic order—the state simply an instrument of class domination. He thought that Marx was wrong to be uninterested in such questions as how a society’s leaders were chosen, what the limits were to their powers, or what their relation was to the governed; he felt that the answers to these sorts of questions told as much about the public and private life of a society as did its economic structure.

In his own sociological approach, Aron proceeded in the tradition of the great French political sociologists, Montesquieu and Tocqueville, accepting from them the idea that a society’s political regime was a decisive variable in determining its nature. Indeed, he was in great part responsible for reestablishing, in France, Tocqueville’s reputation as a political thinker of the highest order, and Aron adopted into the core of his own sociological vision the implications of Tocqueville’s analysis of social change.

Tocqueville had argued that the breakdown of the aristocratic hierarchy of the past and the growing equality in conditions of status were the main driving force behind the sociological transformations of the 19th century. He thought it obvious that an increasingly egalitarian, democratic, and commercial society would involve a growth in the power of the state; he was haunted by the question of whether this enhanced state would permit men to remain politically free or deteriorate into a despotism of enforced conformity.

This was the Tocquevillian choice that shaped the contours of Aran’s own analysis. Both the Communist states and the liberal democracies were variants of “industrial society,” and “democratic” by virtue of universal citizenship and the rejection of hereditary elites. Yet they differed profoundly, not primarily because of their economic structures but because of the nature of their political regimes. In proclaiming that “the primordial values of the community” can be discerned in “the antithesis between the single party and parliamentary institutions, between the imposed orthodoxy and intellectual pluralism,” Aron was defining both his own sociological method and the values which underlay his political commitments.

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These values Aron had explicated in his polemical classic, The Opium of the Intellectuals, published in 1955. The work was a sustained critique of the largely Marxist intellectual climate in postwar France. The best-known of the French philosophers, Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, denied nothing about the Gulag Archipelago. But the problem was that their elaborate justification of their hopes for another kind of Communist revolution had effectively permeated the French intellectual atmosphere with a remarkable indulgence toward Stalinism. In this climate, Alfred Sauvy, a noted economic writer, was not expressing an aberrant view when he proclaimed (in 1949) that “in a nation where Communism is introduced by violence, all opinion will be Communist in a generation, so to announce that it is so now is only an anticipation of the truth.” Merleau-Ponty worried that if Marxism were shown to be false, history would have no meaning; Sartre argued that the only way to favor the French working class was to take the side of the Soviet Union.

Out of this morass of troubled rationalizations and cheerful sophistry, Aron dissected the essential “myths” of the historical unity of the Left and the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat. He noted that French intellectuals generally had little interest in the study of what economic policies might actually improve the living standards of the French working class, and he set forth his own interpretation of the sources of Marxism’s appeal:

In Marxist eschatology, the proletariat is cast in the role of collective savior. The expressions used by the young Marx leave one in no doubt about the Judeo-Christian origins of the myth of the class elected through suffering for the redemption of humanity. The mission of the proletariat, the end of prehistory thanks to the Revolution, the reign of liberty—it is easy to recognize the source of these ideas: the Messiah, the break with the past, the Kingdom of God. Such comparisons are by no means damaging to Marxism. The resurrection, in seemingly scientific form, of age-old beliefs has a natural appeal for minds weaned on faith.

Aron gave a further explanation of why the French intellectuals were so receptive to revolutionary Marxism: they, more than any other class, suffered from the shrinking of France’s stature and power in the world. In compensation, as spokesmen for a nation which had, for most of the last two centuries, been the principal disseminator of the ideas of the European Left, they sought to reassert their preeminence by expounding theories applicable to all humanity and all history.

The charge that Aron leveled at the French Marxist intellectuals was a grave one: that their indulgent stance toward Soviet policies and toward the ambitions of the French Communist party was a betrayal of the most vital traditions of their own civilization. For while the Communists (in France) always took care to present their doctrine as the natural heir to the spirit of the Enlightenment, in practice they had hardened the Marxist prophecy into dogma and made the banishment of skepticism a defining political value. (The French poet Paul Eluard praised Stalinist Czechoslovakia in 1952 for “shutting its doors to doubt.”) To submit to this, Aron argued, was to desert the one tradition that was the foundation of all Western achievements:

The essence of Western culture, the basis of its success, the secret of its wide influence, is liberty. Not universal suffrage, a belated and debatable political institution; not the parliamentary system, which is one democratic procedure among others, but the freedom of research and criticism, gradually won, the freedom whose historical conditions have been the duality of temporal and spiritual power, the limitations of state authority and the autonomy of the universities.

At the close of The Opium of the Intellectuals, Aron remarked on “the first glimmerings of skepticism” that were appearing on the horizons of French intellectual life—omens, he happily suggested, that might presage “the end of the ideological age.” For despite the passion of his polemic, Aron did not consider it likely that Communism would come to power in Western Europe on its ideological merits; the problem it posed essentially concerned foreign policy. Only the Bolshevik seizure of power had given credibility to the claims of Leninism and encouraged their diffusion. “Unarmed prophets,” Aron concluded, “inevitably perish; the future of the secular religion depends on the balance of power.”

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Not surprisingly, then, Aron in the early 1950’s, almost alone among French intellectuals, was unequivocal in his advocacy of French integration into the Atlantic alliance. Indeed, his critique of French Marxism was in part intended to clarify France’s diplomatic choices by dispelling the ideological haze that habitually surrounded their discussion. As he pointed out, if it had been czarist Russia that had moved twenty-five divisions to within two hundred kilometers of the Rhine, and installed, in Warsaw and East Berlin, potentates who swore their allegiance to the eternal Holy Russian Empire, no progressive French intellectual would deny the logic of the Western nations’ uniting their forces to restore a military equilibrium at the line of demarcation.

Yet while Aron emphatically affirmed that a common Western defense effort, including American troops, was needed to reduce to a minimum any Soviet temptation to push farther westward, throughout most of the 1950’s he stressed the limitations of what the Western nations could achieve by the use of military force. He considered it unreasonable for France to commit resources to hold its colonial empire together when it lacked the means to defend its own territory. After World War II, he opposed the French effort to reestablish control over Vietnam, although that implied acceptance of Ho Chi Minh’s domination of the Vietnamese nationalist movement. (In his memoirs he regretted not having criticized France’s Vietnam policy with more frequency and force.)

In The Algerian Tragedy, published in 1957, Aron was an early advocate of Algerian independence. The pamphlet outraged most of the French Right; but left-wing intellectuals were for their part dismayed by its lack of moral indignation over French conduct of the war. Aron did ignore the highly charged emotional reference points of the French debate on the Algerian issue, and he made no ideological condemnation of colonialism. Instead, he argued that it would be impossible to govern Algeria’s Muslim population—whose birth rates were higher and whose living standards lower than those of the metropolitan French—under French law; further integration of the two communities (as proposed by most of the advocates of Algérie française) was therefore quite implausible. Closer ties to Algeria would obligate the French to raise the territory’s living standards nearer to their own; but not even the oil underneath the Sahara would render this possible without the sacrifice of France’s own economic growth. This manner of formulating his conclusions earned Aron the epithets of an “icy” and “calculating” thinker, callous toward the fate of the French settlers in Algeria, indifferent to France’s destiny, a “defeatist” and a “pessimist.”

Aron’s caution was due primarily to his sense of the limits of France’s resources. But on a more general level, he was genuinely uncertain about whether Western institutions and political practices could take root outside the developed nations. Convinced that both freedom of inquiry and the respect of the government for the wishes of the governed were ideals of universal validity, Aron nevertheless wondered whether such concrete institutions as parties, elections, and parliaments were the necessary means to their realization in the Third World. In The Opium of the Intellectuals he had advised that Westerners would be mistaken to attribute “universal significance” to such institutions. Five years later he questioned whether it was a form of racism not to advocate the only institutions that had permitted the general realization of liberal ideals once the traditionalist structures of society had been broken down by the forces of modernization.

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In 1962 Aron published Peace and War, a tremendously ambitious effort to “understand the implicit logic” of international relations. It is a work whose scope and comprehensiveness remain unchallenged to this day. The book opened up international relations as a subject for university study in France, and had an impressive impact on the field in universities throughout the world. Aron later regretted that in the final chapters he strayed too far from theory, and immersed himself too deeply in contemporary dilemmas. But it is these final sections, written during a sabbatical year at Harvard, that are the most gripping. And though Aron would never have acknowledged it, the reader cannot but feel that the closing section, “Praxology”—a plea for a diplomacy that combines both a sense of mesure and Realpolitik—was written for the education of a young American republic that could not avoid mature responsibilities.

Aron viewed the international system as amoral: states do not subscribe (in practice) to a common legal code, and do not renounce the taking of the law into their own hands; their survival depends not on legal judgments but on the balance of power. He stressed his sympathy with George F. Kennan’s critique of the legalistic and moralistic temper of the American study of international relations, and he expressed a withering impatience with what he called the “idealistic illusion” that underlay much of American diplomatic behavior, particularly during the interwar period. (About the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war, he commented that “anyone imagining he was guaranteeing peace by outlawing war was like a doctor imagining he was curing disease by declaring it contrary to the aspirations of humanity.”)

Ethical considerations were incorporated into Aron’s perspective, but these, he maintained, ultimately depended upon the historical judgment of the success or failure of an external action. As Aron explained (in a subsequent essay on American foreign policy), the historical view was “inseparable from a judgment about the internal system, that is, whether the armies bring with them freedom or tyranny, economic development or stagnation, a modernizing or reactionary elite.” Yet he noted that even that level of interpretation did not resolve the ethical complexity: if France had heeded the advice of Marshal Pilsudski and overthrown Hitler by force in 1933, historians would never have known what miseries humanity would have been spared.

Aron’s argument was that the statesman has the moral duty to recognize international relations for what they are, to calculate first of all the balance of forces, and to understand the selfishness of his own nation and that of others. This attitude he called the “morality of prudence”—and the policies he derived from it were prudent indeed, at least by comparison with those undertaken by most American statesmen during the next two decades.

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Aron’s recommendations, set out in the chapter “To Survive Is To Conquer,” were organized around the idea that the purpose of Western strategy was both the preservation of its institutions and the avoidance of war with the Soviet Union.

At the outset he conceded that the most likely means of avoiding nuclear war were capitulation and unilateral disarmament. But even that course would not insure survival; disarmament would guarantee nothing at all except helplessness, for throughout human history the extermination of the disarmed had been one of the possible expressions of victory. Furthermore, Aron maintained that the moral stakes in the cold war were such that the risks of resisting Communism were worth running, and he opened his discussion of strategy with a consideration of what those stakes were.

The Soviet Union, Aron pointed out, justified its system of dictatorial rule with the claim that only the Communist party was capable of overcoming monopoly capitalism and opening the way to a classless society. But this justification rested on a philosophy of history that was manifestly false. The progression from a capitalism defined by private ownership to a socialism characterized by economic planning and the monopoly power of the Communist party had brought about neither the end of the alienation of man from his labor nor the abolition of social and economic inequities; it was plain enough that the party was not the proletariat. Because, Aron said,

their philosophy does not agree with the facts, the Soviets have been forced gradually to construct an extraordinary system of lies, and to oblige conquered or converted peoples to live in a perpetual lie. . . . Because they have done something different from what they believed they would do, because they pursued inaccessible goals, goals contrary to the nature of men and societies, the Communists lie as perhaps no great historical movement before them has ever lied. The rejection of Communism is for me above all the rejection of the enforced lie.

In invoking such fundamental values to justify resistance to Communism, Aron was making no claim about the relative perfection of Western societies. The decisive difference was that criticism of Western society was itself an integral part of society. “One may,” Aron wrote,

debate the share of power in the hands of the monopolies (or large corporations). But it would never occur to an American theorist to claim that the more power such monopolies have, the more completely democracy is realized. On the Soviet side, such an inversion of values is the foundation of the regime, since the party is identified with class, and the rule of the party with the realization of liberty.

The strategic problem remained: how were Western societies to be defended without increasing the risk of war? For the Communists were not only despotic toward the populations they governed; their ideology implied that conflict with capitalist societies was inevitable, even beneficial—the diplomatic expression of the historically preordained transition from capitalism to socialism. Thus, according to the Marxist-Leninist conception, any period of detente could be nothing more than a pause in the protracted conflict. The Soviets, Aron wrote, “cannot even conceive of what a peace without a victory might be.”

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Did the Communist conception of the world impose upon Western governments the requirement to respond in kind, by adopting a military-diplomatic strategy that had, as its goal, the political (or physical) destruction of the Soviet regime? Would the failure to adopt such a “forward strategy” doom the West to passivity, and increase the likelihood of its eventual defeat? Aron recognized this as a crucial question, and he acknowledged that a Western posture based on peaceful coexistence, which did not counter Soviet attempts at subversion with subversive efforts of its own, increased the danger that the West would perish by gradual suffocation. But he countered that the bourgeois democracies, even when they appeared diplomatically passive, were, by the mere fact of their existence, aggressive toward the Soviet empire, because of the standards of living and the liberties that they reserved for their citizens.

The strategy that Aron proposed was both limited and defensive: the West should not seek to overcome the Soviet regime but should simply pursue what he defined as “survival and peace.” By survival, he meant not only the avoidance of war, but also moral survival—the maintaining of liberal civilization. Peace he defined as the “reciprocal acceptance by each bloc of the other’s existence and right to existence.”

He acknowledged that phrasing Western purposes in this limited manner was “contrary to the passions of the struggle.” Still, not matching the universalist pretensions of the Soviets’ ideology with equally ambitious aims offered the best chance of peace-making without war and “the total collapse of one of the contenders.” For “the conversion of the Marxist-Leninists to a more modest and truthful self-interpretation” would be for the West a striking victory—“of all victories the most fruitful, since it would have been obtained without bloodshed and would pave the way to reconciliation.”

Aron recognized that such a victory implied a radical change in the way the Soviets viewed the world. It would not be attained without the Soviets’ recognition that their government was nothing more than one form of modern government among others; they would have to cease to consider themselves engaged in the universal diffusion of what they called socialism. Aron saw nothing in Soviet practice that suggested the imminence of such a conversion, and he thus foresaw the need for a protracted Western effort. But once Western goals were defined in this defensive fashion, it would become easier to discriminate effectively between those interests vital to Western survival and those of secondary importance.

About such discrimination Aron made two main points. The first was that maintaining the central military balance between the blocs, at both nuclear and non-nuclear levels, was the vital requirement of a defensive strategy. He argued that if the Soviets achieved any meaningful superiority in armaments on either the Central European front or in strategic nuclear weapons, they would be tempted to press their advantage by making demands on the West to choose between capitulation and war. It was, he wrote, precisely because a balance of forces had been created in Europe that the East-West conflict had not assumed a military dimension; as soon as that balance of forces was compromised, peace in Europe would be thrown into jeopardy.

Aron’s second point was that Western Europe was the vital strategic stake in the cold war; so long as Atlantic unity was preserved, any positions in the Third World which had been lost could be, eventually, regained or compensated for. If Atlantic unity were shaken, however, all of the West’s other positions would be endangered.

In 1962 this emphasis on the primacy of Europe was contrary to the prevailing concerns of most American strategists, who were paying increased attention to the problems posed by Communist insurgency movements in the Third World. Aron did not suggest that Western statesmen could ignore political and military developments in Asia and Africa, and he advocated both increased developmental assistance and aid in armaments and in “counter-subversion” techniques to friendly regimes that faced Communist guerrilla movements. But he did urge Western statesmen to recognize that no defeats in the Third World would have a decisive impact on the central balance of forces between the two camps. The advent of nuclear weapons had diminished the value of allies; the passage of one or several Third World states from one camp to another would have only a marginal effect on the resources available to either bloc. He argued that the ideological allegiances of Third World governments were likely to be transient and revocable, and he thought that few Third World revolutionary regimes would be inclined to cut their ties definitively to the West. He counseled “detachment and a certain indifference” each time “Ruritania” declared its allegiance to Moscow, and advised Western statesmen to recognize that the Third World would be undergoing revolutionary transformation even if Marxism-Leninism had never existed.

Over twenty years have passed since the publication of these chapters on Western strategy, and what is striking is the disparity between what Aron considered the appropriate measures for the conduct of Western strategy and the policies pursued by the United States. For the two central operational concepts that made up Aron’s strategic suggestion—a certain sense of mesure toward indigenous Communist insurgencies in the Third World and a deep seriousness about maintaining the Soviet-American military balance at all levels—are precisely those that were violated, in turn, by American statesmen: the first, during the 1960’s, to the most extreme degree imaginable, and the second, during the 1970’s, to an extent that has yet to be determined.

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Aron’s study of American foreign policy during the postwar era, The Imperial Republic, appeared in 1972. In the American edition, published during the final months of the Watergate scandal, Aron expressed his own appreciation of the diplomacy of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and regarded with foreboding the erosion of the preeminence of the executive branch in the conduct of American foreign policy. The study, sympathetic in its broad contours toward both Americans and their political culture, and enthusiastic about what American postwar policies had achieved in Western Europe, was nonetheless peppered with exasperation at the way in which the United States had conducted much of its foreign policy. The Vietnam war was the principal error: Aron described it as a historical watershed, marking the division between America’s rise in global influence and prestige and the onset of its relative decline.

Aron supported the objectives of the American war effort; the maintenance of a non-Communist regime in the South was fully consistent with the postwar logic of divided nations, and a more legitimate goal than the French effort to keep a colonial position in Vietnam during the 1950’s. But what he ruefully found absent from American policy was the sense of proportion and discrimination that would have enabled the government to determine whether a non-Communist South Vietnam was truly a stake so vital as to require the commitment of half-a-million men.

Extending the doctrine of containment outside Europe was not, Aron thought, in itself illogical. But he regretted the tendency of American policymakers to “substitute symbol for reality in the discrimination of interests.” They had construed containment as a categorical imperative, and the coming to power of any Communist party anywhere as a defeat. The consequence of this corrupted sense of strategy was that the United States had pursued quite modest goals in Vietnam “with the kind of obstinacy . . . in which even success could never compensate for the human cost, first in Vietnam, and then to the United States itself.”

At the end of The Imperial Republic, Aron forecast a period of relative American indifference toward the outside world, and he worried whether the nation whose foreign policy had historically oscillated between crusading idealism and isolationism would be able to pursue a middle course. Many of the American critics of the Vietnam war, he thought, seemed intent on turning noninterventionism into their own categorical imperative, seemingly unaware that both their nation’s ties to the international economy and their own national psychology made an involvement in the world unavoidable.

A much more pessimistic tone came into Aron’s writings during the late 1970’s. In books like In Defense of Decadent Europe (1977) and in such essays as “Soviet Hegemony: Year One” (1980), Aron expressed greater concern about the East-West balance of power, and less confidence in the survival of free institutions in Western Europe than at any time since the early 1950’s.

His pessimism flowed from his analysis of the international situation, which had undergone important shifts during the 1970’s. The Soviet projection of military power into Africa and Central Asia, the Cuban interventions in Angola, Ethiopia, and Yemen—all of this, Aron conceded, was not the first time a great power had pursued an imperial ambition by projecting military force beyond its borders. What alarmed him was Western indifference toward these advances. Though he had asserted, in both Peace and War and The Imperial Republic, that no particular Third World state was in itself a vital stake in the East-West competition, such states were important in the aggregate. One could, Aron wrote, argue easily enough that a Soviet base in Ethiopia did not upset the global balance, but it was an argument that grew weaker each time it was repeated. The West could not be indifferent if one African country after another were dragged into the Soviet orbit; it would be absurd to pretend that Soviet domination of the sea lanes connecting the Persian Gulf to Western Europe would not fundamentally alter the global balance of power.

The lack of a Western strategy to curb Soviet advances greatly disturbed him. In “Soviet Hegemony: Year One” he ascribed global significance to recent changes in the American political climate: the Eastern establishment, collectively the creator of the containment doctrine, had torn itself apart over Vietnam, leaving the United States with no foreign-policy consensus and no ruling elite capable of formulating one. Aron wrote that the contrast between the aspirations expressed in John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address and Edward M. Kennedy’s habitual campaign against the American military budget was a portentous symbol of American decline; an equally significant sign, this time of the changed attitudes of American foreign-policy intellectuals, was George Kennan’s conversion to a stance of near isolationism.

Aron was the same age as Kennan, and had known and respected him for decades. He considered Kennan’s finest hour to be the advice he had given to the American government (summarized in Kennan’s famous Mr. X article in Foreign Affairs in 1947, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”) that repeated demonstrations of American good will would neither impress Stalin nor stem Soviet expansion. Kennan’s repudiation of the policy of which he had been a principal architect troubled Aron, and in an essay (“Mr. X Renders an Account with His Past,” 1978) and in several passages in his memoirs Aron sought to understand Kennan’s conversion and to define his own disagreement.

For both men the central question remained what it had been in 1947: what were the ambitions of Soviet foreign policy, and in what manner did they flow from the nature of the Soviet regime? To Aron it seemed that Kennan, in his most recent writings, had resorted to caricature in describing the attitudes of those worried about Soviet military expansion. It was plain enough, Aron argued, that the Soviet leaders were not plotting to unleash a surprise military attack on the West on a day which they had set in advance. But it did not follow that the regime had thereby transformed itself into a group of prudent elderly men, defensive in their strategic concerns, whose main worry was agricultural productivity.

Thirty years ago Kennan had argued that Stalin had no inclination toward military risk-taking; his regime was sensitive, above all, to the balance of forces, military and political, that were arrayed against its expansion. What Kennan had not done, Aron contended, was to demonstrate that the “sources of Soviet conduct” had changed, in their essentials, since Stalin’s time. Certainly the dictatorship had grown more supple—dissidents were incarcerated or exiled rather than killed, and the political competition in the Kremlin was no longer a life-and-death struggle. But these changes did not imply the transformation of Soviet foreign-policy goals. The regime still spoke to its own militants about the inevitable triumph of Communism over capitalism, and the large percentage of its national product devoted to armaments indicated that it did not share the commonly expressed American opinion about the diminishing relevance of military force as an instrument of foreign policy.

What Aron found absent from Kennan’s analysis was any effort to attribute political meaning to the changes in the balance of military power. The Soviets had recently attained equality with the United States, and perhaps superiority, in strategic nuclear weapons; they had, at the same time, developed the capacity to project their military power globally. For the first time they had begun to use military force outside the zones occupied by their army in 1945. To Aron it seemed that Kennan had chosen an unusual moment to announce that the analysis he had made of Soviet foreign policy in 1946-47 was no longer valid. How, Aron wondered, was it possible to argue that at the very moment when both Soviet military capacities and activities had increased, Soviet goals had become less ambitious?

Aron described the threats to the liberty of Western Europe as diffuse, shifting, and complex. No longer attracted by Communist ideology, West Europeans lived under the growing shadow of the Soviet army. Aron did not think the Soviets would attack; such risk-taking was no more characteristic of Brezhnev’s regime than of Stalin’s. But the Soviets sought to profit from their ability to intimidate the nations of Western Europe, to acclimate them to the idea that there was a plausible Soviet military option, to convince the Europeans that they owed their security not to their own defense, or to their alliance with the United States, but to Soviet prudence and good faith.

At another level the threat involved Europe’s dependence on resources from the Third World, particularly oil from the Persian Gulf. Here Aron argued that the overall military balance between the two blocs, and the readiness of each side to fight, if need be, to defend its vital interests, had a great influence on future developments in the region. In “Soviet Hegemony: Year One,” Aron argued that the balance of forces was never absent from the minds of diplomats, or from the consciousness of both rulers and rebels. The contrast between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and America’s passivity during the collapse of the Shah of Iran could not fail to make an impression on the Islamic world: Arabian princes now feared, rather than sought, American protection; even anti-Communist potentates took care to direct the fury of their street mobs away from Soviet embassies. This mattered: the regimes and the resources at stake were not of quasi-symbolic interest to the West—as Vietnam had been for the United States and Algeria for France. Europe could not survive without oil from the Middle East—yet it had developed no policy to insure its access. The willingness to face up to the dangers and adopt the necessary policies depended, ultimately, on a European sense of civic morality and collective resolution, which Aron felt was very nearly absent.

Over the last generation, Aron pointed out, West Europeans had made dazzling progress. Their economies had flourished, their politics had remained tolerant and liberal, their people had been creative in all fields. If the judgments of history were rendered by a court predisposed to the virtuous, the Europeans would have little to fear. But Aron had no great confidence that history would be so indulgent; it had habitually favored those societies that produced citizens willing to make sacrifices necessary to the survival of the community.

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The community whose preservation was the purpose of so much of Aron’s writing was first of all French, and in important respects European and Western. Jewish by ancestry, Aron did not define himself by his attachment to Jewish traditions or communities. In his own description he was a “juif déjudaisé,” a “dejudaized Jew,” who felt “the same emotion in front of the Wailing Wall as in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.” Aron stressed his affiliation with the religion of his forefathers only when Jews came under attack.

Hitler’s rise to power, which Aron experienced as a young teacher in Cologne and Berlin, first made him aware of his Jewishness. Surprisingly, perhaps, this consciousness restrained his writing during the 1930’s: was his reaction to the German menace, he wondered, that of a Jew or of a Frenchman? He expressed remorse about this in later writings, and welcomed the fact that being a Jew made it easier for him to advocate French reconciliation with Germany after World War II.

Aron felt no great enthusiasm for the birth of Israel, and he seemed to have been surprised at the growth of his own affection for the Jewish state. He visited Israel for the first time in 1956, and was struck, most of all, by the resurrection, in modern times, of a “nearly forgotten kind of polity—a republic of citizen-soldiers.”

What Aron wrote about Judaism and about Israel and the Arabs is but a small fragment of his collected works. But these essays, collected in the volume De Gaulle, Israel, and the Jews (1968), contain some of his most passionate and revealing writing. His reaction to de Gaulle’s caricature of Jews as “an elite people, self-assured and domineering” was severe. In that language Aron recognized a vocabulary of anti-Semitism that had been repressed in France since the fall of the Vichy government. Aron’s reply was a tour de force of irony, indignation, and uncharacteristic confession. The confession concerned his own attachment to Israel, whose survival he had feared for during the days that preceded the 1967 war. “I have never been a Zionist,” Aron wrote,

firstly and above all because I do not feel myself to be a Jew. It seemed to me probable that the state of Israel, simply because it existed, would lead to a prolonged conflict. I cannot agree now any more than in the past to uphold unconditionally the policy of a handful of men, no better and no worse than those who govern anywhere else in the world, responsible for the Israeli state. But I also know, more clearly than in the past, that in the event of the state of Israel being destroyed (an event that would be accompanied by the massacre of part of the population), I should be wounded in the very depths of my being.

This solidarity with Israel did not inhibit Aron from expressing reservations about Israeli policies, and his practice of writing about events in the Middle East from a consciously French perspective (the emphasis was Aron’s) brought him many troubled and irritated letters from other French Jews.

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Briefly in his youth Raymond Aron belonged to the French Socialist party; for two years after the war he wrote position papers and made speeches for the Gaullists. With the exception of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who overlooked some of the acid comments he made about his foreign policy, Aron managed to be on reasonably bad terms with every French president in the postwar era. “He never was a Gaullist” was de Gaulle’s remark about the man who had followed him to London in June 1940 and edited the principal Free French newspaper. Georges Pompidou said something similar: “You can never count on Raymond Aron.” That comment was made shortly after Aron had been received, at his own request, for a political discussion in the presidential palace—and had then gone on to write critically of Pompidou’s policy. What Aron felt he owed to political leaders was not loyalty but his own independent judgment. Naturally Aron cited both of the above remarks with mischievous approval.

Aron’s readers, in France and throughout the world, could always count on him. One always knew his values and preferences, but it is difficult to convey the sublime sense of authority, and—so far as it is possible in any political writing—objectivity that rang through every piece he wrote.

Yet even those who admired Aron, and shared, more or less, his political perspectives, regretted his pessimism. Well before he began to voice his alarm at the deterioration of the global balance of power, Aron was criticized for restraining political enthusiasms. One such critic, the American liberal Henry Aiken, complained, in 1964,¹ that “the vein of pessimism and the self-division” running through Aron’s works left no space for the governing ideas that were needed for the “reconstruction of society in the 20th century.”

Aron’s reply, not a denial but an explanation, comes as near as any single passage to expressing how he formed his values in response to the experience of his century. “I do not know to what generation Aiken belongs,” he wrote,

but any man living in the same century as Hitler and Stalin who does not experience from time to time doubts about the temporal destiny of humanity, must be supported by what, on the kindest possible view, is a very naive and simple faith. Millions of Jews were exterminated in the name of racism, millions of kulaks were deported for the purpose of agrarian collectivization, millions of innocent people were thrown into prison by a despot who was acclaimed by tens of thousands of intellectuals the world over, and if all these deaths and absurdities have not shaken my system of values, they have at least put me on guard forever against people who talk of “reconstructing society” (those strange builders who always begin by destroying) and have roused me from the dogmatic slumber induced by philosophies of history. I do not know what the future of humanity will be, but I do know that we do not know. Those who claim to know are deliberately falsifying the truth. We are entitled to hope for a future in keeping with human aspirations, but not to present our hope as a certainty, and still less to expect confidently that the laws of history or the action of one particular party (or class) will bring it about.

America had no better European friend, and liberty no wiser defender, than this great man. His death has made life more lonely for free peoples everywhere.

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¹“The Revolt Against Ideology,” COMMENTARY, April 1964.