The Burden of Responsibility by Tony Judt;

Author:Tony Judt; [Judt;, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226414188
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

THREE

The Peripheral Insider

RAYMOND ARON AND THE WAGES OF REASON

When Raymond Aron died, in 1983, he had achieved a unique status in French public life. He was almost universally admired and respected; his writings and opinions had been elevated to near-canonical standing across a broad swathe of academic, intellectual, and public opinion. As the only prominent French thinker of his generation who had taken a consistent liberal stand against all the totalitarian temptations of the age, Aron represented not just a symbol of continuity with the great traditions of French thought but also a beacon of light pointing to the future at a time of confusion and doubt within the intellectual community. Where a few years earlier Aron had been, for the ’68 generation, the vile and vilified incarnation of all that was wrong with the French mandarin elite, so by 1983 he was—in the opinion of some of the same people, now shorn of their illusions and ideals—the best hope for a revival of liberal thought. Institutes and journals sprang up to continue his work and pursue his objectives. Upon the funeral pyre of Sartrean radicalism a new generation of French intellectuals began to erect a monument to Aronian reason.

To anyone who recalls the hostility that Aron encountered in the French academic and intellectual establishment over the course of nearly three decades following the end of World War II, this was a striking reversal of fate. Raymond Aron lived just long enough to experience this transformation—hastened by the publication of his Mémoires in the year of his death—which gave him some pleasure and much cause for ironic reflection. Having knowingly chosen the discomforts of honesty and clarity in a political and intellectual culture marked by confusion and bad faith, Aron never complained at his exclusion from the mainstream intellectual community. But despite his widely acknowledged impact upon generations of students, his respectful audience among the readers of his column in Le Figaro, and his admirers in the fellowship of scholars across four continents, Aron was largely excluded from the company of his peers in France. He lived much of his adult life on the periphery of his natural home.

There is, of course, something mildly counterintuitive about describing Raymond Aron as peripheral. He was, in one sense, a consummate insider, an exemplary Frenchmen of his generation and pedigree. Born in 1905 (the same year as Sartre), he followed the career path of an outstandingly successful scholar, surpassing his peers at every stage. He attended the elite classes of the Lycée Condorcet, was admitted to the Ecole Normale Supérieure at a time when it was still the leading grande école of the country, took the national agrégation in philosophy in 1928 and was awarded first place. He prepared and defended a doctoral thesis in philosophy and was universally regarded as the most promising philosopher of his generation when World War II put a temporary end to his academic career.

After the war he postponed his return to the university for a while, turning

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.