This book continues Raymond Aron’s presentation of the “great doctrines of historical sociology.” In Main Currents in Sociological Thought, volume 1, Aron examined three rival traditions of sociological reflection, those inaugurated by Marx and Comte, as well as the “French school of political sociology,” represented by Montesquieu and Tocqueville and of which he presents himself as a “belated descendent.” Like its predecessor, this volume is based on lectures originally presented at the Sorbonne in 1959. Although they have been touched up a bit and a scholarly apparatus has been added, the lectures remain remarkably faithful to Aron’s original presentation and hence capture his profound lucidity as a teacher. In Main Currents, volume 2, Aron turns to the three great theorists who shaped sociology as it entered the twentieth century: Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), the distinguished French sociologist who affirmed the determinative influence of the “social milieu” and who exhibited a supreme confidence in the possibility of a “science of society” that would overcome the anomie and atomism of modern society; Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), the Italian “neo-Machiavellian,” who scorned liberal humanitarianism as a “residue” unrelated to genuine scientific or “logico-experimental” thought and who proclaimed that every society is built upon the ineliminable distinction between elites and masses; and Max Weber (1864–1920), the incomparably erudite German historian, economist, and sociologist who tried to save the possibility of science after what he, following Nietzsche, saw as the incontestable “death of god,” the crumbling of metaphysical supports for human hopes and aspirations. The three men left a powerful impression on both the social scientific enterprise and the common consciousness of our age.
In their distinctive ways, each provided powerful alternatives to the Marxist analysis of modern society and understanding of the sociological enterprise. Durkheim challenges the pessimistic Marxist emphasis on inexpiable class struggle; Pareto opposes its optimism regarding the ultimate resolution of the political question through egalitarian revolution; and Weber defends a place for the human element against all determinisms. As Pierre Manent observes in his Foreword to volume 1 of Main Currents, Aron was especially attracted to those figures such as Montesquieu and Weber who attempted to do justice to the claims of both science and human freedom and who understood that science should aim to enlighten but not replace prudential judgment. Aron shows in the two volumes of Main Currents that the Comtean-Durkheimean vision of an all-encompassing “science of society” and Marx’s historicist dogmatism do not exhaust the sociological possibilities.
Aron’s portraits of Durkheim, Pareto, and Weber are penetrating, remarkably synoptic, and comprehensive. Each of these thinkers, Aron observes, aimed at more than methodological clarity or scientific rigor; while attempting to explore the possibilities and limits of a science of human action, each interpreted what is distinctive about modern society and attempted to articulate the features of an emerging global or universal history. In his broader reflections opening and closing the volume, Aron discretely emphasizes the sterility social science experiences when it abandons the humanizing ambition to reflect comprehensively on the larger social whole within which it operates. As a political liberal and critic of Marxist historicism, Aron does not associate the effort to move beyond partial and narrowly empirical studies with a “totalizing” approach to history or politics; rather he sees in it the necessary effort by social science to understand the society which is its subject matter, the world within which human and political choices are made.
Despite their sometimes radical theoretical and political differences, Durkheim, Pareto, and Weber shared a common ambition to formulate a science of human action, while never forgetting the tensions and complicities that mark the relationship between thought and action and science and politics. This unceasing reflection on the problem of science and society was no mere methodological exercise. Rather, it was the constant practical or existential concern of sociologists who remained public-spirited despite their “scientific” efforts to rigorously separate facts and values, at least in the cases of Pareto and Weber. (This is true even of the cynical Pareto. In large part, he was concerned with protecting both science and society against the moralistic superstitions of a decadent and sentimentalized “humanitarianism.”) In his portraits of these theorists, Aron never artificially separates their scientific and political concerns. Such an effort to scientize or excessively generalize their thought (an effort that can be associated with the work of Talcott Parsons) ends by profoundly distorting it. Aron is intent on respecting their integrity as thinkers who are at once social scientists, philosophers, and interpreters of the political condition of modern man. He blessedly spares the reader moralistic sermons on the illicit character of such eclecticism and he never laments their failure, in practice, to separate rigorously science and politics and facts and values.
We might be tempted to read the second volume of Main Currents in Sociological Thought as a vindication of Weber against his rivals, much as volume 1 can be read as an endorsement of the “French school of political sociology” against the more sociologically reductive and politically visionary approaches of Marx and Comte. There is some truth in both of these readings. But just as Aron’s choice for Montesquieu and Tocqueville over Marx and Comte is dialectical in character and marked by genuine respect for the thinkers whose systems he finally rejects, so Aron makes every effort to do full justice to Durkheim and Pareto. (And this despite his self-described “allergy” to the fundamental assumptions of Durkheimianism, in particular.) In addition, Aron raises enough suspicions about the brooding pessimism and quasi-Nietzschean pathos of Weber to qualify his own “Weberianism.” For Aron, “Max Weber is the greatest of the sociologists; … he is the sociologist” (p. 222). But as we shall see, Aron himself is no simple partisan of Weber or of the modern sociological enterprise in its standard or established forms.
Aron’s portraits are so clear and suggestive that there is very little that one can or should add by way of commentary. We will limit ourselves to a few observations on Aron’s treatment of each of these thinkers in order to highlight what is original to Aron’s interpretations as well as the distinctiveness of his own thought in relation to each.
We have already referred to Aron’s opposition to Durkheimian sociology. Aron thoroughly rejected Durkheim’s quest for a “science of society” which self-consciously—and hubristically—aimed to replace religion as the source of common affections and obligations. Aron was, in fact, Durkheim’s cousin but this in no way attenuated his uncharacteristically fierce response to his thought, a response moderated, however, by an accompanying effort to understand it. Durkheim, following August Comte’s lead, exaggerated the possibilities for consensus in society and downplayed the permanently agonistic and tragic features of human and political life. As a result, Durkheim and his sociological epigones provide little help in grasping properly political phenomena. They had next to nothing to say about the wars, revolutions, and clash of ideologies that so ravaged the twentieth century. Moreover, Aron believed Durkheim’s sociology of religion gave rise to an especially dogmatic form of atheism. Aron feared that authentic religious experience—rooted in the experience of transcendence—would “vanish” in a system like Durkheim’s, which redefined religion as a manifestation of society’s collective self-worship. A non-believing Jew who nonetheless shared the believer’s respect for a transcendent space above the social order or the human will, Aron bristled at Durkheim’s sanctification of the social order: “in my eyes the essence of impiety is precisely the worship of the social order” (p. 51). Nor did Aron approve of Durkheim’s indirect but important role in the kulturkampf which divided the French after 1875; Durkheim had provocatively intervened in that conflict by claiming that human beings must choose between “morality and divinity.” In doing so, Durkheim elevated himself to high priest of a secular or positivist morality that allowed no place for authentic religious belief. Aron was too much of a good citizen to exacerbate irresponsibly the tensions between believing and nonbelieving Frenchmen. But he was also a reasoned critic of the effort to identify rationalism or social science with any species of dogmatic atheism, whether in the form of a science of morality or a religion of humanity. Despite a certain admiration for his intellectual achievement, Aron’s allergy for Durkheim persisted. For Aron, Durkheim represented a sociologism which underplayed the continuing political stakes in modern society, exaggerated the possibilities for a law-governed science of society, and falsely identified rationalism with a religion of humanity and the self-deification of society. Durkheim’s way was decidedly not Aron’s way.
Pareto undoubtedly shared Durkheim’s dogmatic atheism—but not his optimism or moralism. As Aron underscores, Pareto is a disillusioned descendant of the rationalist thought of the eighteenth century. The Italian theorist accepts and even radicalizes the chasm between the enlightened (the practitioners of “logico-experimental” thought) and the unenlightened, although he extends the critique of reason to the moralistic denizens of a new form of humanitarian and pseudo-rationalistic superstition. Pareto is the acid ironist, the embittered critic of the decadence of soft, democratic elites, blind to the harsh realities of collective life. For Aron, Pareto is less a precursor of fascism than a cynical critic of liberalism, who nonetheless can remind partisans of the regime of liberty that even a liberal society needs virtue in the Machiavellian sense. Partisans of liberal society need to be reminded, to use Pareto’s terminology, that the maximum utility for a social order (the greatest good for the greatest number) is not coextensive with the maximum utility of the collectivity (its power or glory).
In his writings on communist and National Socialist totalitarianism, Aron freely adapted Pareto’s sociology of elites and his recognition of the fundamentally inegalitarian or oligarchical character of every social order. Pareto and the other neo-Machiavellians, such as Michels and Mosca, helped Aron to think through the necessarily inegalitarian consequences of a supposedly egalitarian revolution such as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, as well as the fascist “substitution” of “decadent,” humanitarian elites by violent, ruthless, revolutionary ones in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Aron thus affirms the partial truth of the neo-Machiavellians: that all societies are divided into elites and masses—a partial truth that helps disenchant the dangerously enchanted politics of the secular religions. These elites utilize essentially two methods of forging obedience: the path of the lion who relies upon force, and the way of the fox, who displays guile or fraud. But Aron refuses to transform a suggestive framework for sociological analysis into a manipulative philosophy which denies a priori the possibility of a common good or the pacification of social conflict. For Aron, Pareto’s sociology of elites and masses provides important material for a critique of Marxist illusions about the revolutionary transformation of the world and contributes to the demystification of all forms of dogmatic egalitarianism. But Pareto’s sociology is radically inadequate as a social or political philosophy. It exists, Aron recognized, at a too rarified level, at a too high level of intellectual generality. It ignores the perspective of citizens and statesmen because it finally refuses to treat the differences among regimes and ideologies with the requisite seriousness. As Aron insists, the sociology of elites and masses abstracts away from central questions about political legitimacy and largely ignores the import of constitutional arrangements and political institutions. The mere fact of the existence of elites is less politically interesting and pressing than the question of their character, mode of selection, and ultimate accountability to the community as a whole. Pareto’s “neo-Machiavellian” framework is of limited help in accounting for the essential differences between constitutional-pluralistic and ideocratic regimes. As Philippe Bénéton has well noted, “the experience of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century vindicates Pareto against Marx, but it also vindicates Aristotle against Pareto.”1 With these considerations in mind, we find ourselves in a better position to understand why Aron turned away from Pareto toward the thought of Aristotle and Montesquieu when he developed his classification of modern regimes in Democracy and Totalitarianism.2
Still, “residues” of Pareto’s thought persist throughout Aron’s work. His critique of doctrinaire egalitarianism in the conclusion of the 1976 Postface to the Essai sur les libertés and his warnings about the deleterious effects of anti-political humanitarianism and antinomianism in his book In Defense of Decadent Europe clearly owe much to Pareto’s inspiration.3 Aron’s constructive use of Paretonian themes provides evidence that Pareto’s neo-Machiavellianism can be used at the service of a humane but realistic liberal political reflection. But it would not be accurate or precise to call Aron a “neo-Machiavellian.” Aron’s “realism” never degenerated into cynicism of any sort.
Main Currents culminates in Aron’s magisterial treatment of Max Weber. If Aron’s writing is marked by a striking sobriety of expression, Weber’s resonates a pathos which is never very distant from the surface of his work. Weber’s pathos is inseparable from his proto-existentialism, his belief that reason is unable to guide the choice of human ends or goals. As he famously puts it, we must all choose our gods or demons and between these gods there is perpetual and inexpiable conflict. It is not this neo-Nietzschean irrationalism, this evocation of the war of the gods, which drew Aron to Weber. Then what did? In our view, Aron is most indebted to Weber’s critique of historical determinism and his denial of the illusion of retrospective fatalism. The historian or sociologist must always ask the “what if” question. What if different choices had been made by the same men or different men at the same time or in the same circumstances? What would have happened to the development of Greek culture and civilization if the Persians had won the battles of Salamis or Marathon? What would have been the future course of western civilization? Closer to home, what would have been the consequences for European liberty if Hitler had subjugated Churchill and England in 1940? Aron, like Weber and Tocqueville, affirms the importance of the human element which is shaped, but not predetermined by, general causes and larger social forces. There is no global determinism of human affairs. Aron’s defense of “probablistic determinism,” so central to his philosophy of history and his political thought as a whole, is heavily indebted to Weber’s understanding of historical causality.
In addition, Aron highlighted the most “statesmanlike” features of Weber’s political sociology. Aron notes the parallels between the thought of Tocqueville and Weber. Tocqueville combined a recognition of the inexorable or providential triumph of democratic equality with a belief that democratic man must still choose between free and despotic political forms. Aron notes Weber’s quite complementary efforts to safeguard intellectual and political freedom within the “iron cage” of an ever more dominant bureaucratic rationality. It is our view that Aron tried to correct or moderate Weber’s political sociology, by emphasizing its most sober and politically responsible elements. He did so without denying and, in fact, while engaging in a critique of its most pessimistic, “pathetic,” and irresponsible elements. While himself an adamant critic of philosophical and political dogmatism, Aron did not believe that the answer to totalitarian monism was to be found in a proto-existentialist philosophy of relativistic commitment. Aron recognized that there is some connection between philosophical dogmatism and the twentieth-century experience of totalitarian despotism. But this does not mean that a skepticism bordering on nihilism is the proper response to political absolutism. Aron writes:
It must be recognized that Max Weber, with his philosophy of commitment, does not necessarily offer a better protection against the barbarians. The charismatic leader was to provide a refuge against the anonymous domination of the bureaucracy, but we have learned to fear the promises of demagogues more than the banality of rational organization. (p. 228)
Aron faithfully followed Weber in acknowledging the “partial” character of science but did not believe that this somehow implied that moral and political choice were essentially arbitrary or “demonic” in character. Aron’s effort to affirm human universalism while eschewing dogmatism and leaving scope for political prudence is more reminiscent of Montesquieu than Weber. Like Montesquieu, Aron worked to “maintain a balance between the Eurocentrism of the enlightenment and historicism. Science’s universal vocation is not incompatible with the diversity of cultures.”4 Aron is far less dogmatic than Weber because he refuses Weber’s resolute rejection of a universal vocation for humanity and his scorn for the very idea of natural right. Because of his adamant desire to avoid all metaphysical illusions, Weber sometimes succumbed to a cynical philosophy which is difficult to reconcile with his choice for science, his love of truth, his defense of personal and intellectual freedom, and his admirable confidence in the ennobling capacities of political action. Aron’s portrait of Weber culminates in a subtle but substantial correction of Weber’s overwrought pessimism, of the Nietzschean nihilism which informed his philosophy if not all of his sociological work. This correction is not without philosophical interest. As one commentator has eloquently stated, “in some way, it is in part thanks to the Aronian renewal—Aron’s interpretation of Weber as well as Aron’s own personal work—that Max Weber owes his healthiest posterity in European sociology.”5
In our view, the reader is well advised to turn to Aron as a guide for understanding the sociological tradition, the political condition of modern man, and sociology’s reflection on that condition. Aron provides an imitable model of social science reflecting on itself without losing its ambition to interpret the meaning of human destiny or the nature of modern society. And he does so without succumbing to academic jargon or ideological illusions. Without preaching, he provides an alternative to the tendency of social science to culminate in narrow empirical studies on the one hand, and in utopian “totalizing” on the other. The remarkable freshness and contemporaneity of this book lies in this unforced combination of audacity and sobriety. This, too, reflects its essentially classical sobriety: its unforced effort to do justice to the competing demands of science and reason, human freedom, and a moderation worthy of the name.
Daniel J. Mahoney
Brian C. Anderson
March 2018
1 Philippe Bénéton, Les Régimes Politiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), p. 72.
2 Raymond Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism, edited and with an introduction by Roy Pierce (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).
3 See Raymond Aron, In Defense of Decadent Europe, with a new introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996).
4 Raymond Aron, “For Progress—After the Fall of the Idols,” in Daniel J. Mahoney, ed., In Defense of Political Reason (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), p. 170.
5 Pierre Manent, “Raymond Aron—Political Educator,” in Mahoney, In Defense of Political Reason, p. 3.