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a b s t r a c t : Central to his own fruitful study of modern society and politics, of the
stakes and twists-and-turns of the dramatic twentieth century, was Raymond Arons
fifty year engagement with Marx and Marxism. In a series of lecture courses (and
elsewhere) Aron provided a comprehensive, balanced, and judicious exposition and
appreciation of Marxs intellectual itinerary. On one hand, Marx helpfully highlighted
various tensions in liberal-bourgeois society. On the other hand, however, his
apolitical, materialistic explanations of them and, especially, his prediction of
capitalisms explosive self-overcoming proved grossly inadequate. In addition to being
a special sort of social scientist, Marx was a Promethean humanist who rejected all
natural and social limits and who claimed to scientifically predict the coming of the
true and real City of Man. Arons own balanced social analysis and his humane,
sober, reformist thought stand in stark contrast.
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. . . the road that led me to what is called my liberalism begins with the critique of Marx
and passed through the reading of Max Weber and the lived experience of totalitarian
regimes. At the end of the road, I discovered Tocqueville and I was won over by the man
as much as I was by the sociologist or the historian.4
Any adequate account of Arons liberalism must thus come to terms with his
critique of Marx, his reading of Weber, his critique of totalitarianism as well as his
discovery in the 1950s of the deep affinities between his thought and the political
liberalism of Montesquieu and Tocqueville. Some early reviewers of this book,
carried away by the discovery that the author of The Opium of the Intellectuals owed
416 more to his engagement with Marx than his reading of Tocqueville, have tended
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In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are
indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a
definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these
relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation,
on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms
of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social,
political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that 417
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In the thought of the mature Marx, political institutions and disputations, literary
and other artistic productions, and philosophical and religious ideas are more or
less ideological reflections of underlying and truly determinative social relations.
When the Czech dissident turned statesman Vclav Havel addressed a joint ses-
sion of the American Congress in February 1990 he announced to his befuddled
audience that consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around.8
That seemingly abstruse observation was in fact nothing less than a revolutionary
utterance of the first order, an attack on an orthodoxy central to the Marxist con-
ception of reality. Without the conviction that material conditions determine the
consciousness of men, everything else in Marxism is open to question. By 1848
Marx had rejected every idealistic account of human being and society. He no
longer spoke of a human essence as he had in some of his earlier philosophical
writings. By The Communist Manifesto, Marx had also arrived at his purported
discovery of a fundamental contradiction between forces and relations of pro-
duction, a contradiction that could only be resolved by revolutionary action on the
part of the proletarian class. Marx was no doubt correct to observe a disconcert-
ing gap between the immense productive capacities of the capitalist economy and
the misery of much of the industrial working classes. But he was wrong to believe
that only revolution could bridge this gap and the hopes that he placed in the
revolutionary transformation of humanity were truly extravagant. In a later chap-
ter, Aron speculates that Marxs belief that revolution could resolve the enigmas
of history and establish for the first time a truly non-antagonistic regime re-
flected both his tempestuous revolutionary temperament and his residual
Hegelianism (p. 300). For a revolutionary who cut his teeth on the writings of
Hegel, contradictions needed to be definitively resolved. The thought that the
class which had nothing else to lose, that embodied the misery of man under con-
ditions of late capitalism, could inaugurate the reign of humanity appealed to both
the revolutionary and the Hegelian in Marxs soul.
In his measured presentation of the development of Marxs thought, Aron
shows that Hegel was Marxs cherished interlocutor as well as his principal intel-
lectual reference point. But it cannot be said that Marx was Hegelian in any strict
sense of that term. The youthful Marx used an essentially Hegelian vocabulary
that he quickly turned against the system and thought of the master. As early as
his Introduction to the Critique of the Philosophy of Right of Hegel (1844)
Marx used the methods and spirit of critical philosophy to subvert Hegelian con-
clusions. Marx rejected the mediation of the state as an instrument for resolving
the tensions inherent in the historical condition of man and located the real
foundation of social life in the material conditions of civil society. His critique of
Hegels Philosophy of Right led to an even more fundamental critique of the
418 alienation of human work that he identified with the division of labor and the
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I have taken a long time to convince myself but I dont believe that it is possible to refuse
this conclusion that in the eyes of Marx, the source of all the evils of humanity resides in
commodity form more radically than in private property, which, it seems to me, is only the
social condition of the existence of commodity form. (p. 680)
For Marx, the abolition of alienation finally demands that the economy itself be
abolished (p. 680). In this sense Lenins war communism, the coercive effort to
abolish commerce and property in all their forms, the ruthless struggle to subdue
the independent proprietor and the petty merchant, was a logical consequence of
the Marxist critique of political economy (p. 680).
Profoundly moved by his reading of Solzhenitsyn and other Soviet dissidents,
Aron was less equivocal in 1977 about the ultimate human and political conse-
quences of Marxism. In this text, as well as in In Defense of Decadent Europe (1976),
Aron excoriated Marx for replacing balanced social analysis with a prophetism
that masqueraded as a science of society.11 In the 19767 text Aron goes so far as
to call the Marxist claim that the industrial proletariat represents the cause of
humanity an absurdity (p. 681). Aron clearly had arrived at the conclusion that
Marx was not an economist or social scientist in any ordinary sense of those terms
(p. 680). By the end of his life Arons criticisms of Marx were both more radical
and a good deal less courteously delivered than the ones put forward in his
Sorbonne lectures.
There is an important sense, however, in which Arons engagement with Marx
fails to be sufficiently radical. Aron never adequately confronted the limits of
critical philosophy in its Marxist form. In particular, he fails to examine the ade-
quacy of the militant, dogmatic, and even irrational atheism at the heart of the
Marxist enterprise. This failure to fully confront the truth of Marxs atheism is
undoubtedly rooted in an important ambiguity within Arons own thought. On
the one hand, Aron was a non-dogmatic adherent of what he did not hesitate to
call atheistic humanism. On the other hand, he displayed a deep and abiding
respect for the limits inherent in the human condition and therefore rejected the
radical Prometheanism at the heart of almost every current of modern thought.
He was repulsed by an immanentist philosophy of history that denied any princi-
ples above the human will. He affirmed a transcendent realm above the praxis of
men even if he could not give that realm any supernaturalist definition or con-
tent. Still Marx must be given a full and fair hearing, so Aron faithfully reports
how the Marxist critique of religion eventually gave rise to the mature Marxs cri-
424 tique of political economy, a critique rooted in the identification of religion with
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. . . the contradiction between the subjectivity of work and the objectivity of the world of
commodities; the contradiction between the Promethean will of social control and the
unpredictability of the market; the contradiction between the liberty and equality of
political agents, citizens on the one hand and the inequality and dependence of economic
agents on the other. (p. 682)
Because of the continuing relevance of these concerns, Marxs work will continue
to speak to us long after the collapse of the regimes that ruled in his name. But
Aron goes on to point out the terrible inadequacy of the Hegelian language of
contradiction at the heart of the Marxian project. Contradiction is a term of
logic; it calls for a radical solution (p. 682). Aron, ever sensitive to the antinomic
character of social and political life, preferred to speak of tensions or conflicts
or oppositions (p. 682). In an admirable spirit of intellectual moderation, Aron
reminds his readers that the reasonable man tries to understand and moderate
conflicts rather than attempting to eliminate them altogether. The latter is the
path of intellectual fanaticism and ideocratic despotism. Therefore, despite his
enduring fascination with the thought of Marx, Aron chose another path
altogether. He rejected the revolutionary effort to abolish contradictions by a
Promethean enterprise of social transformation (p. 682). Aron turned critical
philosophy against itself by appealing to the needs of flesh and blood (p. 682)
426 human beings against the ideological abstractions so dear to Marx and his
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Notes
1. Raymond Aron (2002) Le Marxisme de Marx. Preface and notes by Jean-Claude Casanova
and Christian Bachelier. Paris. ditions de Fallois.
2. For his own account of the affinities between his thought and the liberalism of
Montesquieu and Tocqueville, see Raymond Aron (1998) Main Currents of Sociological
Thought, vol. 1, with a new introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson
and a foreword by Pierre Manent, pp. 3323. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
3. Ibid.
4. See Aron (1994) On Tocqueville, in In Defense of Political Reason: Essays by Raymond Aron,
ed. Daniel J. Mahoney, p. 176. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
5. Raymond Aron (1967) Les tapes de la pense sociologique, p. 21. Paris: Gallimard.
6. Rosanvallons review of Le Marxisme de Marx appeared in Le Monde (31 Jan. 2003) under
the misleading title Raymond Aron prefrrait Marx Tocqueville.
7. Quoted on p. 46 of Arons text. I have used the translation in Robert C. Tucker (ed.)
(1978) The MarxEngels Reader, p. 4. New York: Norton.
8. See Vclav Havel (2001) Address to a Joint Session of Congress, in Peter Augustine
Lawler and Robert Martin Schaefer (eds) American Political Rhetoric, pp. 20710, and
p. 208 for the quotation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
9. Aron had already developed this argument in his chapter on The Sociologists and the
Revolution of 1848 in Main Currents, vol. 1, pp. 30333, esp. pp. 32130.
10. The essay can be found in Aron (1984) Politics and History, tr. and ed. Miriam Bernheim
Conant, with a new introduction by Michael A. Ledeen, pp. 13965. The quote is from
p. 160. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
11. Arons indebtedness to Solzhenitsyn is most apparent in the opening chapter (Marxs
Messianism and its Misadventures) of (1979) In Defense of Decadent Europe, pp. 327.
South Bend, IN: Regnery/Gateway.
12. For a representative discussion, see Aron (1989) Essais sur la condition juive contemporaine,
ed. Perrine Simon-Nahum, p. 212. Paris: ditions de Fallois. 427
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