Nothing prevents us from understanding, nothing obliges us to hate those whom we fight against.

Raymond Aron

In March 1968, Jean Monnet, the founding father of what is today known as the European Union, wrote to Raymond Aron to praise his passion, clarity, responsibility, and courage. A month later, Claude Lévi-Strauss himself sent a letter to Aron in which he expressed his admiration for Aron’s balanced tone, moderation, and firmness in his book De Gaulle, Israël et les Juifs. Both recognized that it was a real privilege to live in a civilization which had made possible the existence and expression of judicious and civil opinions like Aron’s, whose writings stood out as an example of lucid political judgment in an age of extremes.

For all the admiration expressed by these sacred figures of French culture and society, Raymond Aron has yet to gain the recognition that he fully deserves. Although Aron was a major representative of the European liberal tradition during the Cold War, he remains a relatively marginal figure in the English-speaking world. To give just one example, Samuel Moyn’s recent Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times had no place for Aron, arguably the most important Cold War liberal. It is surprising (and, frankly, disappointing) how little he is read and taught today by political theorists and international relations scholars, although he authored classic books such as Peace and War and Clausewitz. Aron produced informed commentaries on topics as diverse as the Algerian crisis, the student’s revolts of May 1968, the failures of America’s foreign policy, and the nature of the Soviet Union regime, all of which can still be read with great profit for their political acumen. Aron’s Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection and Le Spectateur éngage, his dialogue with two younger journalists translated into English as Thinking Politically, remain essential reading for understanding his life and works.

Liberty was a central topic for Aron as it was for other Cold War liberals such as Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, and Friedrich von Hayek. Some political philosophers prefer to start from an imaginary state of nature and a hypothetical social contract from which they deduct individual rights and obligations. Aron was skeptical of such approaches. He did not like to use the word ‘liberty’ in the singular, and was aware that we always enjoy certain freedoms even if we can never exercise all of the liberties we dream of. In many cases, the freedoms we have also imply restrictions or prohibitions for others. One might be tempted to try to come up with a general theory of liberty for all societies, but that, too, is bound to lead to poor results. Some definitions of freedom are too abstract, while others are so evident that they are devoid of any real meaning. 

In his writings and particularly in his last lecture on liberty and equality at the Collège de France in 1978, Aron took a different approach. An English translation of this important address has just been published by Princeton University Press, in a volume titled Liberty and Equality. It is accompanied by an excellent essay by Aron’s favorite student, Pierre Manent, and a brief foreword by Mark Lilla. Manent points out that Aron always started from what is, much like Aristotle did two thousand years ago. What he wrote about liberty as well as authority, equality, and power was derived from a careful analysis of the types of society and social structures to which these concepts are related.      

Aron sought to specify the concrete content of our liberties in democratic modern societies without pretending to offer a theory of liberty. He preferred to speak of ‘liberties’ in the plural and identified several categories of freedoms. The first one includes personal liberties that protect individuals against the abuse of state authorities or other groups. Among them, Aron highlighted the protection against the abuse of the judiciary, the freedom of movement and travel, the freedom to choose one’s employment, and the freedom of enterprise. To this list, one could also add religious liberty along with the freedom of opinion and of expression. The second category includes political liberties—the freedom to vote, to protest, and assembly—while the third category comprises social liberties, often known as social rights, such as the right to social security or the right to form unions and strike.

In his 1978 lecture, Aron recognized that all these liberties are inevitably imperfect in Western societies, but he also maintained that all things considered, Western liberal democracies have been more successful than other rival regimes at protecting and guaranteeing them. Aron rejected the distinction between formal and real liberties proposed by Marxists, who tend to have a dismissive attitude toward formal liberties. In his opinion (which I share), personal and political liberties are real, eminently concrete liberties that also have a significant symbolic power. They limit abuses of power and serve as the essential condition of other liberties. In spite of the persistence of economic inequalities, the right to vote gives voice to the equality of all citizens by allowing them to freely choose those who govern. This truth may not be so apparent to those born in liberal democracies who take these freedoms for granted, but it is evident to those who have previously lived under totalitarian regimes and been deprived of the right to express their opinions, the right to assemble and travel. Only when these liberties are violated or eliminated do we become aware of their precious value. 

In his final lecture, Aron went a step further than most classical liberals to admit that social liberties are also real liberties that must be given their due. “They are in effect the necessary conditions of the exercise of certain liberties, or even it’s an attempt to attenuate the power gap between those who hold authority and those who submit to authority.” Such liberties, he added, will always be necessary given the unequal structure of professional life and the differences between the few who are in the position to command and the many who must obey. By defending a moderate version of the welfare state, Aron distanced himself from its  right-wing critics who equated it with totalitarianism. He also made it clear what separated his position from libertarians who narrowly conceive of liberty as resistance to the abuses of the state. “Our liberties,” Aron wrote, “are defined as once thanks to the State and against it,” and we always expect the state to guarantee and protect some of our liberties, even if we can never fully be sure that it will not overstep its boundaries. (There are a few oddities in translation that will be discussed in greater detail below.)

This helps explain why Aron distanced himself from those like Hayek who conceived of liberty strictly as absence of coercion. Since social life inevitably implies the exercise of power, it will also always involve a certain degree of coercion and domination. Whether we like it or not, Aron wrote, the governments of societies will always be characterized by the power of some individuals over others and will involve a certain degree of inequality. In his 1961 review of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, a book that he otherwise genuinely admired, Aron maintained that it is impossible to have a single uniform criterion for identifying and eliminating coercion in all spheres of life. In reality, the definition of coercion and freedom varies with circumstances and always has a certain subjective component, influenced by how individuals perceive the network of power and authority in society. “The domination of man by man,” Aron warned, “exists in all societies known at the present time; what differentiates between societies is the mode of exercising this power by ruling minorities and the guarantees that the State or these powers are able to give to the governed.”      

In this regard, he insisted, there were fundamental differences between an imperfect liberal regime like the American republic and the totalitarian regime of the former Soviet Union. Overall, Aron believed, the imperfect liberties and rights people enjoy under liberal democratic regimes are real and should not be underestimated. These societies manage to avoid the severe privation of liberty that occurs in other regimes and offer the possibility to freely express one’s thoughts, to assemble, protest, and vote. They secure individual rights and maintain the rule of law and legality in the exercise of power, something that has been quite rare in the history of mankind to date.

It is a proof of Aron’s open-mindedness and moderation that he resisted any sort of liberal triumphalism. Writing in the aftermath of the students’ revolts of 1968, he understood that some will always have the feeling of being unfree even in the midst of an open society, no matter what. This is because no society offers total freedom from domination or alienation. Some might be tempted to reject liberal democratic regimes for being hypocritical and oppressive and seek to replace them with ones that promise total freedom. While he remained immune to the sirens’ songs of ideologies, Aron insisted that the debate about liberty, and the kind of society we want to live in, must always remain open, given the existence of inequalities which relate to unequal opportunities and limited resources. “The more we are drawn to defining liberty by the capacity or the power of doing,” Aron wrote in a Tocquevillian vein, “the more inequality appears to us unacceptable.” At the same time, he reminded his younger critics and readers why it is not possible to eliminate power, authority, and hierarchy from social, professional, and political life and invited them to study the complex rules and institutions of modern industrial society before dismissing it as a system of oppression. 

Aron’s moderation is on full display when it comes to assessing the virtues and limits of contemporary society. If he expressed concerns about the decline of the civic spirit, his tone was always measured and balanced, never dismissive or categorical, paying attention to and leaving room fo nuances. “Today, in the majority of Western societies,” he wrote, “liberty essentially means the liberation of the desires. Not only are we in a hedonistic society, that’s obvious, but I would say also that today, the enemy is the State or power qua the enemy of individual desires; the enemy is also all the prohibitions and all the institutions which, in effect, limit the liberty of the individual as a being of desire.” 

For many, liberty means little more than individual autonomy, choice, and the liberation of desires. Aron believed that this is one of the factors that may account for the moral crisis of liberal democracy. We treasure the right to choose our path and live the kind of life we want, and that is not necessarily a bad thing, but we no longer know today what virtue is and where it may be found. It is virtually impossible to agree on a definition of the virtuous citizen or to speak about civic duties and take them seriously. Our schools and universities train students to think about their rights as individuals but they are mostly silent about their duties as citizens. As a result, Aron concluded, one can no longer be sure “whether in our societies there is still a representation of the good society, nor a representation of the ideal or accomplished man.”

As a sociologist who had studied the works of Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, Aron was conscious of how much had been gained and lost in the rapid transitions of the modern era. “Is the glory of Europe extinguished for ever? he asked this provocative question in a lesser-known text, La société industrielle, humaine ou inhumaine, written in 1964 and first published in German in 1965. Was he yet another nostalgic conservative who bemoaned the decline of civicness in modern society and proposed a return to an imaginary golden past? Not at all. Aron never abandoned his faith in liberal democratic regimes and remained to the end an engaged spectator, ready to speak to both the Left and the Right while maintaining his intellectual independence and integrity (for an example of Aron’s intellectual independence, I recommend watching his last public appearance on September 23, 1983 in the Apostrophe series of Bernard Pivot.) As an exemplary representative of a long and distinguished tradition of political moderation, he understood that modern democratic societies are no longer capable of reaching the spiritual consensus of previous eras, nor can they be unified under the scepter of science, as Auguste Comte once predicted. They are bound to be pluralistic and have a threefold ideal: bourgeois citizenship, technological efficiency, and the right of the individual to choose the path of his salvation. Each of these principles is legitimate and necessary, and none may be sacrificed for the sake of another. Liberty, equality, and efficiency often clash, and legislators must work to find an acceptable modus vivendi between them. Moderation and compromise are two means of making democracy work.

The way Aron chose to end the last lecture of his career should be a lesson to all those who confidently announce or predict the death of liberalism today, on both the Left and the Right. He accused no party and managed to remain impartial and fair in his assessment. His words deserve to be quoted in full for their humility and lucidity:

I don’t want to conclude anything, I am simply saying that our societies, the imperfections of which we critique with a just title, represent today, in relation to the majority of the societies of the world, a happy exception. … I do not conclude that they are condemned to die. Still less do I conclude that the societies of the rest of humanity are called to organize their communal life on our model. I say that we ought never to forget, to the extent that we love liberties or liberty, that we enjoy a privilege rare in history and rare in space. 

In the past three decades, Transactions Publishers has republished some of Aron’s most important writings such as The Opium of the Intellectuals and The Committed Observer, yet much more remains to be done to allow his work to be better known in English-speaking world (the situation may be a bit better in France but not by much). The decision of Princeton University Press to publish this valuable work must be applauded. Any new translation of his work, especially by a university press, is a step in the right direction; yet, Samuel Zeitlin’s translation has a few regrettable infelicities. If translating sûreté by “surety” instead of security is contestable, “denuded of meaning” should have certainly been “devoid of meaning.” “Assemblage of western societies” sounds equally awkward and inaccurate. But one the most serious mistranslations can arguably be found on the last page of the lecture, where the correct sentence should have been “these societies which make power emerge from the peaceful and regulated conflict between the groups and parties” (instead of “make power move toward rule-bound and pacific conflict between the groups and the parties”).

I believe that it would be difficult for the readers unacquainted with Aron’s work to fully understand the lessons of his last lecture if they limit themselves only to what he said in 1978. The originality and importance of Aron’s message may be grasped best if read along with his book Essai sur les libertés (1965, translated into English as An Essay on Freedom) as well as two seminal essays, “La définition libérale de la liberté“ and “Liberté, libérale, or libertaire.” Echoes of all these writings, including the idea that the socialist critique of the liberal order had fostered the progress of the liberal democratic synthesis, can be found in his last address at the Collège de France. Essai sur les libertés grew out of three lectures given by Aron at the University of California in April 1963, at the invitation of the Jefferson Lectures Committee. They set up an interesting intellectual dialogue between Tocqueville and Marx on the nature and possibility of freedom in modern society, a dialogue that continues today. Taken together, all these writings form a coherent whole and could (should?) be republished in a single volume allowing us to compare Aron’s views on liberty with the ideas of other prominent political theorists who have written on similar topics, such as Isaiah Berlin or Hannah Arendt.

Today, those who are disillusioned with the failures of liberal democracies are tempted again to return to Marx for inspiration or to seek regime change. I believe that if Aron were alive in 2024, he would keep on doing exactly what he had done all his life. He would continue to embrace political moderation and criticize those who disparage formal freedoms in the name of an imaginary, perfect society that promises greater real freedoms and an end to oppression and exploitation. To those who confidently proclaim the death of liberalism, he would repeat that “politics is never a conflict between good and evil, but always a choice between the preferable and the detestable.” Finally, Aron would remind all of us that the imperfect liberal societies in which we are privileged to live are a happy exception in the history of mankind. That, he would add, is no small matter. It should be a powerful incentive to cherish and preserve our values, norms, and institutions while trying to improve them in a piecemeal manner.