Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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article
EJPT
European Journal
of Political Theory
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.
k e y w o r d s : Aron, Marx, the political, radical Prometheanism, contradiction versus
antimony
In The Critique of Dialectical Reason, the French existentialist philosopher JeanPaul Sartre famously declared that Marxism is the unsurpassable philosophy of
our era. Sartres was an unqualified judgment, the intemperate assertion of a
philosopher turned fellow traveler and sometime apologist for totalitarianism.
Raymond Arons approach to Marx and Marxism was considerably more balanced. He spent 50 years of his life studying the writings of Marx. On the one
hand, he admired Marxs ambition to capture the nature of social reality and
learned much from his penetrating analyses of modern political economy. At the
same time, Aron reluctantly concluded that there was an intimate connection
between the Marxism of Marx and the tragedies of the 20th century. In his view,
Marxs revolutionary dogmatism, his disparagement of representative institutions, his articulation of a global historical determinism that denied the autonomy
of politics and the human element in historical becoming, all played crucial roles
in shaping the totalitarian propensities of 20th-century Marxism.
Contact address: David J. Mahoney, Assumption College, 500 Salisbury Street,
Worcester, MA 01609, USA
Email: dmahoney@eve.assumption.edu
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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
more to his engagement with Marx than his reading of Tocqueville, have tended
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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 session 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 conception 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 production, 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 disconcerting 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 chapter, Aron speculates that Marxs belief that revolution could resolve the enigmas
of history and establish for the first time a truly non-antagonistic regime reflected 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 conditions 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 intellectual 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 conclusions. 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
alienation of human work that he identified with the division of labor and the
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Pre Pierre Bigo. Nonetheless, Aron believed that both the partisans of the philosophical and scientific readings of Marx ignored the path announced by Marx
himself. The subtitle of Capital is A Critique of Political Economy. The idea of
critique provides the key to reconciling the partial truth in both the philosophical and scientific readings of Capital.
Aron rather wryly remarks that one could not imagine David Ricardo engaging
in a critical reflection on political economy (p. 445). The mature Marx remained
faithful to the critical project by aiming to give it a rigorously scientific
foundation. What the work of the early and late Marx have in common is the
desire to dispel illusions, to root social analysis in the concrete conditions of
human existence. If the critique of religion entailed both a blistering expos of
religious illusions and of the social conditions that gave rise to them, then the
critique of political economy must demonstrate both how the contradictions of
capitalism will finally give rise to its self-destruction and how the bourgeois
economists and other defenders of the liberal order do not begin to understand
the contradictions internal to capitalist reality (p. 446).
In an extensive discussion, Aron carefully delineates Marxs analysis of surplus
value or profit. While recognizing that Marxs analysis illuminates important
features of the modern economy, Aron finally concludes that the doctrine of
surplus value is both non-operational (p. 458) and non-refutable (p. 456). If
capitalists only give workers what is necessary for themselves and their families to
survive according to the habits of a given society, then what can account for the
growing prosperity of capitalist societies over the past century and a half? And how
can one ever prove that salaried workers are being fairly or unfairly remunerated
for their work if, by definition, profit is a form of exploitation? The idea of surplus
value can account for the growing misery and prosperity of society at the same
time and thus is finally capable of explaining nothing. But to say that the concept
of surplus value is finally non-operational for the science of political economy is
not to suggest that it is without intellectual interest. Marx had many insightful
things to say about the crucial role of capital accumulation in the economic
development of modern societies. And his analysis of surplus value inspired
important critiques of communist totalitarianism that pointed out the crucial similarities between communist regimes and the bureaucratic despotisms of the past.
Arons analysis should convince even the most skeptical reader that the
mysteries of Capital are well worth exploring. Aron ably conveys how in that work
Marx brilliantly highlights the relentlessly transformative character of capitalist
society. Marx illustrates how, in striking contrast to the essentially conservative
nature of all premodern social orders, capitalism ceaselessly transforms every economic and social relation. All that is solid melts in the air, as Marx famously
put it in the first part of The Communist Manifesto. Aron notes that Schumpeters
influential notion of the creative destructive propensities of capitalist societies is
heavily indebted to Marxs earlier analysis in Capital. And while Marx was clearly
wrong when he prognosticated about the inevitable self-destruction of capitalist
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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 consequences 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 adequacy 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 principles 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 content. 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 critique of political economy, a critique rooted in the identification of religion with
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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)
human beings against the ideological abstractions so dear to Marx and his
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