Carl Schmitt, one of the official theorists of National Socialism, affirms that all political doctrines start from the assumption that man is wicked.
Raymond Aron, 1941Footnote 1
Carl Schmitt never belonged to the National Socialist party. A man of high culture, he could not be a Hitlerian and never was.
Raymond Aron, 1983Footnote 2
Even thirty years removed from his death, Raymond Aron—the sociologist, journalist and Cold War intellectual—may still be the best-known French liberal thinker of the twentieth century. Perry Anderson has recently gone so far as to suggest that in France “the comprehensive rehabilitation of liberal themes and attitudes that set in from the mid-1970s onwards produced no political thinkers to compare even to Aron.”Footnote 3 But this celebration—or in Anderson's case, demonization—of Aron as a font of liberalism has left unanswered what sort of liberal Aron was, and what legacy in French thought his version of liberalism has had.
To address these questions, this essay begins with a disconcerting moment late in Aron's life—one difficult to reconcile with his reputation as the ur-liberal of contemporary France. In his Mémoires, published in the year of his death in 1983, Raymond Aron astonishingly remarked that
Carl Schmitt never belonged to the National Socialist Party. A man of high culture, he could not be a Hitlerian and never was. But right-wing doctrinarian, nationalist, full of disdain toward the Weimar Republic, of which he ruthlessly analyzed the contradictions and agony, he viewed as a jurist Hitler's arrival to power, the formation of the Nazi tyranny. In particular, he interpreted the events of June 30, 1934, “the Night of Long Knives”, presenting the Führer as “supreme judge.” At the time this interpretation could pass for acceptance. Schmitt ceased to be persona grata in the regime before the outbreak of the war. After 1945, he recognized his errors and withdrew to a village in Westphalia.Footnote 4
In response to Aron's surprisingly revisionist view of Schmitt's relation to the Nazis, Françoise Bondy, writing for Commentaire, stated that “with all due respect we owe to our late friend [Aron], Carl Schmitt gave a very good imitation of a Hitler admirer.”Footnote 5 In a similar vein, Joseph Rovan described Aron's statement as an “opinion of strong indulgence” in the volume of Commentaire published in 1985 in honor of Aron's death.Footnote 6 More recently, the political theorist Jan-Werner Müller has weighed in on Aron's appraisal of Schmitt by affirming “that the usually well-informed Aron had it wrong.”Footnote 7 But absent from these assessments is a robust explanation of why Aron, shortly before his death, trivialized Carl Schmitt's involvement with the Nazis.
The question is worth exploring, not only because of Aron's connection to the liberal revival, but also because the first controversy over the reception of Carl Schmitt's work in France occurred only a few years after the publication of Aron's memoirs.Footnote 8 The topic thus presents an uneasy subject for Aron's liberal defenders, who have typically addressed it by disconnecting Aron's statements about Schmitt entirely from his mature thought. From their perspective, Aron's views must not be taken seriously and instead should be understood as the consequence either of Aron's ignorance of Schmitt's oeuvre, or of his tendency to succumb to Schmitt's flattery, or even of Aron's being misled about the nature of Schmitt's Nazi involvement: for how else could the main defender of the liberal faith in France devote himself to salvaging the reputation of the greatest antiliberal of the age?
This essay argues, however, that none of these explanations for Aron's bizarre statements about Schmitt suffice, and that Aron's statements actually provide a crucial aperture into the nature of Aron's liberalism. In fact, based on archival research, it is clear that Aron was intimately familiar with Schmitt's ideas and party affiliation for several decades, never took Schmitt's flattery at face value, and remained unconvinced by any student's efforts to change his mind about Carl Schmitt. Instead, I will begin by placing Aron's comments about Schmitt within his Clausewitz project of the 1970s. Aron's Clausewitz: Philosopher of War must be seen as an attempt to modernize conservatism in consideration of May 1968 and Aron's concerns about the weakness of the French state, along with the lack of a strong tradition of political realism in France. Aron took Schmitt as a guiding inspiration even as he sought to overcome Schmitt's existential interpretation of Clausewitz. By doing so, Aron hoped to establish a rational foundation for political action. Yet Aron's attempt to contain Clausewitz would not only lead to a renewal of interest in Schmitt's thought; it would also revive Aron and Schmitt's correspondence that had lain dormant since the early 1960s. As the 1970s advanced, this would have implications for how Aron viewed Schmitt. This does not imply that Aron became a Schmittian but that his move to the right brought him into much closer proximity to Schmitt (via Clausewitz) than ever before.
To a remarkable extent, Aron's attempt to wrench Clausewitz away from the authoritarianism of the old right reveals something distinctive about the character of Aron's “liberalism.” In this sense the paper shares much in common with the recent work of the French philosopher Serge Audier, who has insisted that the intellectual origins of recent French liberal thought must be placed in a conceptual context that is resolutely antiliberal.Footnote 9
Moreover, this rereading of Aron's sources has a bearing on how to account for his influence. The few works in English that actually address Aron's intellectual legacy almost always stress his writings on Tocqueville during the mid-1960s, which undoubtedly played the key role in the Tocqueville revival in France that continues to this day.Footnote 10 From this perspective, Aron moved away from his early obsession with the work of Max Weber as a consequence of his general disillusionment with German thought following World War II. Instead, according to the conventional wisdom, Aron looked internally to his own national tradition in order to articulate his liberal political vision of the Cold War. In doing so, Aron sought to remind his students that Montesquieu and Tocqueville not only belonged to them,Footnote 11 but were also great thinkers whose writings could be mined for philosophical insights.Footnote 12 According to this view, Aron offered an intellectual alternative in France to “the attractions of German thought [Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche] . . . responsible for the tragic deviations of two generations of French thinkers.”Footnote 13
This interpretation of Aron's significance, however, ignores the fact that he never really abandoned the German tradition; in the 1960s, along with his students, such as Julien Freund, Alain Touraine, and Pierre Bourdieu—despite his differences with the latter two—Aron initiated the most significant reception of Max Weber's thought ever to occur in France, even as Aron sought to distance himself from the illiberal elements of Weber's thought.Footnote 14 During this same decade, Aron's Peace and War among the Nations appeared,Footnote 15 which, as we will see, heavily relied on the international thought of the German jurist Carl Schmitt. Most importantly, Aron dedicated the bulk of his academic energies during the 1970s to his celebrated work on Clausewitz.Footnote 16 In connection with this project, Aron in the early 1970s commissioned the translation of Carl Schmitt's Theory of the Partisan and Concept of the Political—the first works of Schmitt to be translated into French in decades.Footnote 17
To be sure, in France this aspect of Aron's legacy has not been overlooked. A recent eight-hundred-page tome on the French reception of Clausewitz affirms that “in France, the name Clausewitz has often become inseparable from that of Aron’s.”Footnote 18 Moreover, in a series of interviews conducted by Alexis Lacrois, the philosopher Blandine Kriegel recently stated that Carl Schmitt is now one of the most important German thinkers in France.Footnote 19 The polemicist Daniel Lindenberg has suggested that this is the consequence of the antitotalitarian movement in France during the 1970s, and then goes on to hold Raymond Aron, along with his former student Julien Freund, in part responsible for it.Footnote 20 This essay concludes by taking up the implications, for understanding Aron's legacy, of its focus on his German sources generally and his Schmittian inspiration specifically—at just the time he became the avatar of contemporary French liberalism.
TAKING ARON SERIOUSLY
Nearly ten years ago, the French political scientist Philippe Raynaud observed that Raymond Aron's later views about Carl Schmitt were still in need of an explanation:
Contemporary historians, and more generally, those who have followed the rather damning evolution of Carl Schmitt's record, will surely be surprised by the candor of Raymond Aron, who underestimated at the time the intensity and duration of Schmitt's Nazi engagement . . . The heart of the problem lies in the idea that because he was a great mind and a man of high culture, Schmitt could not be a Hitlerian . . . Aron was mistaken, but it remains to know why.Footnote 21
There are very compelling reasons to take Raynaud's question seriously. But let us momentarily ignore Aron's significant role in the postwar reception of Schmitt's work in France. Aron also vindicated Schmitt in the midst of the “Vichy syndrome” that gripped France in the late 1970s and early 1980s.Footnote 22 In the same year in which Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political and Theory of the Partisan appeared in Aron's highly regarded Liberté de l’esprit series, Jean-Pierre Faye published his Langages totalitaires, which accused Schmitt of being the theoretical inspiration behind the Nazi conception of the state.Footnote 23 This would later be followed by Zeev Sternhell's Ni droite ni gauche and Bernard-Henri Levy's L’idéologie française, books that, Aron believed, not only misjudged the nature of fascism, but, in the case of Sternhell, accused Bertrand de Jouvenel—one of Aron's liberal allies—of having fascist sympathies during the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote 24
Moreover, a media firestorm took place in 1979 over the growing membership rate of the French Nouvelle droite—an intellectual movement that drew inspiration from Schmitt's work—which many believed to be an anti-Semitic school of thought with Nazi sympathies.Footnote 25 Although Aron clearly distanced himself from the Nouvelle droite, he readily admitted that they shared a number of common intellectual inspirations.Footnote 26 Yet despite Aron voicing his bizarre statements about Schmitt in this frenzied intellectual context, the standard approach has been to explain away any significance they might entail. By doing so, this perspective seemingly rejects outright the possibility that Aron's admission could provide a window for understanding the nature of his own brand of liberalism. Pointing out the shortcomings of this way of interpreting Aron, however, not only will show the various ways scholars have attempted to shield Aron's liberalism from Schmitt's influence, but more importantly will demonstrate how indebted Aron is to Schmitt's thought.
Joachim Stark has argued that Aron's interpretation of Clausewitz, the early nineteenth-century German military theorist, tacitly relied on the analysis of “Carl Schmitt, with whose teaching Aron was without a doubt only very superficially familiar and whose dangerousness he had therefore misjudged.”Footnote 27 The passage is noteworthy since Stark cites as his defense of Aron's ignorance the “man of high culture” passage in Mémoires. Stark overlooks, however, that on the first page of Philosopher of War Aron remarks that he had read Schmitt's Concept of the Political while in Berlin two years before Hitler came to power. A cursory perusal of the index of Aron's Peace and War between the Nations, published in 1962, indicates that he had read Schmitt's Nomos of the Earth and Land and Sea.Footnote 28 In fact, Aron's correspondence reveals that he attentively followed Schmitt's publications for decades, not to mention his role in having Schmitt's works appear in French translation.
All of this indicates that Aron drew conceptual inspiration from Schmitt's thought years before the publication of his book on Clausewitz. Raynaud has suggested that Aron's appropriations of Schmitt in Peace and War are so significant that it should be viewed as containing a “hidden dialogue with Carl Schmitt.”Footnote 29 For instance, part of Aron's analysis of international politics relied on what he described as a “sense of space”. Accordingly, “the sense of space has been, in each period, determined by the image which men have made for themselves of their habitat, by the style of movement and of combat on land and at sea, by the sake for which societies came into conflict.”Footnote 30 Aron acknowledged that Schmitt pioneered the concept and he then proceeded to take over almost entirely Schmitt's mythological account of the opposition between land and sea without citation.Footnote 31 A little over a decade later Schmitt would remark to one of his disciples that Aron's notion of a sense of space “is the reason for which I speak of Großraum” (an area dominated by a power representing a distinct political idea—this idea was always formulated with a specific opponent in mind).Footnote 32 Aron also seemingly embraced Schmitt's exhortation for rulers not to confuse law and morality, in addition to appropriating Schmitt's conception of politics as a distinction between friends and enemies, albeit with a liberal spin that rejects a notion of politics as “a death-struggle as the basis of order.”Footnote 33 It is no wonder that Schmitt could relay to a friend that “the agreement of my thought and position with that of Raymond Aron's is simply striking.”Footnote 34
Yet what makes Stark's argument even more doubtful, and further complicates Aron's “mature” view of Schmitt, is that Aron knew by at least as early as the 1940s that Schmitt had become a member of the NSDAP. In 1941 Aron, while writing for the French journal La France libre, remarked, “The jurist Carl Schmitt, who became the legal theorist of National Socialism, has written that the Weimar Republic was made of a plurality of totalities and that the Third Reich had drawn the logical conclusion and achieved essential unity.”Footnote 35 Less than a year later in the same journal Aron mentioned Schmitt's party affiliation.Footnote 36 In December 1954, having received a letter from Schmitt for the first time, Aron replied to him by stating that he had “always had a great admiration for the jurist and philosopher” despite his own reactions to the political positions Schmitt had taken. Footnote 37 The letter clearly indicates that Aron made a distinction of some kind between Carl Schmitt “the scholar” and Carl Schmitt “the Nazi Jurist”. This explains why he could also remark that “I am for many years, one of your attentive readers” and that “I have read with profit Nomos of the Earth.”Footnote 38 This view of Schmitt is exactly what Matthias Oppermann refers to when commenting that “even in the 1950s [Aron] knew to distinguish ultimately between the scholar and the alleged or actual “Crown Jurist of the Third Reich.”Footnote 39
Attempting to mitigate his involvement with the NSDAP so as to receive translation into other languages, Schmitt established a network of impressionable younger disciples after World War II who would spread his illiberal political gospel throughout the world, and never missed an opportunity to flatter famous intellectuals impressed by his thought.Footnote 40 Müller defends the thesis that Aron thought of Schmitt as a dangerous mind. While acknowledging that Aron shared many of Schmitt's judgments on international law and politics, Müller stresses what fundamentally divided them. Aron rejected Schmitt's nostalgia for a European legal and political order long past, criticized his account of political enemies for the ease with which a political enemy could easily be reduced to a biological enemy—a clear nod to Aron's awareness of Schmitt's former political association—and distanced himself from Schmitt's rejection of liberal politics in favor of an existential conception of the political leading to potentially apocalyptic solutions to political exceptions. It was for these reasons, explains Müller, that Aron “was always careful to keep his distance from Schmitt.”Footnote 41
Without at all discounting Müller's discussion, his argument does not take into consideration Aron's view of Schmitt near the end of his life. The material Müller cites when making his case most powerfully is the letter Aron wrote to Schmitt on 1 October 1963, after Schmitt sent him copies of Concept of the Political and Theory of the Partisan.Footnote 42 This same attitude remains clearly on display five yearslater when Aron rejected an invitation to participate in a Festschrift for Schmitt's eightieth birthday due to his Nazi past. No doubt Aron continued to appropriate Schmittian terminology while rejecting the conclusions he derived from it throughout the 1970s, a trend that continues to this day with Schmitt's work. But it is clear that Aron's opinion of Carl Schmitt evolved during the 1970s, so much so that by 1983 he would deny that Schmitt ever was a Nazi. It is precisely Aron's shift in thinking about Schmitt that is difficult to reconcile with the thesis that he always regarded him as a brilliant but dangerous thinker.
There is a clue in Müller's rendition of the Schmitt–Aron relationship that provides a potential explanation for Aron's change of mind. According to Müller, it is “clear from Aron's exchanges with his student Julien Freund, who often acted as a go-between for the two men, that Aron was anxious to know what Schmitt really thought of his work.”Footnote 43 And Schmitt's hyperbolic praise for Aron's writings even when it was at odds with his own positions clearly flattered Aron. Directly after the “man of high culture” passage in Mémoires, Aron cites the high praise he received from Schmitt regarding his massive work on Clausewitz: “It is a book which draws you in, which constitutes a total success. It is an incredible accomplishment, captivating from the beginning until the end.”Footnote 44 Perhaps one could suggest that Aron was flattered by Schmitt praising his books and felt inclined to minimize his ideological and political involvements. Still, as Matthias Oppermann observes in his excellent book Raymond Aron and Germany, flattery does not explain why Aron believed Schmitt had never been a member of the NSDAP, and why he did not unequivocally rebuke him for his stance towards the National Socialist regime, which he had previously done in the 1950s.Footnote 45
If flattery alone not account for Aron's change of mind, perhaps looking at Schmitt's letters where he expressed it might. What this reveals is that Schmitt's high praise of Aron is typically prefaced by referencing one of Aron's doctoral students at the Sorbonne from the early 1960s. This was Julien Freund (1921–93), a former Resistance fighter turned sociologist, who taught at the University of Strasbourg in the 1960s and 1970s, and who remains little-known in the English-speaking world.
Freund became familiar with the work of Schmitt in the early 1950s while studying in Strasbourg, and by 1959 he had developed a friendship with Schmitt that would last over twenty-five years.Footnote 46 In Mémoires, a few sentences before the “man of high culture” passage, Aron states in passing that “Julien Freund, who in the preface of his dissertation, pays homage to his two masters, Carl Schmitt and me, became an intermediary between us.”Footnote 47 Freund first met Schmitt in October 1959, months after Aron had agreed to advise his dissertation. Although Aron had been in contact with Schmitt infrequently since World War II, their correspondence began anew in November 1962 when Schmitt wrote to Aron to thank him for a copy of Peace and War between the Nations delivered to him by none other than Freund. The letter exchange between Schmitt and Aron from this time on is neither substantial nor frequent, but the liaison that Freund facilitated between them lasted almost until the time of Aron's death in 1983. All this suggests that Julien Freund understood the relationship between Aron and Schmitt better than anyone else, and possessed firsthand knowledge of what united and divided them.
Müller mentions Freund, writing that “Aron claimed that la finalité de la politique is l’amitié [the end of politics is friendship] to reassure Julien Freund, who felt caught between his two masters, Aron and Schmitt.”Footnote 48 The letter Müller cites indicates that Aron himself believed Freund's work to be much more Schmittian than Aronian.Footnote 49 And the letter certainly is an attempt by Freund to summarize the differences that separate Aron's conception of friends and enemies from Schmitt’s. It is in this context that Freund mentions Aron's view of his own position: “You had kindly pointed out during the meeting of November that my tendency was more Schmittian than Aronian.”Footnote 50 That Freund's thought was closer to Schmitt's than to Aron's was further confirmed during Freund's meetings with Aron regarding his dissertation on the “essence of the political,” which he defended in 1965. Aron considered Freund's conceptions of the political too Schmittian and distanced himself from Freund's position during his defense.Footnote 51 This background led Oppermann to claim that Freund might have misled Aron about Schmitt's Nazism and prompted his otherwise errant remark in his memoirs.Footnote 52
The hypothesis of Oppermann is intriguing but is there any compelling evidence for it? Freund, this account has it, had to downplay Schmitt's political baggage since French presses were unwilling to publish the work of a former Nazi, and French intellectuals in general were disinterested in reading Schmitt due to his former affiliation.Footnote 53 The blame for introducing Schmitt into mainstream French thought has often been directed at Freund, and one of his greatest successes may have been to lift the stigma around Schmitt's Nazism in Aron's own mind. But for Oppermann this claim works the other way, downplaying Aron's later views of Schmitt, as if they mainly pointed to the shift in our own time to be much more aware of and sensitive to Schmitt's Nazi past.Footnote 54
But Aron's change of mind clearly did occur. And the crucial fact is that Freund had long since been trying to domesticate Schmitt's thought in France—and in the first instance in private conversations with Aron. The real question is why Aron changed his mind when he did, which needs to be linked to more general transformations of Aron's thought in view of the French context of his trajectory after 1968. As late as 10 April 1967, when Freund informed Aron that Schmittians Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde and Ernst Forsthoff were inviting Aron to participate in a Festschrift in honor of Schmitt, Aron's long-standing views of Schmitt remained unchanged. “Quite frankly, I do not envision collaborating in a volume in honor of Carl Schmitt,” he wrote to Freund.
You know what my attitude is on these sorts of questions. I do not judge anyone, and I leave to others the responsibility of pronouncing categorical condemnations. All the same, I witnessed the period of the 1930s and I cannot forget the role that Carl Schmitt played, voluntarily or involuntarily, consciously or unconsciously. My admiration for him is great and I have maintained intermittent relations with him since the war but the collaboration in a volume of this genre is a tribute to a personality, a tribute that I cannot, in spite of everything, render.Footnote 55
According to Oppermann himself, “in the correspondence between Aron and Freund there is evidence that [Freund] attempted to influence his doctoral adviser” over Schmitt's role in the Third Reich.Footnote 56 Oppermann quotes a letter from 16 March 1962 in which Freund reported to Aron after meeting with Schmitt that the received knowledge of Schmitt's attitude towards the National Socialist regime was overstated. Freund specifically told Aron, “if you judge it useful, I will speak to you about it.”Footnote 57 For his part Aron proved more than willing to discuss the matter.Footnote 58 Aron's refusal to participate in the Festschrift refers back to these initial conversations, and potentially others, where Freund attempted to mitigate the significance of Schmitt's NSDAP membership.
If this is the case, the essential point is that, as late as 1968, Freund's long-standing efforts were still failing—but soon succeeded. Until that point, there were categorical differences between the thought of Freund and that of Aron. Moreover, Aron was well aware of Freund's involvement with New Right groups of which Aron did not think very highly. Hence Aron could remark, “I doubt that the two of us at all belong to the same spiritual family.”Footnote 59 Freund's intellectual loyalties lay ultimately in Plettenberg and not in Paris. If Aron did not succumb to Schmitt's flattery and was not misled by a Schmittian acolyte, then the conclusion is that other events after 1968 drove his thinking in general and appraisal of Schmitt in particular. Aron's mature views are inseparable from his Clausewitz project of the 1970s and the controversy that surrounded its German reception—which in turn provide the crucial material for understanding Aron's volte-face.
SECULARIZING CLAUSEWITZ
The political and intellectual impulses behind Aron's Clausewitz project of the 1970s find their origins in the student protest movements of May 1968. The student uprisings fundamentally challenged Aron's notion of an “end of ideology” by reviving revolutionary and utopian passions, which Aron interpreted as an unexpected return to the “Marxist imaginary.”Footnote 60 As Manent observes,
Toward the end of the ’60s, when opinion and society seemed to be heading in the direction of “an end to ideologies,” at least toward an appeasement of ideological tension, and when Raymond Aron was on the verge of receiving in France the recognition that he had never lacked in the Anglo-Saxon world or in Germany, the “events of May 68” forced him on the opposite side of what was then the dominant opinion in French intellectual circles.Footnote 61
This context explains Aron's otherwise rather surprising suggestion that the intellectual mood of the student protests shared much in common with the moral and cultural nihilism that characterized European fascist movements of the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote 62 A few months after the protests subsided, Aron asked,
Are advanced western industrial societies entering into a revolutionary period? A small but very violent minority of students have adopted the style characteristic of fascist movements, while at the same time evoking the ideas of internationalists, the Left, libertarians, even pacifists. But they have still yet to find an ideology which merits a philosophical analysis.Footnote 63
Said differently, Aron believed that something analogous to Nietzsche's “will to power” had seized the imagination of the young revolutionaries who had embraced Pierre Bourdieu's notion that “social reality does not have to be—that it is not necessarily—like this or like that.”Footnote 64 It was a social theory such as this that Aron viewed as constituting the death knell to political science. Faced with this challenge, Aron now set himself the task of confronting what he perceived to be a leftist renaissance of Romantic–utopian thought. In doing so, he became the spokesman for intellectuals of the “silent majority” who shared his anxiety over la Nouvelle Gauche or even a nouvel âge idéologique that in France had exposed the state's reliance on rigid oligarchies and authoritarian bureaucracies that all too easily become targets of rebellion.Footnote 65
The political scientist Gwendal Châton has convincingly demonstrated how the conservative French journal Contrepoint—which began its run in 1970—pushed Aron's move right even further; throughout its short existence, which ended in 1976, it made regular parallels between the French left and fascism or Nazism.Footnote 66Contrepoint's deference to Aron for guidance must be construed in light not only of May 1968, but also of the establishment of the Common Program in France in 1972, American economic decline, and a growing belief in the advancing superiority of the Soviet Union.Footnote 67 In light of these perceived threats, Contrepoint rallied around Aron to promote a tradition they believed to be severely lacking in France: political realism. Aron's writings on Machiavelli, Clausewitz and Pareto thus acted as the tonic needed to remedy a long-standing tradition of French political naivety.Footnote 68 The intellectual difficulty that Aron encountered centered on how to draw from the tradition of political realism without succumbing to the irrationalism of his ideological opponents.Footnote 69 Nowhere is this struggle on finer display than with Aron's attempt to liberalize the work of Carl Schmitt.
Aron's concerns over the precarious nature of liberal regimes compelled him to articulate a theory of political action that placed a premium on identifying the “real enemy” as its “ultimate task.”Footnote 70 It is here that scholars often point to a conservative turn in Aron's thought, characterized by a growing pessimism as expressed by Aron's deepened emphasis on the friend/enemy distinction.Footnote 71 Yet Aron's desire to articulate a theory of political action did not find its main source of inspiration in the writings of Carl Schmitt. Instead, Aron looked to Carl von Clausewitz, who he believed remained unscathed by the fateful traditions of German Romanticism and antiliberalism. And yet his Clausewitz engagement ended up altering his opinions of Schmitt as well.
Aron hoped that his study of Clausewitz would both stress the political rationale behind war and locate the Prussian thinker within the Western liberal tradition. Schmitt's illiberal and existential interpretation of Clausewitz in Theory of the Partisan (1963) thus constituted a major challenge of interpretation. The political/existential divide is a point of contention amongst Clausewitz scholars since both perspectives can be found in his work.Footnote 72 Schmitt supported an existentialist reading of Clausewitz which refused to limit war solely to the implementation of military tactics intended for a desired political end. He rather stressed those passages which viewed war in heroic terms—as a source of greater human meaning. Aron derives his argument chiefly from the first eight books of On War, which stress the underlying practical rationality of war. In a chapter entitled “The Means and the Ends” Aron asserts that the purpose of war is instrumental for Clausewitz and defined by a political “rational end.”Footnote 73 Aron could then affirm that the aims of warfare entail an account of practical rationality demonstrable whenever a regime chooses the strategic means to carry out its ends. According to Emile Perreau-Saussine, this account of practical reason “can embrace the diversity of national contexts by placing itself beyond bias and ideology.”Footnote 74 Aron thus sought to demonstrate that Clausewitz's philosophy of war moderates the distinction between friends and enemies. This also in turn allows Aron to affirm the existence of natural justice.
On the basis of such reinterpretations, Aron puts forward a revisionist argument suggesting that the Prussian general should be read in light of the “Western liberal” tradition. But why would Aron make this move? By modernizing or attempting to contain the irrational elements in Clausewitz's thought, Aron hoped to reorient the friend/enemy distinction away from its illiberal origins. In this sense Aron shared much in common with the “militant liberalism” of Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde and Hermann Lübbe, who attempted to modernize conservatism “with the claim that what their critics derided as ‘neoconservatism’ was in fact the intellectual preservation of an authentic liberalism, whereas the ‘progressivism’ of the ’68 generation would have ‘totalitarian’ consequences.”Footnote 75
In defending this position, Aron had to overcome an interpretation of Clausewitz that read him as part of the famous divergence from the West that eventually led to National Socialism. Aron argued instead that Clausewitz's principal source of inspiration was Montesquieu's De l’esprit des lois: “As a reader of Montesquieu and of Voltaire, Clausewitz remained to the end a theoretician of some sort of European equilibrium,” Aron insisted. “It is to Montesquieu that he probably alludes in recalling the precept of a great French writer: we must raise ourselves above the anecdotal level to make history intelligible.”Footnote 76 That Aron wanted to position Clausewitz closer to Montesquieu than to German idealist tradition indicates that he viewed the Prussian general in light of a wider European intellectual context. Schmitt, by contrast, interpreted Clausewitz through antiliberal lenses, a standard position that Aron wanted to overcome. For Schmitt, the hope for agreed rules and reasonable exchanges that transcend political divisions became impossible after the breakdown of jus publicum Europaeum. In Theory of the Partisan, he argued that Clausewitz was one of the first to recognize that the old rules and agreed norms quickly became antiquated in a time of revolution. Clausewitz's genius was to grasp that it was not legal norms but “the distinction of friend and enemy [that is] primary, that it determines war as well as politics.”Footnote 77
Clausewitz never imagined that the bracketing of war between states in European international law that had been achieved in the eighteenth century would one day be entirely destroyed. But Schmitt nevertheless contended that Leninist Marxism accomplished this very thing, and in doing so introduced absolute enmity to the world historical stage: “This new reality was conceived with philosophical consciousness by the Russian revolutionary Lenin, and the alliance of philosophy and the partisan that he forged unleashed unexpected new and explosive forces.”Footnote 78 For Lenin the absolute enemy is the class enemy who is reduced to a criminal or thief that must be destroyed. The terms by which Schmitt conceived warfare of this nature are entirely existential: “The war of absolute enmity knows no bracketing. The consistent fulfillment of absolute enmity provides its own meaning and justification.”Footnote 79 Schmitt thus allowed no exterior political rationality for war since all truth is now subordinated to the distinction of friend and enemy based on the dictates of the will rather than law or reason. Furthermore, he denied outright the possibility of justice since “it is impossible to offer a judgment which transcends the opposition of friends and enemies; there is no concept of justice by which one could determine, by placing themselves above the parties, if a war is just or not.”Footnote 80
Understandably, Aron's thirteen-page critique of Schmitt's interpretation of Clausewitz was compelled by his own attempt to provide a liberal reading of Clausewitz. Aron's most biting criticism involves Schmitt's monolithic conception of the enemy, which made no clear distinction between Communist class warfare and the racist ideology of National Socialism:
I do not ignore the fact that Stalin probably massacred more people as enemies of the revolution than Hitler did in the name of the purity of the race. In practice the Stalinists showered insults (“poisonous vipers,” etc.) on the enemies of socialism just as Hitler's followers did with the Jews. Hostility based on class struggle has taken on no less extreme or monstrous forms than that based on the incompatibility of the races. But if we wish to “save the concepts” there is a difference between a philosophy whose logic is monstrous and one that can be given a monstrous interpretation.Footnote 81
Clearly Aron discerned that Marxism was the real enemy for Schmitt while also rightly criticizing him for remaining defiantly taciturn on the Nazi state.
All the same, Aron's dispute with Schmitt over Clausewitz should not distract from the fact that he sought to preserve Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction by redirecting it towards “liberal” ends. The entire rationale behind the critique of Schmitt involved Aron's concerns over being so beholden to Schmitt's Theory of the Partisan and Concept of the Political that there arose the need to mention “areas of divergence” in their mutual “search for the real enemy.”Footnote 82 In particular, the section of Clausewitz that precedes Aron's rebuttal of Schmitt appropriates—without citation—Theory of the Partisan's discussion of the partisan irregular who stands “outside the law.”Footnote 83
This is explicitly confirmed in Aron's unpublished lectures notes from a class taught at the Collège de France in 1973 entitled “Théories de l’action politique.” Aron readily admitted that he had “borrowed” from Theory of the Partisan—which he describes as “excellent”—Schmitt's idea of “the partisan irregular.”Footnote 84 The question is, why? Immediately before stating his differences with Schmitt, Aron invokes Schmitt's concept of the partisan in order to connect it to what he perceives as
the beginning of another International, that of pure, naked violence, salvationist as such, which Fanon exalted in his book and of which Sartre sketched out the theoretical framework in his Preface . . . The events of the 1960s, including those of May 1968 in France, the failure of revolutions in Latin America, the urban guerilla in the USA . . . all of these things are phenomena that shake regimes.Footnote 85
This critical passage provides the essential motivational context for the very proximity to Schmitt that Aron took on after 1968 that both changed his mind about the Nazi past and occasioned the narcissism of minor differences in their Clausewitz interpretations. Concerned about the precarious state of western regimes in the wake of revolutionary fervor, Aron articulated a properly qualified Schmittian conception of the friend/enemy distinction with the intended purpose of identifying the real enemies of liberal democracy. In short, Aron's searing criticisms of Schmitt must not conceal his increased dependence on Schmitt.
THE CLAUSEWITZ CONTROVERSY AND THE REDEMPTION OF CARL SCHMITT
At some point around the publication of Clausewitz: Philosopher of War Aron's views of Schmitt's Nazi past had changed. As we have seen, the few who have broached the matter resort to extratextual explanations for this transition. What is strangely overlooked is not only the increase of Aron and Schmitt's correspondence during the 1970s—much of which involved Aron seeking advice from Schmitt—but also many of Aron's unacknowledged Schmittian formulations.Footnote 86 Against the backdrop of Aron's growing indebtedness to Schmitt, his reappraisal of Schmitt is not at all coincidental.
The correspondence of Schmitt and Aron was most fruitful during the 1970s. This can in part be explained by the administrative and technical concerns over the translations of Concept of the Political and Theory of the Partisan into French, and by Aron's conversations with Schmitt about Clausewitz. Their letters reveal that Schmitt sent Aron his new book Political Theology II and greatly appreciated Aron's Les désillusions du progrès.Footnote 87 Schmitt wrote Aron a detailed three-page response letter regarding Aron's questions about Clausewitz, and after reading Philosopher of War told Aron of its amazing success.Footnote 88 Aron would never forget this praise; a few years later he would proudly quote it in his memoirs.
The increased communication and openness between Aron and Schmitt throughout the 1970s best explain why Julien Freund—who often mediated these conversations—once again asked Aron to participate in a Festschrift for Schmitt's ninetieth birthday, ten years after being rejected the first time. Now Aron agreed to Freund's request, which in light of Aron's previous justification for not participating, based on Schmitt's past, indicates a decisive shift in Aron's thinking about Schmitt's Nazi involvement. Footnote 89 Aron would later back out due to “time constraints,” but he did give Freund the permission to put a note of homage to Schmitt in the Festschrift, which bizarrely stands alone at the end of the book's preface.Footnote 90 For Schmitt's part, he appeared somewhat surprised at Aron's willingness to participate. “Can you grasp what the fact that Raymond Aron will contribute to the publication you have conceived means?”Footnote 91 Aron's views had evolved: his initial willingness to participate in the Festschrift can only be interpreted as a nod to publicly acknowledge Schmitt's influence. And nowhere is Aron's “mature” view of Schmitt on greater display than in his attempt to disassociate Schmitt's thought from an attack on his Clausewitz book by the New Right in Germany.
In 1978 a young German sociologist named Robert Hepp authored a review article published in the Zeitschrift für Politik on the recent “Clausewitz revival.”Footnote 92 Hepp was associated with the German New Right, and the terminology he used in the review appears eerily close to Schmitt's own language. Dirk van Laak lists both Hepp and Freund, among others, as members of a group that attempted to establish a “Carl Schmitt academy” in the 1970s.Footnote 93 It is clear, however, that Hepp did not understand the delicate nature of the decades-long relationship between Aron and Schmitt, or that his inflammatory review could potentially damage it. The vindictive is devoted to devastating Aron's interpretation of Clausewitz. Aron's biographer described the piece as a work of “extreme violence,” and Aron devotes five pages in Mémoires to defending himself against Hepp's diatribe.Footnote 94 Indeed, the amount of space Aron devoted in Mémoires to a thinker hardly known in France, especially in light of Aron's better-known opponents who received considerably less attention, appears strange. But Aron's significant attention to Hepp's incendiary review is inseparable from the immense pride Aron took in a work he considered his finest.
Hepp's critique was both personal and academic. He questioned how someone whose military service consisted of the time he spent in the meteorological department of the Saint-Cyr officers’ school could ever make judgments on the military tactics and strategies of Clausewitz.Footnote 95 Without apparent hesitation he further argued that Aron's judgment regarding biological enmity (Hitler) as more diabolical than ideological enmity (Stalin) was rooted in Aron's Jewish background.Footnote 96 In a more scholarly vein, Hepp attempted to counter Aron's “pro-Western” position by claiming that Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated an ideology of absolute enmity by criminalizing the Third Reich: “Roosevelt's war against Germany was without a doubt an ideological crusade. Political categories played no role with him in the sense of European state politics. The adversary was considered as ‘criminal,’ and as such he was able and allowed to be destroyed.”Footnote 97
Hepp further affirmed that Hitler's biological war was qualitatively no different to the bombardments of the Allied Forces: “Hitler–Ludendorff must be responsible for ‘Total War’ so that the Allies could not be made responsible for Hiroshima, Dresden, Katyn or Nuremberg . . . The atom bomb, so must one conclude, is only a logical consequence of Hitler's madness.”Footnote 98 In World War II, in short, the enemy had been criminalized, and therefore became a justifiable target of extinction – hence the ease with which Hepp concludes that Roosevelt was just as responsible as Hitler for elevating the conflict to the status of “total war.”
The language of criminalization, and consequently the denial of justice, showed Hepp to be a close reader of Carl Schmitt.Footnote 99 This is of key significance since the real problem for Hepp is that Clausewitz had fallen into the hands of a pro-American Western liberal democrat. Hepp was not suggesting that Nazi Germany provided a preferable model of civilization, but rather that the Allied Powers’ vision was no more desirable. Consequently, Hepp saw in Clausewitz support for his own brand of antiliberalism, and in doing so fiercely rejected Aron's attempt to set the theorist of war within a liberal interpretative context. Aron's version of Clausewitz was harmless, perverted, and non-Prussian. In the end, Hepp's criticism of Aron was directed less at his interpretation of Clausewitz and more at Aron's liberalism.
The vitriolic and personal nature of Hepp's review stunned Aron. Mohammed Rassem, an editor for Zeitschrift für Politik, contacted Aron in November 1979 regarding the “hysteria” of Hepp's review.Footnote 100 Rassem described Hepp's polemic as “monstrous,” and further explained to Aron that Hepp's primary intellectual influences were none other than Armin Mohler—a leader of the New Right in Germany—and Carl Schmitt, and that Hepp was associated with the New Right in Germany. Raymond Aron's response was revealing. Aron informed Rassem that France also had a New Right that was “less cultivated than Hepp and as a result less dangerous.”Footnote 101 Most importantly, he relayed to Rassem that he did not associate Hepp's attack with the work of Carl Schmitt. The passage clearly indicates that Aron did not associate Hepp's dangerous ideas with the thought of Schmitt.
Hepp's connection to Schmitt did pique Aron's curiosity. In October 1979, Aron offered a published response to Hepp in Zeitschrift für Politik.Footnote 102 Two months later he wrote to Schmitt asking if he was aware of his ordeal with Hepp and if he had read his rejoinder: “I do not know if you have looked at this review [of Hepp’s] in the Zeitschrift für Politik which exceeds the limits of academic decency and which is close to personal injury.”Footnote 103 Schmitt had indeed been following the matter. Schmitt responded to Aron on 4 December 1979 stating that he had been following the affair for several months and that he had communicated his dissatisfaction with Hepp's lack of tact to Julien Freund.
However, for the first time ever in their correspondence Schmitt expresses a disagreement with Aron, regarding the possibility of a just war. The language that Schmitt uses in his letter to Aron is simply convoluted, especially when raising the issue of just war: “But [to the question] as to whether a war was just, one can only know once, one knows the ending peace of that war.”Footnote 104 There was enough in Schmitt's letter to convince Aron that he did not support Hepp's position, but Schmitt's language and comments over the impossibility of a just war unsettled his correspondent. In the attempt to better understand Schmitt's remarks, Aron wrote to Freund asking him for clarification. Freund explained that, for Schmitt, “The idea of just war leads to a criminalization of war, therefore to a ruthless fight, since the enemy loses its political signification and becomes the devil that one must destroy.”Footnote 105 This was precisely the position of Hepp, who attempted to equate Hitler's war ambitions with Roosevelt’s.
It is noteworthy that in a letter to Freund regarding the affair, Schmitt stated, “I have come to read a long discussion of Monsieur Raymond Aron with Professor Hepp. As for me, it saddens me bitterly to see a noble and generous man attacked by a young man without much experience.”Footnote 106 Freund sent this passage to Raymond Aron in February 1980, and it is clear that Aron came away from it satisfied with Schmitt's response. But why would he be? Schmitt never denied his association with the German New Right and Hepp. Aron willingly chose to ignore this connection despite the fact that Rassem—himself a member of the German New Right—had accurately relayed to him the link between Schmitt and Hepp. What Aron failed or even refused to acknowledge is that Schmitt had ironically inspired the most incendiary response to his book. Just a few years later Aron would discuss the entire affair in Mémoires and proclaim in the context of his work on Clausewitz that Carl Schmitt never was a Nazi, but instead, like Clausewitz, a man of high culture.
CONCLUSION
In his later life, in response to 1968, Raymond Aron transformed premises with worrisome antecedents. He was neither ignorant of Schmitt's oeuvre, nor deceived, nor charmed by flattery, but rather, by the end of his life, Aron had chosen to give public recognition to a disgraced figure, on whom he had grown increasingly dependent, by downplaying his past political commitments. In doing so Aron vindicated not only Schmitt but also his own reliance on Schmitt's work. If there is an element of “bad conscience” involved it is to be found here.
Aron clearly embraced the idea of a bon usage de Schmitt. Perhaps it is, therefore, unsurprising that the explosion of French interest in Schmitt's work since the late 1980s followed on the heels of the so-called French liberal revival. Throughout this time a number of French intellectuals—many of whom praise Aron—have challenged the notion that Schmitt's work could be put to good use.Footnote 107 In 1987, the first controversy involving Carl Schmitt's Nazi membership occurred, in which calls for the banning of any future translations of Schmitt's work were voiced, specifically in light of its appropriation by the Nouvelle droite.Footnote 108 This sentiment reemerged in 2002 after the French publication of Schmitt's The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes. In an article appearing in Le Monde entitled “Carl Schmitt: Nazi Philosopher?”, Yves Charles Zarka argued that Schmitt's works should be studied in a manner no different to Mein Kampf; they should be read as documents and not allowed to appear as philosophical texts in a philosophy series.Footnote 109
In the aftermath of the German Historikerstreit in the mid-1980s, and the controversies that erupted in France over the works of Heidegger and Schmitt starting in the late 1980s, few today in France—outside the Nouvelle droite—would promote so openly the position that Aron held of Schmitt by the end of his life.Footnote 110 It is this context that explains why some scholars believe that Aron's students are now relying on Schmitt's thought in stealth mode.
Pierre Manent is typically considered to be Raymond Aron's heir apparent.Footnote 111 Perhaps because of this, more of his work has appeared in English than any other French liberal thinker’s, while translations of his writings constitute the largest contribution to Princeton's New French Thought series by a single author.Footnote 112 Manent's Catholicism has also made him an author of interest for those associated with the conservative Catholic journal First Things.Footnote 113 Like so many other French thinkers linked with the liberal revival, Manent has written a great amount on Tocqueville, the history of liberalism, and the nature of modern democracy. Yet a number of French scholars have argued that the work of Pierre Manent also provides an alternative genealogy of Aron's influence on a younger generation of French intellectuals.Footnote 114
Manent's Schmittian inspirations can be found in his 2001 work Cours familier de philosophie politique, which has been translated into English as A World beyond Politics?. According to Manent, a nation defines itself by “determin[ing] its external actions in ‘sovereign’ fashion, choos[ing] its alliances, and discriminat[ing] between ‘friends and enemies’ making war or peace.”Footnote 115 It is interesting that “discrimine entre l’ami et l’ennemi” is entirely omitted from the English translation.Footnote 116 Putting this aside, what Manent stresses throughout the book is the Schmittian idea that the nation must be conceived of as a “body politic whose content is homogeneous or tends towards homogeneity.”Footnote 117 Yet what are the background conditions that shape the political form of European nation states? Manent insists on the unavoidably Christian character of Europe, which played the decisive role in the development of modern democracy and liberty because Christianity is the only religion that sets the secular sphere free:Footnote 118
This idea, which will only be carried out, transformed into stable institutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in democratic countries, is intellectually elaborated fully by the seventeenth century. The power that is without opinion is what we have come to know as the neutral or secular state.Footnote 119
Manent has recently applied this notion to the debate over whether Islam is compatible with Western European political values. This has led him to affirm that “if Islam is our enemy, it is in the sense that Theodor Däubler, in a very striking formulation, wrote: ‘The enemy is the figure of our own question.’”Footnote 120 From this perspective, Islam constitutes a potential threat to the European nation state insofar as Islam defines itself against the European political form, namely liberalism. Yet is it by coincidence that Carl Schmitt was a friend of the poet Theodor Däubler and wrote a commentary on his work that appeared in 1916?Footnote 121 Invocations such as these have led Serge Audier to suggest that Manent's fears over the decline of the European nation state are inspired by Schmitt's thought, although he prefers to mobilize in print the writings of Tocqueville.Footnote 122
The young Belgian scholar Tristan Storme has gone even further by arguing that Manent has liberalized Schmitt's political theology, appropriated his idea of the Roman Catholic basis for Western European political form, and has applied Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction to the question of Islam and Europe.Footnote 123 The implication appears to be that Manent is a neoconservative thinker who promotes a militant liberalism in defense of liberal Europe. It is exactly this Schmittian tendency in Manent's writings that has led many to criticize him for promoting Islamophobia.Footnote 124 The exact nature of Schmitt's influence on Manent, though, is anything but conclusive. If there is a certain tendency in contemporary French liberalism to transform illiberal categories into liberal ones, the concern naturally arises over the potential perils this could entail—something debated over the last two decades in France. Evidence suggests that Raymond Aron is one interesting illustration of a French liberal who believed in the benefits of incorporating Schmitt's thought into the service of the modern liberal state.
