Raymond Aron: Too Realistic to Be a Realist?

Pierre Hassner

Was Raymond Aron a realist? Certainly the answer is obvious if one understands realism
in the non-academic sense of analyzing situations accurately, of not pursuing utopian
goals with inadequate means, of acting with prudence and moderation but without
allowing moralism or idealism to prevent one from using the means, from violence to
cunning, necessary for avoiding defeat. Very few analysts in the 20th century have shown
Arons skill and lucidity in analyzing international situations and in recommending the
most reasonable course of action.
But was he a realist in the sense of international relations theory? Here the answer
becomes much more complicated. He is generally classified as belonging to this school,
even though he has carried many polemics with some of its most illustrious represen-
tatives like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan. An American author has called the
theory of his major treatise, Peace and War, a Gaullist theory of international relations.
Yet the Gaullists, including the General himself, have never considered him as one of
them and, indeed, his political image is more that of a defender of the free world against
totalitarianism than that of a defender of the French national interest.
Perhaps, then, the solution of the puzzle is that he was not really an international
relations theorist? Here the answer is even less obvious. He single-handedly introduced
this academic discipline in France, wrote a major treatise, still the only real French
contribution to the field, and one of the most impressive ones altogether, as well as
several methodological articles defining the nature and limits of international relations
theory. Yet, I would venture to argue, contrary to what Aron himself may have thought,
that this is not the most important part of his work. Arons contributions to interna-
tional relations theory cannot be understood in isolation but, on the contrary, would
give a distorted perspective on his real views of international relations if one abstracts
from his historical and political work. Arguably, international relations theory relies
on isolating one segment or one dimension of international relations in order to be
able to treat it scientifically. Aron has criticized this operation, but may have fallen
into it himself, in his more academic or specialized work, and in some regards may
have erred in this direction more than Morgenthau or Kennan. But all this disappears
if one looks at his historical works and at his political stands as well as at his ear-
lier and more general, philosophical works as well as at his historical ones. In other
words, my thesis is that Aron was both too philosophical and too political to be an
international relations theorist. Or, to put the same idea in a less provocative form, he
was a very peculiar kind of international relations theorist, one whose real contribu-
tion can be understood only if one relates it to his views on philosophy, politics and
history.

Constellations Volume 14, No 4, 2007.


C The Author. Journal compilation C Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford

OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

 Aron: Too Realistic to be a Realist?: Pierre Hassner 499

From The Century of Total War, through Opium for Intellectuals, to Peace and War,
all his books are based on the refusal of the dilemma between assigning a global meaning
to history or reducing it to a story told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing. Following Weber and the French philosopher Augustin Cournot, he thought
one could identify, within history and society, a number of logical sequences or of
specific dynamics, relevant for a given dimension of social reality or a given epoch of
history, but that the way in which these sequences or these dynamics meet or interfere
with each other was unpredictable and produced the event. The work of the analyst
and of the historian lie precisely in discerning the crossroads where the meeting of
necessity, of choice and of accident can produce the most varied results on the basis of
the same fundamental trends.
It is probably because of this notion of a multiple or fragmented rationality which
he developed in his first major work, Introduction to the Philosophy of History that
he always refused to sacrifice rigor and prudence in favour of a global or prophetic
vision. But the result is also that he never presented a complete synthesis of his thought
nor brought forth a central idea, like the progress of equality in Tocqueville or the class
struggle in Marx. This has led to some misunderstandings, particularly concerning his
theoretical works. They must always been read in the light of his political choices and
commitments and vice-versa.
Raymond Arons work has a striking intellectual and moral unity but this unity
must often be recovered or reconstructed beyond an apparent dispersion which has
led to quite a few misunderstandings. One can distinguish at least five Arons : the
first is the philosopher of Introduction to the Philosophy of History (originally his
doctoral thesis). This book deals above all with an epistemological critique of the
historical science, in the tradition of Max Weber; but it reveals, mostly indirectly, a
reflection on the human condition, a justification of intellectual and political pluralism
and a tension between a temptation for relativism and an ultimate faith in reason. The
second Aron is the critic of totalitarian ideologies and regimes and the defender of
liberal democracy. The third is the sociologist who attempted a global interpretation
of industrial society. The fourth is the analyst of international relations, with whom
we are chiefly concerned here. And I have not mentioned the historian of ideas who
resurrected Tocqueville for the French but wrote and thought even more on Marx and
Clausewitz.
Within the fourth aspect itself, one must distinguish the political and strategic com-
mentator who, from the Second World War until his death, has covered every important
event and debate in dailies, specialized periodicals, and essays (like the one dedicated
to the nuclear debate between the United States and France); the historian and sociolo-
gist of war in the twentieth century who wrote The Century of Total War, On War, and
War and Industrial Society; and the international relations theorist and author of the
monumental Peace and War among Nations and the no less monumental two-volumes
book on Clausewitz. Aron had a preference for these last two books as well as for the
Introduction to the Philosophy of History because he saw them as more theoretical than
the others.


C 2007 The Author. Journal compilation 
C 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
500 Constellations Volume 14, Number 4, 2007

Certainly the Clausewitz book is the most impressive one ever written about the
author of On War, and Arons philosophical interpretation, which insists upon the
conceptual distinction between absolute war and real war and underlines the primacy
of politics, is intellectually the most satisfying, even though it has often be accused of
under-estimating the role of violence and the temptation of romanticizing war which
was not totally absent from Clausewitzs thought.
As for Peace and War, it is probably the most exhaustive treatise on war and on
international relations in general which appeared in the 20th century. It is to this work
(and to a few programmatic or methodological articles) that one has to look to ascertain
his commonalities and differences with the American realist school. The most important
point in common is that it starts from the plurality of states and from the anarchic nature
of the international system. The classical difference between the state of nature and the
civil state remains for him as crucial as for Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant. His very
definition of international relations (which is apparent even in the title of his magnum
opus, if one compares it with Morgenthaus Politics among Nations) is based on the
opposition of domestic peace (characterized by the states monopoly of legitimate
violence) and of the international state of war (characterized by the fact that each state
reserves the right of resorting to force). Where he did part company with Morgenthau
and the classical realists (and even more, in advance, with Waltz and neo-realism) is
in arguing that this structural situation is not enough to predict the behaviour of states
as it is or even as it should be. He denies that Morgenthaus two basic concepts
national interest and power can be operationalized. The definition of the former is too
dependent on regimes, ideologies, and on the perception of rulers and ruled. The second
can be seen as a means, as an intermediary goal, necessary to attain other objectives,
or as a goal in itself. What Aron calls diplomatic strategic behaviour is, for him,
essentially indeterminate. Its objectives can range from survival, to power, glory, or
the spread of ideas. A great power, he argues against George Kennan, cannot define its
national interest in purely material or defensive terms: it necessarily tries to influence
its international environment, so as to make it more congenial to its view of the world.
In all these respects, Aron is much closer to Arnold Wolfers, the most open and
nuanced of the realist thinkers (whom he does not seem to have read) in Wolfers
distinction between possession goals and milieu goals and in his general view of
national security as an ambiguous concept. Aron refutes the frequent analogy between
economic and political theory. In politics, according to him, one does not find a com-
mon standard equivalent to utility or a unity of measure comparable to the monetary
one.
In this sense, he is more realistic than the American realists (with the exception of
Arnold Wolfers), by deflecting both the deterministic claims of their structural wing
and the normative claims of their classical one. At the same time, he is on their side
both against the romanticization of power (in particular in its military dimension) and
of Americas mission practised by neo-imperialists or neo-conservatives, and against
the devaluation of power and of force and the faith in universal institutions practised
by liberals.


C 2007 The Author. Journal compilation 
C 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
 Aron: Too Realistic to be a Realist?: Pierre Hassner 501

In a sense, however, Aron accorded more importance to institutions than either

realists or liberals, but provided they were backed by a political authority endowed
with means of constraint. On international law he shared the Hobbesian-Hegelian view
that covenants without sword are but words and that, without a praetor, international
law remained in the realm of the ought, and he was never a believer in international
organizations.1 He criticized Morgenthau for applying the same concepts, like the
search for power, to domestic and international politics. To my mind, this strict dualism
between civic order and international anarchy, between peace and war, between inter-
state system and transnational society without leaving a place for international society
and transnational politics is a serious weakness of his theory. It makes it unnecessarily
rigid and static, in stark contrast with Arons political choices and historical analyses. I
had several discussions about this with him. I asked was asking him whether, at a time
when war between Western liberal states and between nuclear superpowers was very
hard to imagine, but when states had trouble maintaining law and order at home and
civil wars were increasingly the dominant form of violent conflict, it was not counter-
productive to define international relations by the state of war and domestic politics
by the civil state. He used to answer quoting Max Weber, that while reality may be
ambiguous this is no reason for our concepts to be fuzzy. I would rather side with
Hegel who, in his youth, said: If reality is inconceivable let us forge inconceivable
concepts of which I thought the notion of bellicose peace (Arons parallel, in 1948,
to Lippmanns Cold war) was a perfect example.
This discrepancy between his abstract theoretical stand and his concrete political
analyses has led to the many misunderstandings I mentioned at the beginning because
of his emphasis on the competition of states, considered as unitary actors, while in
reality he always emphasized the priority of the distinction between democratic and
totalitarian states.
These misunderstandings and limitations are swept away when one considers the
more concrete works where Aron interprets the twentieth century in light of an ap-
proach which can be called philosophical history as well as historical sociology. I
am referring in particular to The Great Schism which appeared in 1948 and in which
he provides us with the definitive characterization and prediction concerning the Cold
War (peace impossible, war improbable) and The Century of Total War in which,
applying the method delineated in Introduction to the Philosophy of History he mas-
terfully unfolds the dialectic between necessity, accidents and choice which lead from
the First World War (initially a failure of the diplomatic system) through the evo-
lution of technology, the development of ideological propaganda, the centralization
of the state, the collapse of the continental empires, the victory of totalitarian rev-
olutions, to the second World War and the Cold War. I am also thinking of short
essays like On War, War and Industrial Society, and the Dawn of Universal His-
tory. In these essays, he struggles with the failure of the 19th century predictions
about the peaceful character of the 20th century and of industrial society, and with
the interaction between what he calls the process of social and technological evolu-
tion (which leads to war becoming more and more irrational) and what he calls the


C 2007 The Author. Journal compilation 
C 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
502 Constellations Volume 14, Number 4, 2007

drama, i.e. the struggle between men and between political units for power and for
glory.
It is true that all these works end with a question mark about the future of mankind
and the nature of man, raised almost in the same terms as at the close of Peace and
War and of Clausewitz. It is also true that Aron may be seen as short on prescription
as well as on prediction since, as Hedley Bull points out, his pages on ethics usually are
limited to pointing out tensions or dilemmas and recommending prudence, which hardly
constitutes an ethical doctrine.2 One can, however, sum up his prescriptive teaching on
war with the three following propositions:
1. Peace is better than war; one should not, as was done by thinkers as different as
Lenin, Ludendorff, Spengler and Foucault, reverse the Clausewitzian formula and
see in politics the continuation of war by other means.
2. However, pacifism is no answer; war should be avoided through strength and deter-
rence and sometimes be accepted as a last resort.
3. While war cannot be eliminated, and cannot always be avoided, it should be limited
both in its objectives and it means: the effort to avoid escalation should never be
abandoned, including in the middle of confrontation.

The Use of Force: Why, When and How

This general attitude has led Aron to choices and prescriptions that, while based on the
situation of his time, are often extremely relevant to our current dilemmas. This applies
in particular to the disputes between Americans and Europeans today. On the issue of
legitimacy there is a current view that the Europeans are converted to international law
while, a little before, being rather ironical about Wilsonism and the UN and now
think that legitimacy comes from international law incarnated in institutions, above all
the Security Council. And Americans, at least as Robert Kagan and Frank Fukuyama
have explained, see legitimacy as coming from the American Constitution and from
the American electorate and not from the consent of other countries or, indeed, from
universal principles.
It so happens that in Peace and War, in which Aron considered what kind of peace
could emerge beyond power politics, there are two parallel chapters on peace: La paix
par la loi and La paix par lempire, peace by law and peace by empire. And he criticizes
both. The originality of his position is interesting for our debates today. In the same way,
in the same book, he is against unilateral and general disarmament, and, on the other
hand, against the search for military victory against the Soviet Union. All throughout
the Cold War he believed neither, as Walter Lippman and Hans Morgenthau did, in the
possibility of having a grand settlement, a grand negotiation with the Russians, nor in
the Cold War ending in Armageddon or in general disaster.
So where does that leave him? Not so far from a realist position. But this real-
ism was informed and modified by the importance he gave to political regimes and
to ideology, on the one hand, and by the hopes he had for the positive evolution of


C 2007 The Author. Journal compilation 
C 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
 Aron: Too Realistic to be a Realist?: Pierre Hassner 503

industrial society making war at least less profitable and less rational, on the other
hand.
Let us look first at his critique of international law. It is fairly conventional, I would
say, but it is a convention which goes back to Hobbes, to Hegel and to many others:
that international law is not really law, that its in the sphere of the ought, that there is
no authority, no constraint no praetor, as Hegel says and hence that nobody really
follows the UN Charter. I think he would have agreed, perhaps, with the recent articles
by Michael Glennon saying that it is time to abandon this illusion because something
which is honoured only in the breach does not have the value of a law.3
On international law, as already mentioned, he had a fairly simple notion: the states
are in the state of nature, not in the civil state; international relations is defined by each
state reserving the right to use force when negotiation fails. Hence he was not against
the notion of pre-emption or prevention, which could, in certain extreme circumstances,
be indispensable.
But the other chapter was a critique of empire. His book on America was called: The
Imperial Republic. He didnt shrink from speaking of an American empire not that
America wanted possessions, but that it has an asymmetric view of law: it gives the law
and what applies to others doesnt apply to itself. And he thought, like Montesquieu,
that a republic which is imperial endangers its own republican character. So he was
against the Wilsonian crusade in the name of the law and he was just as much against
imperial crusades. His motto was moderation and wisdom and the search for gaining
time so, basically, the notion of containment. In this he agreed with Kennan while
being much more attentive to the need for military rearmament and to the dangers of
the Soviet Union. But his position was essentially containment.
And there is an interesting chapter in Peace and War called Survivre cest vaincre
survival is victory in which he polemicizes with Strausz-Hupe, Pozsony, Kintner,
the trio who founded and led the Institute for Foreign Policy Research in Philadelphia,
and who were for a catonic strategy against the Soviet Union. He was saying that
this was unrealistic and dangerous, that you could not have a crusade nowadays, but
that there was a hope that the contradictions of the system would one day, if we were
firm, lead to its transformation or to its collapse.
On decolonization, it is, I think, very interesting to think back today, because for
many people it was the same as the struggle against totalitarianism. Nasser was Hitler,
the Algerian rebels were communists and so on. And he emphasized very much that
it was not the same struggle. He was very much for intervention in the Korean War.
Actually, the first time in my life when I heard him was a lecture he gave just after the
beginning of the Korean War, after the invasion of the South, when Le Monde had the
headline Il est urgent dattendre. And Aron answered, Il est urgent dagir. So he
was all the way for the Korean War.
On the other hand, on Algeria, as seen before, he broke with his friends, with the
Figaro and the right in general by saying, much before most of the Left, the responsible
Left or Left-of-center, that the Algerian War could not be won and that Algeria should
be given independence. On Vietnam, he hesitated more because it had an aspect of


C 2007 The Author. Journal compilation 
C 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
504 Constellations Volume 14, Number 4, 2007

Korea (against a communist attack) and an aspect of Algeria (national liberation against
colonialism).
And that was his central idea, which I think is worth meditating on again today,
namely that the problem was very different in Europe and in Asia. In Europe, it was a
military problem. The populations were on the side of the West and the problem was
the Red Army. The task was to contain or to balance the Red Army. In Asia, it was
impossible to separate the communist manipulation from national liberation against
decolonization. It was the importance of nationalism to which he was very open.
On terrorism and guerrilla warfare, he emphasizes the dialectic between subversion
and repression, the fact that one may destroy terrorists, but their main tactic is to bring
more repression in order to mobilize potential supporters. The German sociologist
Georg Simmel was saying that in any bilateral conflict there is a virtual or potential
third party either an arbiter, an empire, or a state, or an interested spectator. So, in
the struggle against terrorism, there are the terrorists, but the question is about the
population about whom the whole struggle is, which side it will be on. Secondly, there
is the question of the international context, what the consequences would be. And as
in his interpretation of Clausewitz, its always the primacy of politics, of the political
questions, which is decisive.
Aron died in 1983, and I am sorry that he couldnt see the collapse of the Soviet
Union and his ideas being confirmed. In particular about the danger of war between
America and the Soviet Union: it didnt come from the arms race, it came from the
nature of the Soviet regime, and when the Soviet regime collapsed, it collapsed too.
Now there is a new kind of peace within the West which has been discussed ad
nauseam in American political science about the sources of the democratic peace. For
whatever reason, war is not conceivable as defining the relationship between mature
constitutional democracies. And there are these new types of war, these new types of
enemies civil war, the spread of fundamentalism everywhere except, partly, in Europe
trans-state networks, uncontrollable movements, and so on.
We dont know what Aron would have said about this new situation, but I am
certain of one thing: He would maintain the primacy of politics. He would see any
struggle still in the context of the political objectives and consequences. But what
interplay he would have seen with the interstate model, what combination of ac-
tion and moderation he would have analyzed and recommended, of course, I cannot
say.
But I can say that, for all its value, the dualistic conceptual scheme is no longer very
tenable. He talked about the struggle against secular religions, but not about what to
do about fanatical fundamentalist religion. The emerging of the individual (on one side
as the victim, on the other hand as a criminal, including the head of state who can be
imprisoned) and the emergence of the planet, have no real place in his theory. I think
he would have analyzed the situation very well as he did for the interaction between
war and revolution in the 20th Century or between domestic and international politics
in his historical writings and in his articles. But his theoretical scheme is shown even
more than before as too dualistic.


C 2007 The Author. Journal compilation 
C 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
 Aron: Too Realistic to be a Realist?: Pierre Hassner 505

In the same way, he may be right about international law in the strict sense, even
perhaps about the weakness of international institutions, but he doesnt speak much
about the undoubted evolution of norms, of what is considered normal. It seems to
me that war in the classical sense if you cant negotiate, you go to war for the same
objectives has been de-legitimized and, on the other hand now, with these new kind
of opponents, the earlier version, the just war, against infidels or enemies of humanity,
is being re-legitimized. We are very much in need of overcoming, I think, the strict
duality between the civil order inside and the anarchical state of nature outside, in
favour of what David Calleo calls a semi-constitutional view of international relations4
or what the English school called international society. One should go beyond the
opposition between a supreme authority which would be a world state which is
impossible and, on the other hand, pure anarchy. There is the need for these norms
to be expressed in deliberation and dialogue. The solution is more necessarily hybrid
and more complicated than at the time of the Cold War.
The international order must organize a coexistence of states, which have their
sovereignty, but for whom autonomy doesnt mean exclusiveness. And there is this new
dimension of human rights and of the need for intervention, but the latter cannot be
purely arbitrary, decided by one country. This has to go through a process of rethinking
and reformulation. And that we do not find yet in Aron, above all because he died
before the end of the Cold War and secondly because his very sharp analysis was ill at
ease with these ambiguous, mixed, evolving situations.
But he is still sadly missed in this constellation more complex than the Cold War.
Someone who warns against the twin dangers of triumphalism and catastrophism, of
adventurism and passivity, of Manichaeism and relativism, is absolutely needed. We
have no lack of terrible simplifiers, to use Burckhardts expression which Aron
liked nor of premature synthesizers. But Arons clarity, his combination of passion
and moderation, and his awareness both of insoluble tensions and of uncertain but
indispensable choices will inspire us as long as we still have politics in this world.

NOTES

1. See, respectively, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996) and G.W. Hegel, Elements of Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
2. Hedley Bull, Natural Law and International Relations, British Journal of International
Studies 5 (1979):171175, reproduced in Ken Alderson and Andrew Hurell, ed, Hedley Bull on
International Society, 167.
3. Michael Glennon, Why the UN Security Council Failed, Foreign Affairs, May-June 2003.
4. David Calleo, The Broken West, Survival, Summer 2004.

Pierre Hassner is Research Director, emeritus, at CERI, Fondation nationale des sci-
ences politiques (Paris). He is the author of Violence and Peace (1997), and La terreur
et lempire (2003).


C 2007 The Author. Journal compilation 
C 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.