French Post-War Social Theory

International Knowledge Transfer

Derek Robbins, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780761949725
• eBook ISBN: 9781473971868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Derek Robbins has shown once again that he is one of the few Anglophone scholars with an exceptionally profound and impressively comprehensive knowledge of the history of modern European social thought. This book is a must for anybody interested in twentieth-century French social theory. The coverage is wide-ranging; the information provided is authoritative; complex ideas are presented in an accessible language; key controversies are explained in an eloquent and thought-provoking fashion; and, perhaps most importantly, seemingly abstract tensions between intellectual positions are put into historical context.
- Dr Simon Susen, City University London

Detailed, timely and original this book explores the trans-cultural transmission of social theory. Derek Robbins presents us with a chronological commentary on the intellectual production of five French social thinkers (Aron, Althusser, Foucault, Lyotard, Bourdieu) and on the English reception of their texts. The book:

• Sets up a Bourdieusian investigation of the habitus of the five thinkers and, comparatively, of the national sub-fields of intellectual discourse.
• Enables an inter-active generation of enquiry based on the primacy of individual experience.
• Challenges the social sciences to abandon their grand narratives and to advance the cause of social democratic inclusion.
• Reconciles the legacies of the work of Bourdieu and Lyotard in order to advance practically a socio-analytic recognition of dissensus or différence.

By representing modern classics of French social thought in socio-political context, this in-depth study encourages all social researchers to reflect on their use of social theories in their practice.

1

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Raymond Aron (1905–83)

Background

Aron’s Mémoires. 50 ans de réflexion politique (1983) was published in the year of his death. In following Aron’s late description of his ‘fifty years of political reflection’, we need to remain aware that, ex post facto, Aron was seeking to represent his life and thought in a way which would advance his developed ideology of the social function of the intellectual as the participant observer of history in the making. While using the data which Aron supplied, we have to consider the social conditions of possibility which generated the ideology of which he sought to present himself as a paradigmatic exemplar.

Aron was born in Paris in March 1905. His family ‘belonged to the solid French Jewish bourgeoisie’ (Aron, 1990: 6). His grandparents came from Lorraine. His father, ‘a freemason in his youth, without religious concerns, hardly following Jewish ritual’ (Aron, 1990: 7), taught law and speculated on the stock market. Independent means had been inherited from the grandparents, but the crash on all stock exchanges in 1929 destroyed the family finances. Deliberately to subvert Marxist analysis of his intellectual development by anticipation, Aron volunteered the information that ‘For most of my life, after completing my studies, I had no capital: I lived on my salary’ (Aron, 1990: 9). Tacitly differentiating socio-economic from sociological analysis, Aron commented that ‘If I were to play the sociologist, I would say that my parents were products of large families’ (1990: 9). Given that a recent collection of Aron’s essays has an introduction entitled ‘The sociological thought of Raymond Aron’ (Aron, 2006: 9–47), we have now to consider the trajectory which led Aron to offer his Mémoires as ‘political reflection’ in which he was prepared to ‘play the sociologist’ in respect of only a severely circumscribed proportion of social experience.

Aron was educated at the local lycée in Versailles (where his parents lived until 1922 before returning to central Paris to coincide with his admission that year to the Lycée Condorcet). Aron gained admission to the École Normale Supérieure in 1924, in the same cohort as Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Nizan, Georges Canguilhem and Daniel Lagache, and one year earlier than Jean Hyppolite. In the first two years, he passed licence certificates in psychology; general philosophy and logic; history of philosophy; ethics and sociology; and in 1927 he wrote a dissertation on ‘The notion of intemporality in Kant’s philosophy’ for his diplôme d’études supérieures, under the supervision of Léon Brunschvicg. Assuming that Aron was primarily analysing Kant’s discussion of time in the Critique of Pure Reason, it is likely that he was interested at an early stage in the relationship between objective temporal sequence and subjective experience of change or, to put this epistemologically, in the relationship between temporality as a transcendental category of a prioristic reason and as the product of empirical observation. Certainly, he recalled in his Mémoires that ‘Every day I read the Critiques, for eight or ten hours a day’ (Aron, 1990: 26). Perhaps this was not unconnected with his general recollection of his time at the École that ‘Aside from history (barely) and civic instruction (insignificant), we learned nothing or almost nothing about the world in which we lived’ (Aron, 1990: 20). In 1928, Aron passed his agrégation in philosophy. From the autumn of 1928 he carried out military service for 18 months at Saint-Cyr, assigned to a meteorological unit. While there he began to consider a possible topic for a thesis, choosing at first to write on ‘Mendelism: an epistemological and critical essay’¹ on the grounds that he did not want to write an orthodox ‘history of philosophy’ thesis and, positively, that the emergent science of genetics was raising important questions about historical change which were being neglected by academic philosophers. In the spring of 1930, he obtained a post as a teaching assistant in French at the University of Cologne where he gave a course on the French counter-revolutionaries Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald. There he settled on what was to be his actual research project. In recalling this decision in the Mémoires, Aron argues that he moved away from a focus on Mendelism because his teaching left him with insufficient time to come to terms with the scientific literature, and he also argues that his new choice represented a rejection of Brunschvicg’s tendency to take ‘as a model and a foundation for existence the attitude of the scientist in his laboratory’ (Aron, 1990: 39). Rather, he proposed to study ‘history’ philosophically, neither the philosophy of ‘history’ in an Hegelian manner nor positivist historical science in the tradition of Comte, but, instead, in a way which would accommodate both science and humanism.

Aron spent almost three years in Germany. After one year in Cologne, he moved to Berlin, leaving in 1933. In Cologne, he read Marx’s Das Kapital. Like Sartre, who was to spend 1934 in study in Berlin, Aron came under the influence of the philosophies of Husser and Heidegger, but, as he puts it in the Mémoires, ‘on the other hand’, he became familiar with the work of ‘the survivors of the Second International, the Frankfurt School, and Karl Mannheim’ (Aron, 1990: 47). In his recollection, it was mainly thanks to his reading of Weber that his research project began to take shape. The effect of his experience of the early years of the National Socialist Party in Germany was to change his general perspective: ‘I left a postwar world to enter a prewar world’ (Aron, 1990: 55). In October, 1933, he settled in Le Havre – again, a year before Sartre. He taught in a lycée there for one year when he wrote most of La sociologie allemande contemporaine (Contemporary German sociology), which was to be first published in 1935, and also what was to be submitted subsequently as his complementary thesis, entitled La philosophie critique de l’histoire. Essai sur une théorie allemande de l’histoire (The critical philosophy of history: Essay on a German theory of history), which was to be published in 1938. La sociologie allemande contemporaine was a slight diversion from the main thrust of Aron’s thinking in the 1930s. The title of his text should not lead one to suppose that he was writing about sociology as a sociologist. His orientation was as philosophical as Sartre’s, still directed towards the philosophy of history. The culmination of the project which Aron had first devised in Cologne came with his defence of his two theses in March 1938. He wrote the main thesis – Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire. Essai sur les limites de l’objectivité historique (Introduction to the philosophy of history: Essay on the limits of historical objectivity) – between October/November 1935 and Easter 1937, and it was subsequently first published in 1938.

These three texts define Aron’s intellectual position before the outbreak of the Second World War. Aron began the first text by adopting the distinction made by German authors between the ‘encyclopaedic sociology’ of the nineteenth century and the ‘analytic sociology’ of the twentieth century. He followed the Germans in rejecting the encyclopaedic tradition associated with the Comtist legacy in France and with Spencer in England. He wrote:

The sociology of Comte and Spencer had as its object the totality of the human past and the whole of society. It was the crown and the synthesis of the social sciences. At the same time historical and systematic, it determined laws and values, re-connecting the human order with nature. It was in this form that sociology, coming from France and England, was first known and, generally, rejected in Germany. (Aron, 1981: 1)

Aron had immediately signalled three of his lasting bêtes noires: his rejection, first of all, of the sociological attempt to usurp the function of philosophical history in seeking to take the whole of human history as its object; his rejection, second, of the sociological attempt to impose systematic unity on the diversity of social processes; and, third, his rejection of what lay behind these two forms of conceptual appropriation: what he took to be the false inclination to deny any distinction between human and natural behaviour, that is to say the false endeavour to place human history within a bio-genetic evolutionary process rather than to acknowledge human transcendence of nature. The consequence of these fundamental orientations was that Aron was able to fulfil his commission to write an account of contemporary German sociology without forfeiting his philosophical commitment to the primacy of the philosophy of history. He further subdivided analytic sociology into two schools – ‘systematic’ and ‘historical’ – and this distinction provides the framework for the book in that the first chapter discusses the former and the second chapter the latter. Most important, however, is the third chapter, which is devoted to the work of Max Weber. In his introduction, Aron had indicated that the work of Weber provided the best proof that the opposition between the two schools was not insurmountable and the third chapter concludes with the extravagant claim that Weber was a man who

saw acutely the destiny which is ours, fearing lest the individual might disappear in the bureaucratic apparatus, liberty in a rational economy and the person in the regime of the masses. (Aron, 1981: 126)

Implicit in this praise is a differentiation which was made very clear in the conclusion – between the legacies of Durkheim and Weber. The core of Durkheim’s sociology, for Aron, was the reassertion of collective norms and values. By contrast, Weber was concerned primarily with the distinctive feature of Western civilisation – rationalisation. Aron concludes:

The philosophy of man and history penetrates sociological findings deeply. The focus of the work of Durkheim is the antinomy of the individual and the group; the dissolution which threatens contemporary society demands that we should restore collective discipline and morality. … By contrast, the work of Weber, the work of the majority of German sociologists, targets primarily the historical singularity of our Western civilisation, namely rationalisation. (1981: 139)

Contrary to what one supposes was his brief and what one might infer from the title of La sociologie allemande contemporaine, Aron was not especially interested in trying to define what was ‘essentially’ German in German sociology. Indeed, his conclusion articulates well that he had been drawn to German sociology as a consequence of its roots in a philosophy of history and that he wished to remain true to this elective affinity in attempting to evaluate it philosophically rather than sociologically by reference to the social conditions of its production. He made similar comments at the beginning of his La philosophie critique de l’histoire – subtitled Essai sur une théorie allemande de l’histoire. The intention of the book was to evaluate the philosophies of history of four fin-de-siècle German thinkers: Dilthey, Rickert, Simmel and Weber. Although Aron was to make clear his preference for the philosophical position taken by the last of the four, nevertheless it was important for him to state that he was in sympathy with the orientation of all four as opposed to the approach dominant within the French tradition. The common frame of reference of the four German thinkers was neo-Kantian and, in different ways, they all sought to explore whether it might be possible to establish a critique of historical reason in the spirit of Kant’s three Critiques, whether, in other words, categories of historical understanding might be identified which would counter the imposed systems of the positivist historians in the same way as Kant’s categories had, perhaps, revealed the a priori origins of Newton’s systematic understanding of the physical world.

The interest of La philosophie critique de l’histoire is that it is doubly philosophical. It offers a substantive discussion of ‘critical’ philosophies of history but does so methodologically in a way which manifests sympathy with phenomenological philosophy. Substance and method converge in Aron’s celebration of the work of Weber. Substantively, Weber might appear to be a disciple of Rickert who tried to specify the universally valid limitations of objective historical knowledge, but, rather, Weber had extended Rickert’s position to ask how far historical knowledge can have universal status independent of the partisan interests of historians. Incipiently, Weber replaced Rickert’s epistemological enquiry with an enquiry about the limitations imposed on objective knowledge by the dispositions of practising historians. Put differently, Weber had taken the discussion out of exclusively philosophical discourse and had related the generation of historical knowledge to the sphere of practical action. As Aron expressed this:

… politician at the same time as scientist, it fell to him to elucidate definitively the characteristics of historical knowledge necessitated by action. (1969a: 19)

In spite of his sympathy with Weber’s resolution of the philosophical discussion, Aron nevertheless undertook to evaluate variants of critical philosophy of history in an autonomously philosophical manner, proposing to analyse the ‘progressive elaboration of an original logic of historical knowledge’ (1969a: 19) and, in his presentations of their theories, ‘to conserve the language of our authors, to pose the problems as they posed them’ (1969a: 19) and, therefore, to refuse to offer any biographical details which might be thought to hypothesise sociological explanation of philosophical difference. Inasmuch as Aron had become an adherent of Weber’s position in the process of carrying out his research, he still adopted a pre-Weberian procedure in offering his research findings.

The main thesis which Aron presented for his agrégation in 1938 demonstrates further his difficulties in trying to hold together a phenomenological analysis of critical philosophy of history and an interest in an action-oriented solution provided by Weber which superseded both the method and the object of his study. The book ‘unfolds simultaneously’, as Aron puts it, ‘in three dimensions which, for simplicity, we call epistemological, transcendental, philosophical’ (1948: 11). Writing later, in the Mémoires, Aron is inclined to agree with a criticism of one of the examiners that the text was too scholastic in presentation but, in retrospect, he claims that ‘The book as a whole made explicit the mode of political thought that I adopted from then on’ (Aron, 1990: 85). The achievement of the book was that:

The analysis of historical causality served as a basis for or an introduction to a theory (or rather a sketch of a theory) of action and politics. (Aron, 1990: 85)

Historical events were about to occur which would provide Aron with the opportunity to develop in practice the position which the book had outlined in theory. In 1938, he undertook substitute teaching at the University of Bordeaux and, in August 1939, he was appointed maître de conférences at the faculty of letters at Toulouse. An orthodox academic career was developing but, in September, 1939, aware of the implications of the non-aggression pact signed between Germany and Stalin, Aron went to a mobilisation centre and a few days later left to begin military service in a weather centre on the Belgian border. During May 1940, he found himself in retreat across France towards Bordeaux and before the declaration of the armistice he took the decision to take a ship to England where he arrived at the end of June. There he chose to join the Free French forces but shortly before the scheduled embarkation for the Dakar expedition he was persuaded, at a meeting with André Labarthe, to remain in London to assist with the production of a monthly journal, requested by General de Gaulle, which would represent France in exile. From 1940 until the middle of 1945, he wrote a monthly ‘Chronique de France’ for La France libre as well as other contributions.

1945–60

In his Mémoires, Aron describes in detail his reasons for choosing not to resume after the war the academic career which had just commenced before it. He chose to reside in Paris. He resumed friendship with Sartre, writing an article for the first number of Les Temps Modernes. For a short period he worked as chief of staff to André Malraux when he was Minister of Information in de Gaulle’s provisional government. Shortly after de Gaulle’s resignation, Aron joined the journal Combat, which was an ex-Resistance newspaper most associated with the name of Camus. Aron wrote commentaries on the debates about the new French constitution. When the editorial board of Combat changed in 1947, Aron had the opportunity to be employed by either Le Monde or Le Figaro. He chose to work for Le Figaro on the grounds that the editor’s convictions fitted with his own, defined in the Mémoires as ‘anticommunism, the defence of parliamentary democracy, European unity’ (Aron, 1990: 158). When he made his choice, it ‘was not obvious that the two papers asking for my collaboration would represent, two years later, the extreme opposites of noncommunist French thought’ (Aron, 1990: 158).

Aron wrote for Le Figaro from 1947 until 1977. From 1947–8 until 1952, he became a member of the Rassembl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Raymond Aron (1905–83)
• 2 Louis Althusser (1918–90)
• 3 Michel Foucault (1926–84)
• 4 Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98)
• 5 Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002)
• Preliminary Concluding Comments
• Index