Pierre Manent on Raymond Aron and Leo Strauss

On the advice of your preparatory class teacher, you met Raymond Aron. How did the special relationship you had with him begin?

First of all, I probably would have gone to see Aron even if Jugnet hadn’t recommended I do it. Still, it pleases me that there was a kind of—let us not say apostolic succession—but a kind of passing down of the witness, as in a relay. Each person who has played an important role in my intellectual life has passed on the witness to one who would be responsible for my education in the next phase. In this, I find a reassuring sense of continuity and coherence.

I described the state of mind I was in before meeting Aron, the perplexity in which I found myself before the task of elaborating an intellectual project suited to my interest in political things. I wanted to return to the things themselves, to use a familiar formula. For me, the return to the things themselves, or the beginnings of a move toward political philosophy, is closely tied to my relationship with Aron. Here again, the personal factor is decisive.

It is difficult to speak of such a relationship. I would have to say that there is an element of passion and love. I was carried away with admiration for Aron when I met him. And the Friday seminar, in the old building on the rue de Tournon, immediately became the most important thing for me. There was no question of missing it for any reason to the point that I sometimes forgot the most obvious professional duties. I am not proud of this but it is time to admit it. I was teaching in lycée, and when there was a staff meeting scheduled at the same time as the Aron seminar, even if I was sup- posed to take the lead, there was no way I was going to the meeting; obviously, I would go to the Aron seminar. In retrospect, I tell myself that I should’ve gone to the meeting, that there would have been another seminar the next week. But at that time, there was no question of missing any part of the Aron seminar.

This gives you an idea of the state of my mind and heart. I must add, because relations between student and teacher can involve all kinds of motivations, that no one was less interested than Aron in personal influence or in dominating a young man. Nothing in his conduct suggested the slightest desire for or pleasure in such influence; he had no interest in captivating an auditorium or an individual, unlike others in his generation who were virtuosos in this art. Aron was not at all like that. Of course he was concerned that his work be recognized and that his political analyses contribute to forming the public mind, but he had no interest in power over souls. By instinct, by nature, as much as by conviction, he knew how to live only in freedom, his own and that of others.

In any case, I believe I can say that we formed a very warm friendship, despite the many years that separated us.

Did you already admire his books or was it his teaching that captivated you?

Before teaching me through his books, Aron educated me first of all, and I would say especially, by his very person, that is, by his way of holding himself in the world and of practicing his humanity in the world. By his very being he made it clear that only a long education of the intellect and of the faculty of judgment makes it possible to find one’s way with some certainty in political life. In this way, he delivered us from the contempt or disdain for politics that comes so naturally to intellectuals, even or especially to those who are “politicized.” By the way that he gathered and synthesized the information he needed for all the subjects he treated, he demonstrated that, in politics too, there is something to be known.

I would have liked to avoid this well-worn comparison, but there is no doubt that, whatever one thinks more generally of his work, what distinguishes Sartre’s political judgment is that it is perfectly incompetent, if the adverb is compatible with the adjective. Sartre never knew what he was talking about concerning politics. Aron, whatever one thinks of him more generally, knew what he was talking about, and by this very fact he educated his reader or his listener because he showed that there was something to be known, and therefore that political judgment, far from being de- rived simply from our values or our choices, from our “project,” is based on the patient analysis of the political things themselves.

Of course, Aron wrote a lot, but I would say that he was first of all a talker. Moreover, his writings—this is at once their strength and their weakness—were fundamentally spoken texts. Aron did not write, if you distinguish between writing and transcribing his own words. When Aron wrote, he did not do the work of a writer; hunched over his writing pad, words came to him naturally. He wrote as he would have spoken. This is what gave his writings their direct, strong, and trenchant character, and also what detracts a bit, obviously, from their quality as a written work. His books are projections of his speech, and so they are not quite the finished works that one would sometimes wish.

Aron was above all a speaker, and I have the sense, shared by many who knew him, that his speech possessed an authority, and a simple eloquence that belonged to him alone. On this point, I recommend the text that evokes, better than any I know, Aron’s speech. This is the article by Alain Besançon entitled “Raymond Aron à l’oral,” which was published in the volume of Commentaire honoring Aron after his death. Its invocation of Aron’s speech is extraordinarily suggestive and very true.

Aron allows us to appreciate the natural authority that speech can have. In the text that I drafted in his honor when, at the end of his life, he received the Erasmus prize, I tried to understand Aron’s role under the category of the orator in the Roman or Ciceronian sense of the term, that is to say, a man in the public square, who speaks with authority and competence and eloquence on public affairs. This, for me, was Aron’s greatness. This is a rare greatness; in my view, it is a human type that is more rare than great scientific competence for example, and that is most often underestimated.

Consider Cicero’s reputation, the unhappy Cicero: for how many centuries has he been treated with condescension? Aron had followed a long intellectual path before becoming what he was. He has told his story in his Mémoires. Aron only be- comes Aron in the years just before the war, when the stakes of European conflicts—in particular, of course, the rise of Nazi power—cause him to find his way and his voice. Daniel Mahoney notes that the first remarks in which Aron makes his voice heard, in which he is entirely himself, is his speech before the French philosophy society on the eve of the war, in which he denounces pacifism. He had thus followed a long path: he had left [France to study in Germany] a very good student, an excellent student, a perfect student in the French academic tradition, a highly estimable tradition but one that is quite deficient where political things are concerned. And although the early Aron, I would say, the Aron before Aron, held some interest for me, still, I was not urgently interested, neither in the commentator on German sociology, nor even in the author of the Introduction to the Philosophy of History, even if I have carefully read this book, which was based on his thesis. Thus, to repeat, it was Aron the orator who definitively or decisively captivated me.

You also discovered Leo Strauss in this period. How is it that, captivated as you were by Aron, you took such a passionate interest in this Platonist?

Aron turned me definitively toward political things as the site where human life finds its proper tension and reveals its stakes. At the same time—and here I am obliged to bring to light the imbalance of my intellectual situation at that time—as impressed as I was by Aron’s approach to politics, I was looking for a reference point beyond politics. Perhaps my interest in theology played a role in this, but, in any case, even within the philosophical domain, I felt the need for a criterion of politics, a reference beyond politics that might supply a criterion of politics.

Aron understood my preoccupation, but such questions had no urgency for him. He spoke commonly of “regulative ideas”: “Yes, of course, we need regulative ideas, in Kant’s sense, to orient us in the political world,” but actually he got along fine without them. He made perfectly attentive readers who were not much interested in politics believe he was a Kantian. But Aron was the least Kantian thinker there is; he sought no horizon beyond politics, no “kingdom of ends,” no “pure morality.” He inhabited the immanence of human things without anxiety; for him these things obviously contained their own rules: what must regulate human things is apparent in the very immanence of political life. There is no need to go looking above or elsewhere, as long as we assume— and he never considered another hypothesis—that human beings are not entirely depraved. If men are normally constituted, the rules of human life emerge in the very exercise of their humanity. I would say that Aron was the perfect gentleman who experienced no need of transcendence. The immanent rule of humanity sufficed him. Maybe, after all, he is right. Maybe that is wisdom. But for my part, I impatiently desired some “measure,” to speak Plato’s language, some transcendent measure, or at least some measure that allows a synoptic view of life and thus would make it possible to regulate life. There you have it. And this impatient desire for a measure, Aron could not satisfy it because he did not feel it him- self.

Aron understood immediately that I wanted to follow a path on which he could not guide me. He suggested that I read Leo Strauss, believing that I would find in Strauss something that would answer this need, that I would find in Strauss the Platonist some- thing that would bring me closer to my goal. I’ve always been grateful for this and I continue to admire Aron for it, since I believe it takes a very generous soul to point a young man with whom one has entered into a relation of friendship and confidence, toward an author, a colleague in a way, who one knows will take precedence with this young man. Aron led me to Strauss knowing that to go toward Strauss was to distance myself from him. He did it very spontaneously and naturally. This generosity confirms that Aron had no desire for power over minds. He gave each person what seemed to him best for that person without worrying about his own influence. Aron’s influence was, therefore, doubly decisive for me: in teaching me how to approach political things and in leading me to Strauss.

How did Strauss’s influence prove decisive, as he took over from Aron?

Strauss did not take over in the sense that I left Aron behind. As a reader of Strauss, I continue to be attentive to everything Aron wrote, said, and did. Still, it is true that, where purely speculative thought is concerned, Leo Strauss has had the greatest influence on me. He is the author with whom I have debated most intensely. To explain myself in this connection, it would be necessary to trace broadly how I see Strauss’s work. I shall try.

Strauss rediscovered the Ancients. What does it mean to “rediscover the Ancients”? This means, first, that he discovered an alternative to the Moderns because he had good reason to doubt the wisdom of the Moderns. The axis of Western higher education aims, or tends, to make us spectators in the triumphal march of modern philosophy since Descartes or Bacon. We applaud the great procession and we applaud our own applause. This triumphal march of modern philosophy leads up to the crowning moment, the symphonic orchestra, the great systems: Hegel and German Idealism. In the face of this great orchestra of modern philosophy, we hear Strauss’s discordant voice, at first almost inaudible—a very sober and reticent voice. It is like hearing, I am tempted to say, be- side the crescendo of this symphonic orchestra, the austere and virile monody of a Dorian flute. But this music of Strauss’s is such that, once it has got into your system, you are profoundly taken by it.

All the forms of prestige under which we live are subverted to the point that we find ourselves asking this radical question: does this huge deployment of modern political philosophy, with the huge institutional machinery that we have built in large part according to plans laid down by this philosophy—do these not finally have the effect of separating us from nature, and in the first instance from our own nature? In short, Strauss raises a question mark over everything that seemed victorious, over all the solutions we have taken for granted, over all the conclusions that seemed beyond doubt. This is just what happens: radical doubt insinuates itself in all areas of knowledge and thought. We find ourselves obliged to ask the question: what if the modern project is carrying us ever further from ourselves? What if this moment when humanity thinks it has finally succeeded in possessing itself is, in fact, the moment when it is the most distant from itself?

Were you not predisposed to hear this discordant anti-modern music?

To be sure. A certain sensitivity to the pathologies of modern democratic society, a certain anti-modern sensibility, if you will—no doubt we will speak further of this—opened my mind to Strauss who is, of course, not just any anti-modern; it is Strauss who sought most vigorously and most rigorously to find the root of the modern project and to bring it to light as a political project. Thus, in the face of this official history, in the face of this “progress of the Enlightenment,” in these works that are like no others, these works that one does not know how to approach, Strauss brings to light an alternative history in which the modern project is no longer the superhuman realization of reason but an altogether human project, a deliberate political project that begins with Machiavelli and by which Europe commits itself to the huge enterprise of “acquiring the world” in order to achieve the mastery of the human condition—a mastery that may coincide with the greatest alienation or loss of self. This is one of the first aspects of Strauss that captivated me.

Strauss is also famous for his rediscovery of the “ancient art of writing.” You know what this means: he rediscovered what was, according to him, common knowledge up until the 18th century, that is, that before the founding of modern politics, philosophers were never candid in public; they did not think it desirable or possible that the philosopher say publicly “what he really thought.” By publishing candidly his thoughts, the philosopher would put in danger first of all the city, whose laws and opinions he criticized, and then himself, since the city would punish his effrontery, as happened to Socrates. Therefore the philosophers had to make use of a certain art of writing—an “esoteric” writing—in order to communicate what they wanted to say.

This idea horrifies and scandalizes our contemporaries. They feel personally betrayed: “What, you are saying that Plato, who says such beautiful things, is lying to me?” And the idea that a philosopher could lie to them—to them—this is something they cannot accept. They do not ask themselves whether the philosopher does not do the right thing by avoiding the danger to the city of too much candor. Still less do they ask themselves whether the philosopher does not give sufficient indications of his true thought to those willing to make the effort.

And for your part, what pleases you in this philosopher’s lie? Is it political prudence? An approach of necessary condescension toward the city?

You are mistaken. This reader of whom I have just spoken, who cannot bring himself to believe that Plato is lying when he says such beautiful things, I am this reader! I started as a modern reader my- self. Only gradually did I appreciate the liberating significance of Strauss’s discovery. To say very briefly what would require hundreds of words, Strauss’s analysis of the ancient art of writing liberates us from the “sociological point of view” that tends to determine the way we look at our humanity. This point of view presupposes that in the works of the mind we simply find the signs produced by society. The works of the mind absorb and render the signs produced by society as a sponge dipped in water absorbs and renders this water.

What Strauss shows is that works of the mind, especially those of philosophers, are governed by the philosopher, and that the social signs that one sees in a work of the mind are those the philosophers conveys to society, not those that he necessarily receives from it. For example, if a philosopher lives in a society pervaded by religion, he will use religious language, first of all, simply to make himself heard. The sociological perspective that we have absorbed leads us to say: There are religious signs in this philosophical work—Hobbes speaks of God and of Jesus Christ; Locke speaks of God’s law—therefore, these authors share the religious views of their society, since the opinions that shape the human mind are al- ways those of “society.” But Strauss shows, in a very convincing way, I think, through the extremely careful study of certain fundamental works of political philosophy (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke), to what extent their religious references are part of a language mastered by the philosopher. Far from showing that such authors are subject to the pressure of society or that they are expressing their adherence to socially dominant opinions, he shows that they are using words that are familiar in the society in which they express themselves, in order to say things to this society, or at least in this society that it does not want to hear, things that go well beyond what it is ready to accept.

So did you read Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke with the Straussian decoder?

There is no Straussian decoder. But it is true that there are certain “tricks” you need to know to look for in this “art of writing.” Some “tricks” are common to all philosophers, like their way of beginning and ending an argument with conventional views, and placing subversive views in the dense middle of a text. And then there are tricks proper to each author. The Straussian reader takes a childish, and therefore very serious, pleasure in seeking them out; it is a kind of treasure hunt. I noticed, for example, while reading Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, that the author accompanied his most audacious propositions with a casual “but this by the by.”

That said, what was most important for me in this area was not the art of writing as such. As I suggested above, what matters most—and here I don’t want to be bombastic, but to say things clearly—is the mind’s freedom. Strauss’s rediscovery of the art of writing is a demonstration of the mind’s [esprit] freedom. That sounds like a slogan: who could be against intellectual freedom? We are all for intellectual freedom, but we all (or almost all) think that the mind is determined by society. So tell me what intellectual freedom is if the mind is determined by society! Strauss shows that at least some minds can liberate themselves completely from society’s pressure in order freely to go about their work, being capable at once of taking account of the interests and prejudices of society and of making known to the reader who is sufficiently attentive to the text what he really wants to say that is far removed from the prejudices of society. In this sense, Strauss is indeed a great liberator.

Strauss’s demonstration has very important implications, particularly for our understanding of the place of religion in so-called Christian societies. Why is this? According to the sociological point of view that I have tried to characterize a little bluntly, the prejudice of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the prejudice of our public philosophy of history, is that there were ages of faith in which everyone, so to speak, was a believer, and that now we have left behind the age of faith and every individual believes, or more often does not believe, according to his choice. They had no choice and now we have the choice! This idea plays a decisive role in the received interpretation of European history, to which we will no doubt return.

But Strauss shows that certain authors of the so- called age of faith, who seemed to be good Christians, or at least passable Christians, and who, in any case, called themselves Christians, in fact, if one reads them well, showed themselves to be rigorous critics of Christianity and sometimes implacable atheists. In other words, the obligation to believe characterized the public space but minds were still free. And the most vigorous among them found ways to share their doubts with their readers. In brief, the sociological point of view, and this history which is determined by it, transforms the domain of commandment and of political obedience into a social necessity, a kind of “anthropological” necessity. When the political regime requires public recognition of the truth of Christianity or of a given Christian confession, and when the members of society comply more or less eagerly, there is, indeed, “social pressure” that motivates every individual to say what must be said and to do what must be done, or to pretend. But the social pressure derives ultimately from political government. Ultimately, I might say, the members of society obey the Prince more than they are “caused by society.” The mind is free, in effect, and even if the free mind can be made to obey, to go along, and can forget its freedom, there is no way that it can be “caused by society.”

Strauss thus helped me to loosen the hold of the “social-historic” point of view and to reconsider European history. I came to see secularization theories more and more as sociological fables based, I repeat, on the postulate that there are ages of faith in which man was necessarily religious, that there were forms of society in which human beings were necessarily religious. Secularization theories subject the human mind to necessity—and it is again by necessity that the human mind liberates itself from the necessity of religion. Let me say this as plainly as possible: if there were many atheists during the age of faith, and if there are still some believers in the air out of secularization, then our whole theological-political history must be reconsidered.

You say that Strauss is the author with whom you have debated most intensely. What does that mean?

Yes, Strauss nourished my torment over many long years. He nourished it particularly for the following reason. As I said before, I had discovered philosophy and religion together. I had discovered them from a Thomist point of view, within the serenity of the great Thomist edifice in which, in a way that is obviously very satisfying, reason’s conclusions come together harmoniously with faith’s propositions, or at least prepare them.

Strauss, on the contrary, emphasizes that philosophy and religion are two incompatible ways of life, and that one must, therefore, choose: either/or. I had entered into this question of philosophy and religion through a Thomist portal, and now the man with the greatest power over my thinking explains to me that Saint Thomas was certainly a great thinker who elaborated an impressive synthesis between philosophy and religion, but that in such a synthesis one risks losing what is most essential in each of the elements because, in reality, the way of philosophy and the way of religion are two self-sufficient ways that cannot be joined. One cannot commit oneself at the same time to the philosophic way and to the religious way, to a way that is necessarily one of “skeptical” inquiry and to a way that presupposes the truth of revelation—law or sacred scripture. For a long time, I wandered and hesitated between the equilibrium and the beautiful architecture of Thomism and Strauss’s austere demand that I choose between philosophy and religion. So where am I now? I’m still looking.

Did you not already consider the Thomist tradition defective as it relates to politics?

No doubt the Thomist school is strange; on the one hand, we owe much to them. The Thomists have preserved Aristotle, they have studied texts, they have continued the analysis of virtues, of prudence and justice, the analysis of action, of deliberation and of rational choice. . . . We are in their debt for much. On the other hand, their Aristotle is an Aristotle almost completely detached from his political context and his political concerns; their Aristotle some- times has little to do with the real Aristotle. In the 20th century, even when they deal with politics, the Thomists often use the least political parts of Aristotle’s Politics, for example, the reflections of Book One on natural communities, and in particular, on the family. The Aristotle that the Thomist tradition deploys is usually one who is merely preparing his political analysis proper. Thus, there are whole stretches of the politics that are ignored. Consequently, the Thomist approach to the virtues tends to neglect the political con- text of their exercise, to dilute them into simple “moral virtues.” While I recognize that so general a diagnosis is necessarily simplified and unfair, I would say that the Thomists have moralized and depoliticized Aristotle.

It is strange, but also very touching, in a way, to see that the deepest thinker or the most complete analyst of the democratic city has been preserved as canonical in moral and political thought by interpreters who were often “monarchists”; In effect, the neo-Thomist school was long dominated, at least in France, by authors who were political followers of Charles Maurras. The history of neo-Thomism thus provides a fine example of a noble intellectual tradition that fails to establish an authentic link with actual political experience. Consider for example Jacques Maritain, an eminent mind and a remarkable man in many respects, but one who went from being a follower of Maurras to a democrat without changing his Thomism. This is because, fundamentally, doctrine was independent of political experience and analysis. It was a metaphysical and moral doctrine—on being, intelligence, will—that made full use of Aristotle but that was not re- ally interested in political experience, even though this experience was at the heart of Aristotle’s work.

One might say that, generally speaking, the Thomist tradition is weak where politics is concerned. On this point, in the debate between Strauss and the Thomists, Strauss has a clear advantage. If I now feel distant from the neo-Thomist school within which I received much of my philosophical education, this is because this school has been shaped by its lack of any living connection with political experience; it looks at political experience “from above.”

Strauss asked you to choose between religion and philosophy, but did he not help form your judgment on political things?

Strauss rarely gave his views on political events, but each time he did, he provided texts that I find remarkable in their political wisdom and political judgment. I am thinking in particular of a text on “German nihilism,” written during the war, that is notable for its breadth of vision, its rigor and its equally admirable sobriety. Strauss rediscovered and allowed us better to understand, above all, the Greek or Aristotelian approach to politics, which is, I would say, the political approach to politics. It is truly he who, for the first time in a long history, reformulated what should be the way of political philosophy, or of political science as originally understood. He emphasized that the point of view of political science or of political philosophy is not radically distinct from the point of view of the citizen, that it is, instead, its extension or refinement.

Our political science presupposes, on the contrary, that the scientist or theoretician must by no means believe a word spoken by citizens. He is the one who knows. He is, scientifically, the subject and they are the object. Notice the tone of much contemporary political science: the reader must be impressed that the author is an Expert, that what he says is based on Science, and that such an expert has nothing in common with the unfortunate citizens that one observes as if they were insects.

Strauss reminds us that political science must arise from the citizen’s perspective because political life is founded, in the first in- stance, on the idea citizens conceive of it, that is, on the idea, or rather the different, sometimes opposed ideas of justice that they form. Political science in its full and original sense is simply the most rigorous possible treatment of the question of justice as this question is deployed naturally in political life.

Leo Strauss intended to rediscover the original and, according to him, authentic idea of philosophy. It seems a very radical idea. Do you adhere to his description of philosophy?

No. This is a point that separates me from my American Straussian friends. I have never really succeeded in making sense of this “philosopher.” As much as his idea of the way of philosophy, the “dialectical” way interests me, his idea of philosophy remains for- eign to me, for there is a point or a moment in his presentation, and perhaps even more in that of certain of his students, in which philosophy leaves this earth, where the philosopher separates him- self almost entirely from the human being, and at this point, I can no longer follow Strauss or even see where he is going. . . . To be sure, science as such has a necessarily “inhuman” dimension, insofar as it is “disinterested” and thus presupposes the suppression or at least the suspension of ordinary human interests. One must, to a certain degree, separate the scientist or the philosopher from the man. But I have never been able to understand the figure Strauss sketches of a philosopher who would fulfill his being by completely abandoning all interest in human things, who would leave all human interests behind. I find more humanity in religion, in the religious person, than in the philosopher as I conceive him, or rather as I cannot manage to conceive him, a philosopher above all human things, for whom justice becomes a secondary consideration and for whom human bonds are of no real interest.

This excerpt is from Seeing Things Politically: Interviews with Bénédicte Delorme-Montini (St. Augustine’s Press, 2015)

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