9
Raymond Aron was both blessed and condemned to live in the “most brilliant and
dangerous nation of Europe” at a point in time when the survival of European civilization
itself was in doubt. In many ways, as Aron himself acknowledged in his memoirs, his
writings contained the aspirations and doubts “that filled the consciousness of a man who
was impregnated by history” (Aron 1990, 470). Aron’s career and writings can teach us a
few important things about a particular face of moderation, the committed observer (le
spectateur engagé), whose values, choices, and predispositions run against those of the
romantic intellectual eternally dissatisfied with the order of things and always prone to be
seduced by broad visions of the world.
At first sight, one might be tempted to say that the position of a committed
observer fits best what we usually call the (public) intellectual who lives half-way
between the ivory tower of academia and the bustling space of the agora. Yet, as Aron
reminds us, this opinion needs to be qualified. He argued that it is characteristic of
intellectuals in general not to seek to understand the social and political world, its
institutions and practices. Instead, what they most often want is to denounce the social
and political order in which they live, feeling overwhelmed by its complexity and
murkiness. Aron criticized this tendency of intellectuals to denounce too quickly the
capitalist civilization as excessively rationalistic and anti-heroic without attempting to
understand sine ira et studio the functioning of its institutions. He took to task those who,
without knowing the basics of economics and sociology, indulged however in endless
diatribes against the rationalization of the soul and the (bourgeois) enthusiasm for
Convention