Peace and war raymond aron free download

In a final section, "Praxeology," Aron articulates a normative theory of international relations that rejects both the bleak vision of the Machiavellians, who hold that any means are legitimate, and the naivete of the idealists, who think foreign policy can be overcome. This new edition of Peace and War includes an informative introduction by Daniel J.

Mahoney and Brian C. Raymond Aron, Clausewitz: Philosopher of War , trans. Terence Kilmartin, New York, W. Norton, Google Scholar. Mahoney and Brian C. All emphasized words in quotations are contained in the original.

Praeger, , 32—33, whose compressed summary of Peace and War accurately captures the importance of history throughout the book. But each one activates different qualities of the mind, requires different forms of reasoning or methods of verification. At every level [of conceptualization], the research is inseparable from history, but the role of history is not the same in all four cases.

Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Publication date Usage Public Domain Mark 1. There are no reviews yet. Be the first one to write a review. As for the justification of national interest, it remains of contrary significance for each side. Kennan, Robert E. Osgood do not exalt the "sacred selfishness" of states.

They fear that this selfishness will become even worse, more brutal, less reasonable, if it hides behind words of a vague and grandiose kind. On the pretext of punishing the aggressor, the state carries war to extremes, to the destruction of the enemy state, all the more immoral as it believes itself moral, all the more egotistical as it supposes itself obedient to a transcendent principle.

In other words, if the realists come to the conclusion of Robert E. The teachings of a theologian like Niebuhr or of professors like Osgood or Morgenthau are inseparably pragmatic and ethical: statesmen should be concerned with the interest of the collectivity for which they are responsible, but they should not ignore the interest of the other collectivities.

Yet Niebuhr, and even Morgenthau, adds that realism should not be cynical and that "the remedy for a pretentious idealism which claims to know more about the future and about humanity than is given to mortals to know is not egotism. It is a concern, at one and the same time, with oneself and with the other, a concern in which the self maintains a proper respect for the opinions of humanity, derived from a modest awareness of the limits of its own knowledge and its own power.

The formula "the ego, individual or collective" suggests a second mutation in Machtpolitik, that is, the neglect or, at least, the lack of emphasis upon the primacy of foreign policy.

The state, Treitschke tells us, is the scale of justice and the sword of war. But it is above all the sword, since it can only impose justice once the state is assured, by the sword, that it can enforce obedience. The American realists, arguing against a false idealism but imbued with the individualistic and moralistic philosophy of their country, take as their point of departure either the nature of man self-seeking, violent or the nature of politics, which inevitably implies power, means or end of the rivalry between the individual or collective egos.

The word power, in English, has a very broad or very vague meaning, since, depending on cases, it translates the three French words pouvoir , puissance, force. Power is first of all, in the broadest sense, the capacity to act, to produce, to destroy, to influence; then it is the capacity to command legally to come to power, exercise power ; it is also the capacity of a person individual or collective to impose his will, his example, his ideas, upon others; finally it is the sum of material, moral, military, psychological means or one or the other of these means possessed by the three capacities we have just enumerated.

It is not unjustifiable to regard the concept of power as the fundamental, original concept of all political order, that is, of the organized coexistence among individuals. It is true in fact that within states as on the international scene, autonomous wills confront one another, each seeking its own objectives.

These wills, which are not spontaneously reconciled, seek to check each other. But this comparison, as I see it, conceals the essential point, namely that the members of a collectivity obey laws and submit their conflicts to rules, while states, which limit their freedom of action by the obligations to which they subscribe, have hitherto always reserved the right to resort to armed force and to define for themselves what they mean by "honor," "vital interests" and "legitimate defense.

Obsessed with a concern to refute the philosophy of the contract, the version of liberalism according to which respect for law and morality is enough to impose obedience on homo politicus, the realists set one anthropology against another and power against law or morality. They define politics as power and not international politics as the absence of an umpire or of police. It is another Christian, British this time, who returns to the tradition when he writes: "In international relations, it is the situation of Hobbesian fear which, so far as I can see, has hitherto defeated all the endeavour of the human intellect.

The opposition between "the monopoly of legitimate violence" and "plurality of military sovereignties" is evidently not unknown to them. The insistence with which Hans Morgenthan reminds us that survival constitutes and must constitute the primary objective of states, amounts to an implicit admission of the Hobbesian situation among states, hence the essential difference between international and national politics.

Nonetheless, the fact remains that this avowal is implicit rather than explicit. It is not impossible, it seems to me, to understand this irresolution of analysis if not of thought. The American realists, we have said, are located on the margin of the idealist situation and come later in time. They think against, they criticize the picture the idealists present of the world or the precepts they formulate. They are led, without being fully aware of it, to follow the example of those whom they oppose.

Now, the idealists accept the whole or almost the whole postulate that there is not and should not be an essential difference between international and national politics. States are at the service of individuals and not vice versa. They must obey the law as citizens have learned to do. Once international law has been established, all legal recourse to force will be police action, as it is within states today.

Further, on the level of sociology or history, one would search in vain to find a clear limit between the use of armed force by states in order to establish authority and the use of this same force against external enemies.

The establishment and disintegration of empires or even nations assumes that an enemy, external at the beginning of hostilities, becomes a compatriot at their end, or conversely that compatriots fight each other because some want to secede and organize an independent unit in their turn.

This de facto continuity does not in essence contradict the distinction, but in order to demonstrate this distinction, it would have been necessary to use methods alien to the American school: either the analysis of the intrinsic meaning of a human activity, or else a reflection upon history itself.