The Causes of War

Peace and War, by Raymond Aron. Doubleday, $10.00

THIS BOOK consists of two parts: form and content. The form reminds me of the immense and sad volumes students carry on campus: General Psychology from Rat to Man, or The History of Mankind from Cain and Abel to the Red Guards. There is simply no valid reason to write a book of 787 pages, except that it permits the author to add a somewhat pompous subtitle: “A Theory of International Relations.” The style too is textbookish: verbose, saying in a dozen words what could be said in four, full of pseudolearned terms like “ternary heterogeneity” and (with Heisenberg’s naughty electrons in mind) “inde- -terminacy of diplomatic-strategic behavior.” At one point Aron—quoting Max Scheler, it is true—lists “eight kinds of peace” with a straight face. He also italicizes passages as if they were Newtonian theorems: “TI call an international system the ensemble constituted by political units that maintain regular relations with each other and that are capable of being implicated in generalized war.” Before I proceed, let me, at any rate, exonerate the translator; he did not add to the boredom emanating from the original French! Now the content. Raymond Aron is often referred to as the French Walter Lippmann. I don’t think, even after this book, that he deserves to be that underrated. He is a man vastly more reasonable and sober than our own super-pundit, his judgments are never rash, his vision is not utopian. His shorter studies and his Sorbonne lectures on industrial society are serious, objective and courageous analyses. And Peace and War would have its own meaty conclusions were they not sunk in the fat of unnecessary material and erudite references. Aron, like his friend Sartre, suffered in his student years from exposure to German universities.

TM

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Thomas Molnar

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Peace and War, by Raymond Aron. Doubleday, $10.00

THIS BOOK consists of two parts: form and content. The form reminds me of the immense and sad volumes students carry on campus: General Psychology from Rat to Man, or The History of Mankind from Cain and Abel to the Red Guards. There is simply no valid reason to write a book of 787 pages, except that it permits the author to add a somewhat pompous subtitle: “A Theory of International Relations.” The style too is textbookish: verbose, saying in a dozen words what could be said in four, full of pseudolearned terms like “ternary heterogeneity” and (with Heisenberg’s naughty electrons in mind) “inde- -terminacy of diplomatic-strategic behavior.” At one point Aron—quoting Max Scheler, it is true—lists “eight kinds of peace” with a straight face. He also italicizes passages as if they were Newtonian theorems: “TI call an international system the ensemble constituted by political units that maintain regular relations with each other and that are capable of being implicated in generalized war.” Before I proceed, let me, at any rate, exonerate the translator; he did not add to the boredom emanating from the original French! Now the content. Raymond Aron is often referred to as the French Walter Lippmann. I don’t think, even after this book, that he deserves to be that underrated. He is a man vastly more reasonable and sober than our own super-pundit, his judgments are never rash, his vision is not utopian. His shorter studies and his Sorbonne lectures on industrial society are serious, objective and courageous analyses. And Peace and War would have its own meaty conclusions were they not sunk in the fat of unnecessary material and erudite references. Aron, like his friend Sartre, suffered in his student years from exposure to German universities.