Reading Notes, Autumn 1983

Re-reading Leonard Schapiro - Raymond Aron - The Chorus in Modern Political Tragedy

RE-READING LEONARD SCHAPIRO

1 was reading Leonard’s contribution to our anniversary issue (Volume 15 number 3/4, Summer/Autumn 1980, p. 495) and its vigorously stated conclusions again. They deserve to be quoted here:

‘If internationalism is ever to be attained it will come about through the regeneration of individual societies, and not through the attempt to simu- late union among a congress of barbarous and nationalist entities. What the common law taught me is what I have believed for years - that a society can only progress by evolution, and not by convulsions, by growth and not by surgery dictated by belief in some system. And further, that the only safeguard against convulsion, and the only condition for ensuring organic growth is a well-rooted legal system and a strong and independent judiciary to safeguard it. Never must these primary requirements of a civilized society be sacrificed to the demands of the uncultured masses which will readily yield to the blandishments of demagogues in the hope of achieving their material aims. In my excursions into a very different society from England - nineteenth-century Russia - I have tried to find traces of that belief in gradualness and rejection of systems which is very rare among Russians. But there were a few who held to this faith: Pushkin, Granovsky, Chicherin, the novelist Turgenev, perhaps some more, but the list is very short.

It is difficult in the midst of the increasing barbarism in which the world is rapidly becoming engulfed to see grounds for optimism. I can only think of one tiny ray which has pierced the descending gloom in the last twenty-five years. This is the recognition which is gradually taking shape in international society that the way in which a government treats its population is no longer solely a domestic issue but a matter of concern t o the whole community of nations. The policy of the United States

READING NOTES 111

has played a decisive role here, but so have the various international conventions to which the Soviet Union is a party, and which, in spite of all its efforts, it has not been able entirely to dismiss as the exercises in hypocrisy which it originally intended them to be. This change is, of course, a very modest one - it has had little effect on the conduct of the innumerable tyrannies which exist in the world. But it marks at any rate some progress. . . ’

RAYMOND ARON

As these notes were going to press, we received the sad news of the death of Raymond Aron. In future issues of our journal we will look back on his Protean labours and on his remarkable influence on contemporary sociology, history and political philosophy, as well as on political developments. His wise counsel was listened to on both sides of the Atlantic.

Here and now I can only try to express our gratitude to him. Since 1967, and until his Government and Opposition public lecture in 1981, Raymond Aron has honoured our pages with frequent contributions. In spite of the fact that, his popularity having reached its apogee, the French media, press and publishers, were constantly running after him (for the last three years, he had been ‘polled’ as France’s most distinguished contemporary thinker) Aron was working now on his essay on Elie Halevy for our series ‘The Neglected’. How advanced the manuscript was I do not know.

I was happy that Aron had read in 1975 my all too brief essay on him as political philosopher.’ I did not entirely agree with the usual definition of him as a sociologist. I understood him to be ultimately more of a political philosopher. (The other issue on which we disagreed was on the relative importance to be attached in the history of political ideas to Saint-Simon, the father, and August Comte, the son. In one of our discussions he did recognize that perhaps he had been influenced by his teacher, Emile Gouhier, who in order to exalt Comte, had deliberately and systematically denigrated Saint-Simon.)

I argued that in two major respects he belonged to the family of political philosophy, that his overall vision was much more like that of the Greeks, of the Discourses, and especially of

. 1 G. Ionescu, ‘Raymond Acon, a Modern Classicist’ in Anthony de Crespigny and K. Minogue, Covltemporary Political Philosophers, New York, 1975, pp. 101-208.

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Montesquieu and Tocquevdle, whose tradition he so proudly continued in French culture - than like that of Comte or Marx. His analysis of industrial society laid stress on the pluralistic political organization of such a society, and made of the change in the political structures of communist industrial society the precondition of a ‘convergence’ otherwise difficult to conceive. And unlike the first sociologists, Comte or Marx, who were inspired by an optimistic sense of the final triumph of the human race, and like the classic political philosophers, Aron had a tragic sense of history. In his last, voluminous, Mkrnoires, he takes up this point ‘I wrote almost half a century ago, that our historical condition is dramatic. Should I say dramatic or tr ic? In many respects, yes, tragic is a better word

This view of history opposed him above all to the promissory character of ideologies - which he loathed - and of modern ideological politics; and gave him the magic rod of the ‘just’ interpretation of events, both historical and political. Europe will miss the lucidity of his weekly interpretations of the events of the world.

Perhaps the conclusion 1 put forward in my study in 1975 might serve to end this hasty note, written under the first impact of sorrow: ‘it is this blending of an acute sense of the uniqueness of the situations of the post-industrial world with a profound sense of the continuity of history and culture that Aron achieves. And it is this achievement which gives him the distinctive greatness in the realm of political thought’.

than dramatic’. 3

THE CHORUS I N MODERN POLITICAL T R A G E D Y

Politics is the nearest thing to drama, as is only too well known. Both are performed in a public arena; both consist of a contest (agon); both end in the defeat of one of the dramatis personae by the other, sometimes in the defeat of both by a third, the victor who advances from behind the scenes, according to the way in which the actors have played their parts, and according t o the dictates of fate. Aeschylus knew this when he ended his great tragedy b calling u on the political wisdom of Pallas Athene to assist [is embatt P ed personae. Aristotle knew it

2 R. &on, M6moires. 50 ans de rkflexion politique, Paris, 1983, p. 741.

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when he wrote his treatise on tragedy (Poetics) and his treatise on politics, with action as the common denominator of both, politics and tragedy. Corneille and Shakespeare knew it. Napoleon knew it when he told Goethe that ‘nowadays politics is tragedy’. Hegel transformed the tragedy of the French Revol- ution into the ‘dialectics’ of history. Schiller always preferred political subjects. Only Nietzsche did not accept this to him trivialization of pure ‘tragedy'. But then Nietzsche even re- gretted the separation of the Chorus from its immersion in the Dionysiac exaltation of the primeval show.

Yet ever since the time of Aeschylus, the function of the Chorus has been that of an intermediary between the actors and the spectators, to witness in human humility how gods and fates played havoc with even the mightiest mortals. Sig- nificantly at the end of Sophocles’s very first tragedy the Chorus concludes: ‘Much may mortals learn by seeing; but before he sees it none may read the future of his end’. And at the end of his very last tragedy the Chorus laments: ‘Nothing surpasses not being born’. The Chorus expresses human com- passion and mortal brotherhood. Sometimes it even seems to warn the heroes of impending disaster, of fate’s banana skins. But the Chorus and the heroes are not on the same level, they cannot communicate. The Chorus cannot interfere, it can only comment for the spectators, other mortals.

But nowadays the Chorus not only interferes - it is also the author of the plot, the director, and the stage manager, and it likes to play the role of fate, or better still, that of Iago, in Othello. The Chorus wants to see everything, claiming that this is for the benefit of the spectators, and the spectators, excited by this new ‘voyeurism’, demand to see more and more. The Chorus follow the entire cast everywhere with their zooms; they eavesdrop on all that the principal actors might be whisper- ing to each other; they record it and put it on the loudspeaker or on the screen, and they interrogate the actors in the most intimate and irrelevant way.