Neoliberalism isn't what done it!

And other interesting things I found this week

Uncomfortable Collisions with Reality

Unaccountability: Political, Corporate and Intellectual

After quite a hiatus, here’s a new episode of Uncomfortable Collisions with Reality.

The very terrific Dan Davies and I discuss his new book, and how Stafford Beer’s management cybernetics can help us make sense of what’s going wrong, and do something about it. Hint: we’ve fallen for the idea that massive systems can be effectively self-governing. But they can’t be. If you prefer audio, you can download an mp3 of the program from this link.

And don’t miss Brad Delong’s great review of the book below.

Alan Jacobs thinks we overestimate the power of argument

So do I, though I think it would be a mistake to believe that C.S. Lewis’ point is necessarily connected to his religiosity.

… C. S. Lewis begins his essay “Why I Am Not a Pacifist” … by discussing conscience, which makes sense, since pacifists often account for their position by appealing to their conscience. Their conscience tells them that fighting in a war is wrong. But to say merely this is to obscure a question that Lewis thinks important: How does one arrive at moral judgments, e.g. the judgment that fighting in a war is wrong? …

Lewis says that there are three elements to “any concrete train of reasoning”:

Firstly, there is the reception of facts to reason about. These facts are received either from our own senses, or from the report of other minds; that is, either experience or authority supplies us with our material. But each man’s experience is so limited that the second source is the more usual; of every hundred facts upon which to reason, ninety-nine depend on authority. Secondly, there is the direct, simple act of the mind perceiving self-evident truth, as when we see that if A and B both equal C, then they equal each other. This act I call intuition. Thirdly, there is an art or skill of arranging the facts so as to yield a series of such intuitions which linked together produce a proof of the truth or falsehood of the proposition we are considering. 

Lewis is especially interested in the second step, intuition. (By the way, it is not just Lewis who uses the term in this way: he’s borrowing from Thomas Aquinas.) And one point he makes about intuition is especially important: 

The second, the intuitional element, cannot be corrected if it is wrong, nor supplied if it is lacking. You can give the man new facts. You can invent a simpler proof, that is, a simpler concatenation of intuitable truths. But when you come to an absolute inability to see any one of the self-evident steps out of which the proof is built, then you can do nothing. No doubt this absolute inability is much rarer than we suppose. Every teacher knows that people are constantly protesting that they “can’t see” some self-evident inference, but the supposed inability is usually a refusal to see. … But when the inability is real, argument is at an end. You cannot produce rational intuition by argument, because argument depends upon rational intuition. Proof rests upon the unprovable which has to be just “seen.” Hence faulty intuition is incorrigible. It does not follow that it cannot be trained by practice in attention and in the mortification of disturbing passions, or corrupted by the opposite habits. But it is not amenable to correction by argument. 

And as with rational intuition, so also with moral intuition. If you simply cannot see that, for instance, eating people is wrong, then no one will be able to come up with an argument to convince you. Your mind may be alterable, but not by that means. 

Think about the hundreds of millions of people who spend their days shitposting; dragging political enemies on social media; writing to complete strangers to tell them that they’re stupid or evil; scrolling through TikTok for endless hours — I can’t find the link now, but one person recently reported noticing that the person sitting just in front of her on a 10-hour transoceanic flight never stopped watching TikTok for the duration —; drooling enviously over perfect Instagram lives; constantly self-diagnosing their own manifold mental illnesses; constantly pursuing their porn preferences into darker and darker places … a properly functioning intuitive faculty would tell them that all this is an absolutely shitty way to live … but their intuitive faculty is broken, or has never been developed. 

You just have to wait for the moment when they realize that all this time they’ve been eating grass. And then, when that happens, you need to have something better, something that’s tastier and more nutritious, waiting for them.

Amen

He can’t talk, but he sure talks scouse

Lovely vid

Neoliberalism didn’t cause the rise of the hard right

Draw an op ed picture to illustrate neoliberalism leading to populism

I’m not a huge fan of Janan Ganesh but I think this is an excellent column. Well the first half is excellent. The second argues that Biden’s interventionism wasn’t the answer to populism. I’m not defending it particularly, but it’s a bit of a non-sequitur. Political parties do things because of the balance of interests within and without them. Biden is a bulwark against the grotesque authoritarian craziness of Donald Trump but he’s just been trying to keep himself nice with the electorate and with his party. (Other than not coming over as senile of course!)

In most or all of the areas Biden’s thrown the switch to intervention because it made political sense. It was the only way to be aggressive on climate change. It made sense to prosecute the Americans’ anxieties about China’s flooding its market, stealing its technology and growing in military power.

In 2016, … [a] theory took shape. Decades of Anglo-liberalism had created deindustrialised towns, precarious middle-earners and a lavish, self-dealing overclass. Hence the revolt. Brexit and Donald Trump were the wages of laissez-faire.

This was always a tenuous explanation for public anger (why did the affluent home counties vote Brexit?) but a serviceable holding position until contradicting evidence showed up. Well, behold it. Rightwing populism is ascendant in France, which might be the least economically liberal country in the rich world. …

On the other side of the Alps, the Italian state is not far behind on either overall or social spending. The hard right is not just successful there. It is the power in the land. Meanwhile, in Australia, where the government is smaller, the mainstream political parties are holding up. The centre-left governs.

There is no correlation between a country’s exposure to market forces and its degree of populist anger. The hard right is flourishing in social democracies and in more market-centred ones; in regions that are poorer than their nation’s average, such as the German east, and in regions that are much richer, such as the Italian north; in countries that have experienced government cuts (Britain) and in ones that have spent at will (the US); in places where manufacturing has collapsed over the decades and in places where it hasn’t.

The last of these points is worth dwelling on. Manufacturing accounts for 18 per cent of German GDP, next to the 10 or so in Britain and America. That economic model is hailed (every know-nothing in Westminster knows the term “Mittelstand”) for creating high-status work for non-graduates.

As deindustrialisation leaves behind lots of desperate towns, ripe for populist cultivation, it follows that Germany should be a sanctum of civic calm. Instead, the nation has not just one of the largest hard-right parties in the major democracies now, but perhaps the most strident.

And if that is odd, consider next door Austria, which might be the most confounding case study in the west. It has one of the highest levels of public spending and a manufacturing sector almost as large as Germany’s and a rampant hard right. In all candour, even I — coursing with liberal biases — scratch my head here.

Populism can’t be understood as a howl against laissez-faire. And it shouldn’t have taken recent events to bring this home.

If Joe Biden loses re-election in November, one question will need answering above all. What possessed the Democrats to think America wanted or needed a statist economic transformation? … So why did it happen? Partly because, deep in the left’s gut, there is a belief that something called “neoliberalism” created the conditions for Trump. …

Andrew Sullivan with Elizabeth Corey on Michael Oakeshott, conservatism and living authentically

I really enjoyed this discussion — at least as long as the free first 3/4 of an hour went. I’ve always seen Oakeshott as a very thoughtful, but rather dispeptic conservative whose central theme is how limited the possibilities of politics are, and how we’re forever being drawn into narratives that oversell the prospects of grand projects involving governments — a message that seems increasingly apposite. Yet I like Sullivan’s reticence to call him a ‘conservative’, (though if you need to pigeonhole his politics, that’s the pigeonhole you’d pick), and his focus on a message that conservatives rarely highlight — indeed it’s usually the counterculture, if in a bowdlerised form — the need not to get lost in the trinkets on offer from the group, so as to discover how to life an authentic life.

Amen to that!

I’m also taken with the idea that ‘the individual’ as conceived in Western liberalism is unique in human history and the West’s most sublime achievement (That last bit is me, though I fondly imagine it’s me channelling Oakeshott and simply taking the discussion in what I heard of the podcast to its logical conclusion). Maybe that’s what happens behind the paywall.

Brad Delong on Dan Davies’ Unaccountability Machine

Brad tried to get it into short publishable form, but ended up writing 5,000 words of praise. I’ve cut it back down for your delectation, together with the usual link at the bottom so you can check out the whole thing if you wish.

Why is it a great book?

It is a great book because it sheds light on one of the most pressing issues of our time: why big systems make terrible decisions. Through a blend of historical analysis, theoretical insight, and contemporary case studies, Davies provides an essential read for those looking to understand the complexities of modern decision-making, and the pervasive issue of unaccountability and dysfunction in large human organizational systems.

It is a great book because it is a book that takes a lot of very important and fuzzy ideas about how a world of more than 8 billion people tightly linked together by economic commodity exchange, lightspeed voice, and political control can somehow organize itself to be productive, peaceful, and free when there is no way anything in our evolutionary past could possibly have predisposed us to pull and think together at such a scale. The result is inherent complexities and lack of transparency that lead to catastrophic decision-making. Davies makes this case through intricately woven combinations of historical analysis, theoretical frameworks, and contemporary examples that he uses to critique the phenomenon of 'unaccountability' that plagues modern society, from corporate behemoths to governmental institutions. …

At the heart of Davies’s argument is the concept that historical events and societal shifts are better understood through the prism of decisions rather than the events themselves. … [N]ot events, but rather cybernetic information-flow structures, are at the center of at least modern history.…

Most of the time what you really need to get all the things done is to build better feedback loops, which requires amplification so that the control mechanism can see what is really there outside. The organization needs to better match in its internal structures the complexity of the environment it is dealing with, so that it sees what it needs to see in time for something to be done about it before it is too late.

We have not learned these management-cybernetic lessons, we do not think of our systems in this way. And so lots of things have gone and do go and will continue to go wrong. Davies’s tracing of the cybernetic flaws in the implementation of the 'managerial revolution' provides a historical foundation for understanding the current state of unaccountability. Critical decisions increasingly made by systems and processes rather than by individuals with a stake. This shift, Davies argues, has not only made it difficult to pinpoint responsibility for poor decisions but has also alienated individuals from the very systems that govern their lives. A significant strength of the book lies in its ability to connect these abstract concepts to tangible, real-world consequences. Davies leverages a range of examples, from the tragicomic episode of squirrels at Schiphol Airport to the profound societal impacts of the 2008 financial crisis. These illustrations serve not only to elucidate his points but also to demonstrate the far-reaching implications of systemic unaccountability on both a micro and macro scale.

Note that nowhere in this management cybernetics is a primary task one of making sure that people have the right incentives to act on the information they have (that elimination of “market failures” is the focus of economics. It is, rather, making sure that the flow of information is not neurotic—neither too little for those who must decide to grasp the situation, too much so that those who must inside drown, or too irrelevant. I wish I could say: “It’s a kind of psychoanalysis for non-human intelligences, with [counterculture-era management cyberneticist] Stafford Beer as Sigmund Freud”. But I cannot. Felix Martin wrote that in his Financial Times review of The Unaccountability Machine. And since I cannot do better, I unabashedly steal it.

If von Hayek’s arguments that the market-economy price mechanism can and does have enough information-transmission bandwidth were correct, Black Wednesday would not have happened, because the Lawson Doctrine would have been sound. It wasn’t sound. It did happen. It is not correct.

Davies appears especially angry at what he sees as the intellectual wasteland and on-the-ground rubble left by Milton Friedman, and his shareholder value-maximization doctrine. It took a post-WWII oligopolistic-company system that was in rough, effective, and useful cybernetic balance—what John Kenneth Galbraith called the “technostructure”—and destabilized it by turning its components into harmful paperclip short-term profit maximizers.

He eloquently warns of us economists’ potentially baneful influence:

As long as the ideology of economics maintains its dominant position, there is always a considerable danger of the Friedman doctrine rising back up from the dead. If the highest-level decision-making mechanisms of the world are to be viable systems, they need a philosophy which can balance present against future and create self-identity…. This philosophy cannot look much like mainstream economics…. Any system which is set up to maximise a single objective has the potential to go bonkers…. You can’t have the economists in charge, not in the way they currently are…. The top level of any decision-making system that’s meant to operate autonomously can’t be a maximiser. And so, the governing philosophy of the overall economic system can’t be based on the constrained optimisation methodology that’s currently dominant in the subject of economics…

And he has much else to say.

Indeed he does. Read the whole review and then buy the book.

Fun

Are We All Hypocrites?

As you may have noticed, I’m fascinated — just fascinated — by words and ideas that have been passed down from antiquity at the same time as dramatically changing their meaning. They seem clues to deep structures we take for granted. So I was fascinated in this history of the word ‘hypocrite’ especially as I’ve paid more attention to Alasdair MacIntyre’s claim — which I quoted in last week’s newsletter — that “the characteristic skills of those who are socially and politically successful” in our society are those of navigating our contradiction riddled ethical codes.

On a quick reading I decided I wanted to include it here, so I pasted the whole article here and then started pruning it back. Then on more careful reading I came to a different view. It’s not much chop. the disappointment started when I noticed a token bit of gender equity using ‘she’ to refer to actors on the ancient Greek stage. They were almost exclusively men. So below is all that survived — some factual stuff about the meaning of the word and how it changed. And the usual link to the rest.

The word hypocrite, from the neutral amalgam of the prefix hypo-, meaning “under”, and the verb krinein, meaning “to sift or decide”, pointed to the ability to sift through or decide upon the right words to use. Their decision came from ‘under’ because their voice was amplified by a disposable mask of linen or cork that they used for the interpretation of many different characters in the theatre.

Whereas “hypocrite” was a technical term for a stage actor, “hypocrisy” was, and somehow still is today, the tool for actors, rhetoricians, and debaters to interpret their thoughts in a diplomatic way. Specifically, in rhetoric and debate “hypocrisy” was used as a means to understand each side of an argument, setting to one side one’s own position in order to give more space to a stranger’s argument, to understand it better. In that case, paradoxically, the mask’s function was to create a closer contact with others without being dominated by one’s own inner tyrant: the ego.

After all, we are always obliged to wear a mask in order to live an intersubjective life. James Ensor, the great painter, understood it perfectly. Being in contact with someone else means mediating between ourselves and the other. Being a person, from Latin persona (“mask”, per and soneo – “resound”) means precisely “being a mask”.

The word “hypocrisy” began to hold a negative meaning in the 4th century B.C., when hypocrisy met politics. … The great orator Demosthenes ridiculed his rival Aeschines because he had been a successful actor and politician. … His career as an actor and a politician made him the perfect hypocrite, impersonating characters on the stage and delivering political speeches to his audience.

From my (limited experience) Sean Turnell is a very nice guy. This is a hair raising interview which spends a fair bit of time on his detention in Burma. As you’ll hear, Sean is also a remarkably positive person.

A previous generation

I get a nostalgic thrill whenever I see things that remind me of a time I didn’t know was a golden age — when politicians put a large amount of store in mounting a good argument.

Super annoying commentary b y the guy with the headphones on the right of the screen, but very interesting new media technique for trying to deal with politicians going through their talking points.

What drives polarisation: Identitarian ideological antagonisms or diverging interests?

draw a photorealistic picture comparing polarisation driven by the diverging interests between groups versus it being driven by tribal antagonisms

I have this sneaking suspicion that increasing inequality or even regions being left is not the principal reason for the lurch towards the right. That it’s got more to do with the way in which politics has been swallowed up by the (old) entertainment industry and by social media. But who knows? We do know that polarisation has deep psychological roots which means that the most successful political entrepreneurs of our time are conflict entrepreneurs. It’s good for political organising and, as I’ve covered in this newsletter before, fund raising.

The Consensus GPT AI summary

The [2012] paper titled "Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization" by S. Iyengar, G. Sood, and Y. Lelkes explores the concept of political polarization through the lens of social identity rather than ideological differences. Here's how the authors obtained their results:

Methodology

1. Data Collection: The authors used data from multiple sources, including surveys and experiments, to gauge partisan affect and ideological positions. These sources provided a comprehensive view of the attitudes of Republicans and Democrats towards each other.

2. Measurement of Social Distance: The authors employed the concept of social distance, originally introduced by Bogardus in 1947, to measure the extent of dislike or hostility between partisans. This approach helped quantify the affective component of polarization, i.e., how much members of one political party dislike those of the other party.

3. Policy Attitude Analysis: They analyzed the consistency and correlation between partisan affect and policy attitudes. This involved examining whether dislike for the out-group (opposing party) was linked to policy preferences or if it was more significantly influenced by other factors.

4. Impact of Political Campaigns: The study investigated the role of political campaigns and their messaging. They assessed how exposure to attack ads and negative messages about the opposing party influenced partisans’ views and contributed to affective polarization.

Key Findings

• Increasing Hostility: The study found that both Republicans and Democrats increasingly dislike, even loathe, their opponents. This increased hostility was a key indicator of affective polarization.

• Weak Link to Policy Attitudes: The connection between partisan affect and policy attitudes was found to be inconsistent and possibly artifactually based. This suggests that the hostility between partisans was not strongly grounded in policy differences.

• Role of Campaigns: Political campaigns, especially those focused on attacking the out-group, were identified as significant contributors to reinforcing biased views and increasing affective polarization.

Conclusion

The results demonstrated that affective polarization in the American public is driven more by social identity and partisan animosity than by ideological differences. This suggests that political polarization is rooted in emotional and social factors rather than purely in policy disagreements.

Which article sent me to indexes to see more recent literature

Like this on “How digital media drive affective polarization through partisan sorting”

Abstract

Politics has in recent decades entered an era of intense polarization. Explanations have implicated digital media, with the so-called echo chamber remaining a dominant causal hypothesis despite growing challenge by empirical evidence. This paper suggests that this mounting evidence provides not only reason to reject the echo chamber hypothesis but also the foundation for an alternative causal mechanism. … [W]e follow the move from seeing polarization as diverging issue positions to rooted in sorting: an alignment of differences which is effectively dividing the electorate into two increasingly homogeneous megaparties. To explain the rise in sorting, the paper … present[s] a model which essentially turns the echo chamber on its head …. When individuals interact locally, the outcome is a stable plural patchwork of cross-cutting conflicts. By encouraging nonlocal interaction, digital media drive an alignment of conflicts along partisan lines, thus effacing the counterbalancing effects of local heterogeneity. The result is polarization, even if individual interaction leads to convergence. The model thus suggests that digital media polarize through partisan sorting, creating a maelstrom in which more and more identities, beliefs, and cultural preferences become drawn into an all-encompassing societal division.

eSafety commissioner not so sure we should ban kids from social media

From Crikey! I’d be surprised if banning phones at school is a bad idea, but the idea of banning kids from social media would be hard to bring about. Then again, you’d think parents who want to try should be given what support is possible. Alas the only ‘story’ covered in this piece is the potential political conflict between talking heads — which means we don’t learn much about any of this — though there was a bit at the end about kids which makes intuitive sense. Kids with minority sexual orientations do get harassed more on social media, but it can also be a huge boon to them in finding similar others.

… Earlier this month, Anthony Albanese joined Peter Dutton by saying that a ban on children under the age of 16 from social media is a good idea “if it can be effective”. …

Experts who’ve studied and researched the impact of social media on children have cautioned against a ban because of a lack of solid evidence as to its benefits and questions about its effectiveness. Now, the federal government’s own eSafety commissioner has joined those making the case against a ban.

At an appearance at [a] Joint Select Committee … eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant has not-so-subtly rebuked the idea of a ban by comparing it to the idea of banning swimming from [sic] children. …

In her submission to the inquiry first reported by Guardian Australia, the eSafety commissioner acknowledged that, while there are risks for children online, there are many benefits too. …

Inman Grant, who has served in the role from its previous iteration as the children’s eSafety commissioner, instead argued for using education and regulation to protect children online through things like online safety regulations, training programs and technologies to improve age restrictions.

Meanwhile, the eSafety commissioner’s office has continued to publish research showing the benefits for children under 16 using social media. Noting that some young people may find the harms outweigh the benefits, the eSafety commissioner wrote in her submission that social media can help children’s mental health, particularly if those children face issues socialising elsewhere. …

“An evidence-based approach means being informed by robust and rigorous research,” Inman Grant wrote in her submission to the inquiry.

Lose yourself in the world a century ago

Go on, give yourself five minutes to scroll and watch!

I got a reply to this question I posted on Quora 9 years ago. It was probably spam, but it reminded me of the question — and of a different more naïve time on the net.

Ukraine: is this more wrong than right?

We just have to hope so …

Though I’ve found John Mearsheimer persuasive on how provocative NATO expansionism was, it seemed to me, and still does, that, even if that was an egregious error, we should not let a European country be invaded. But ultimately it all depends on the calculus of two very difficult judgements. If the West is not going to fight off Russia, we should be prepared to negotiate some settlement before hundreds of thousands more die. And then there’s the big one — nuclear war. The fact is we really don’t know how close we’ve been or are. I reproduce this here not because I agree with it, but because it might be more right than wrong (and I might be more wrong than right).

The world is at its most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Back then, the fear of total destruction consumed the public; today, however, few people seem even to be aware of this possibility. It is easily imaginable that nuclear war could break out between Russia (and perhaps China) and the West, yet politicians continue to escalate tensions, place hundreds of thousands of troops at “high readiness,” and attack military targets inside Russia, even while ordinary citizens go on with their lives. 

The situation is without parallel ….

As if expanding NATO to include almost all of Central and Eastern Europe weren’t provocative enough, Washington began to send what would eventually amount to billions of dollars’ worth of military aid to Ukraine in 2014, to “improve interoperability with NATO,” in the words of the Pentagon. …

Meanwhile, as Ukraine was being de facto integrated into NATO in the years before 2022, the United States put into operation an anti-ballistic-missile site in Romania in 2016. As Benjamin Abelow noted in his 2022 book, How the West Brought War to Ukraine, the missile launchers that the ABM system uses can accommodate nuclear-tipped offensive weapons like the Tomahawk cruise missile. “Tomahawks,” Abelow pointed out, “have a range of 1,500 miles, can strike Moscow and other targets deep inside Russia, and can carry hydrogen-bomb warheads with selectable yields up to 150 kilotons, roughly 10 times that of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.” Poland now boasts a similar ABM site. …

In another bellicose move, the Trump administration in 2019 unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. Russia responded by proposing that Washington declare a moratorium on the deployment of short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, saying that it wouldn’t deploy such missiles as long as NATO members didn’t do the same. Washington dismissed these proposals, which upset some European leaders. …

Bringing the world even closer to terminal crisis, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg states that 500,000 troops are at “high readiness,” and in the next five years, NATO members will “acquire thousands of air defense and artillery systems, 850 modern aircraft—mostly fifth-generation F-35s—and also a lot of other high-end capabilities.” Macron has morphed into one of Europe’s most hawkish leaders, with plans to send military instructors to Ukraine very soon. At the same time, NATO is holding talks about taking more nuclear weapons out of storage and placing them on standby.

Where all this is heading is unclear, but what’s obvious is that Western leaders are acting with reckless disregard for the future of humanity. Their bet is that Vladimir Putin will never fire nuclear weapons, despite his many threats to do soand recent Russian military drills to deploy tactical nukes. Given that Russian use of nuclear warheads might well precipitate a nuclear response by the West, the fate of humanity hangs on the restraint and rationality of one man, Putin—a figure who is constantly portrayed by Western media and politicians as an irrational, bloodthirsty monster. So the human species is supposed to place its hope for survival in someone we are told is a madman, who leads a state that feels besieged by the most powerful military coalition in human history, apparently committed to its demise. Maybe the real madmen aren’t in the Kremlin, but in Washington, London, Brussels, and Warsaw.

It is downright puzzling that millions of people aren’t protesting in the streets every day to demand de-escalation. “Pulling civilization from the brink” should be the watchword of every popular movement on both sides of the Atlantic. Evidently, the mass media have successfully fulfilled their function of manufacturing consent. But unless the Western public wakes up, the current crisis might not end as benignly as did the one in 1962.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

A stunner

The tweet it came from said it was from Belgium, but commenters said it was the AIing of an Instagrammer. It’s lovely whatever it is.

Gender pay gap declines as cohorts move through …

One Cohort at a Time: A New Perspective on the Declining Gender Pay Gap
Jaime Arellano-Bover, Nicola Bianchi, Salvatore Lattanzio, and Matteo Paradisi #32612

Abstract: This paper studies the interaction between the decrease in the gender pay gap and the stagnation in the careers of younger workers, analyzing data from the United States, Italy, Canada, and the United Kingdom. We propose a model of the labor market in which a larger supply of older workers can crowd out younger workers from top-paying positions. These negative career spillovers disproportionately affect the career trajectories of younger men because they are more likely than younger women to hold higher-paying jobs at baseline. The data strongly support this cohort-driven interpretation of the shrinking gender pay gap. The whole decline in the gap originates from (i) newer worker cohorts who enter the labor market with smaller-than-average gender pay gaps and (ii) older worker cohorts who exit with higher-than-average gender pay gaps. As predicted by the model, the gender pay convergence at labor-market entry stems from younger men's larger positional losses in the wage distribution. Younger men experience the largest positional losses within higher-paying firms, in which they become less represented over time at a faster rate than younger women. Finally, we document that labor-market exit is the sole contributor to the decline in the gender pay gap after the mid-1990s, which implies no full gender pay convergence for the foreseeable future. Consistent with our framework, we find evidence that most of the remaining gender pay gap at entry depends on predetermined educational choices.

Heaviosity half hour

Raymond Aron on the transition from WWII to the Cold War

It’s amazing how ignorant I am about the state of the world before I was a kid. So I found this discussion fascinating. They’re from TV series which even the English speaking world had a generation ago, but alas has no more — interviews with serious intellectuals. One such is Raymond Aron. This is from the best-selling book of the series of interviews with the very moderate and admirable Aron.

III THE DISILLUSIONMENTS OF LIBERATION

a) National Renewal

D. Wolton. – When you returned from London, how did you find the French? Were they changed?

Raymond Aron. – Let’s begin with my friends. I got together again with Malraux, who had become passionately anticommunist. My last conversation with him had taken place during the “phony war.” In the course of a dinner, I beseeched him to break with the Communist party. We argued all evening, but he refused to make the break. “I would do it if Daladier had not imprisoned Communists,” he said.

I saw Sartre again. In the intellectual and literary world, he had become the great man that he was not back in 1938 or 1939. At the same time, he was much closer to the Communists than before. He was now politicized, whereas, earlier, he had not been. There was a reversal of attitudes between Malraux and Sartre, two men who did not like each other. I liked them both, but never both at the same time because there was practically no conversation possible between the two.

As far as the French are concerned, to judge them after years of war didn’t make any sense. Living conditions were very difficult. The war was still going on. It was the period of the black market. However, when I met Resistants, I had an inferiority complex. As circumstances would have it, my decision to leave in 1940 assumed, in retrospect, an entirely different significance. I thought to myself as having avoided the suffering and risks of those who had remained in France—something that was manifestly not my desire, nor the significance of my gesture in June 1940.

J.-L. Missika. – How did you judge your friends who published during the occupation?

R.A. – I think I’ve already told you: It is not my habit to make moral judgments of other people. Since I neither suffered nor ran any serious risks during the war, I did not believe I had any right to make moral judgments on the behavior of one person or another. Moreover, my close friends had done nothing of a culpable nature. Well, Sartre had one of his plays staged during the occupation, but for those who could read between the lines, the play was anti-Vichy and anti-German. The Figaro journalists were more or less Vichyites until November 1942. But it never occurred to me to criticize them, the less so since I had written in La France Libre an article praising what was being written in Le Figaro Littéraire. The magazine defended French literature against those who, at the time, mouthed abuse against France and the excessive intelligence of the French, attributing to that intelligence their lack of character and the military defeat. So, for my part, despite some articles that I did not like, I always put Le Figaro on the good side of the barricade.

J.-L.M. – And the purge?

R.A. – What can I say? I have written nothing about it. First, I didn’t have the opportunity. The purge took place chiefly in 1944–1945. At that time, I was still writing mostly for La France Libre and a bit for an illustrated weekly, not very seriously. Besides, I just didn’t consider myself enough of a moral authority to take a position on the question. Personally, I detested the purge, but I knew that something like it was inevitable. I wrote a few lines on the subject as part of the conclusion to the “Chroniques de France” in La France Libre. I was rather favorably disposed to Mauriac’s position, except that for certain people, like the Resistants and the Jews, it was more difficult to accept Mauriac’s views.

D.W. – What was the atmosphere like when peace came, in May 1945?

R.A. – There, I must go back very far, to November 1918, when I was thirteen years old. I lived in Versailles. My parents brought me to Paris. And there I lived the unique, unforgettable day of a people unified in joy. What Paris was on Armistice Day and the day after the Armistice could not be imagined; it had to be seen. People embraced each other in the street. Everyone, the bourgeoisie, the workers, office clerks, the young and the old; it was the madness of the crowd, but a joyous madness. There was no hatred; more than anything else, there was a kind of elation and relief. Everyone repeated again and again, “We beat them.” But, above all, there was

In May 1945, on the contrary, Paris was mortally sad, as I experienced it anyway. I recall a conversation I had with Jules Roy that day. He was struck just as I by the sadness, the absence of hope. It was the end of the war, but it was the victory of the Allies more than that of France. There was nothing comparable to the outbursts of enthusiasm of November 1918. I have only one precise memory of May 8. I was walking in Paris, because I did want to share the experience with the Parisians. I saw—I forget where—General Giraud. He was alone. He walked along sadly, as if lost. I went over to greet him as a kind of gesture; then I saw him walk away without saying anything. It was the sadness of a man who could have played a role, but who failed despite his courage. No one remembered him that day. Political life is like that.

J.-L.M. – Woe to the conquered.

R.A. – In politics, you must win or stay away.

D.W. – Didn’t France at this time want to forget the five years of war, during which the behavior of the French had not always been praiseworthy?

R.A. – It is difficult to say. I am not sure the French would be able to answer. It must not be forgotten that General de Gaulle, who was president of the provisional government, had immediately transformed the nature of the events of that period. He considered himself as the permanent legitimacy of France. Because he had always been on the right side, perforce France had also been on the right side. In a striking manner, a number of events of the years 1940–1944 were, so to say, erased.

I recall a conversation with Sartre. We asked ourselves: Why has there not been a single article, not even one, saying, “Welcome to the Jews upon their return to the French community”?—not even an article by Mauriac. The underlying reason for this silence was that one had in a sense blotted out what had happened. There were many Resistants among the Jews. In the Resistance, the Jews had been Frenchmen like the others—to such an extent that no one thought of writing that article. The French settled down again in their France as if the Jews had never been cast out. I took this phenomenon as evidence of a determination to forget, and also as a kind of return by France to its old self.

J.-L.M. – Did France refuse to make an examination of conscience, as the Germans, for example, did to a greater degree?

R.A. – Was there an examination of conscience in Germany, except under the constraint of the defeat and of its conquerors?

J.-L.M. – Whether under constraint or not, there was a certain self-questioning.

R.A. – French responsibility was not comparable to that of the German people. And then, wasn’t there really an examination of conscience? Many Frenchmen made it, probably as individuals. But there was something more important: the transformation of the atmosphere in France, the transformation of the French people, after the war. Beginning in 1944–1945, the France that I have known has been totally different from that of the 1930s. The Right was not the same; neither was the Left. Something gave me hope; the people around me (my generation) were motivated by a genuine passion, it was of nationwide scope. We had in us the memory of the decadence of the 1930s, about which I have spoken. In 1944 and 1945, a truly profound determination for national renewal became evident.

D.W. – That appears very clearly in your articles in the newspaper Combat. In those articles, there was an optimism and a will to modify conditions that were extraordinary. What led you to Combat?

R.A. – I began there in March 1946, after having spent two months as Malraux’s directeur de cabinet in the second de Gaulle government, where I had my initial experience as, let us say, an official personality, at a modest if not mediocre level. I learned a bit about how things are done in a ministry, and it didn’t make me anxious to stay there!

First, one had visits from people for eight to ten hours a day. The newspapers were the focus of attention. By the time I arrived, at the end of 1945, pretty much everything had been done. The newspapers had either been recreated or eliminated. Resistants and non-Resistants had taken over the old newspapers with the titles more or less modified. I had visits from personalities linked to the old newspapers, who had, correctly or unjustly, been considered collaborators. Chastenet visited me; he had been the director of Le Temps. I told him what I thought—that I didn’t like all that, but that there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

The only thing I tried to do and would have succeeded in doing if General de Gaulle’s government had lasted a few more months, was to prevent the birth of the company—later created by Defferre—that was to group all the printing plants confiscated by the state. The proposal of having one company control all those plants seemed stupid to me. I was convinced that the national company would be incapable of managing them, and that they would go to pieces in a few years. So I refused the proposal drawn up by the ministry’s legal counsel and had a totally different text drafted. My proposal would have the printing plants transferred as rapidly as possible to their directors, to the newspapers, and so on. I saved this text for a few years and finally threw it in the wastebasket. Nothing remains of this program that, in my point of view, was reasonable and would have avoided several of the disadvantages of the other decision. Otherwise, I didn’t do much. Nonetheless, Malraux and I authorized the creation of Le Figaro Littéraire. And then, from time to time, there were discussions on the allocation of paper. One day, we received a telephone call from Palewski, General de Gaulle’s directeur de cabinet. He told us to cancel the authorization to publish. At the time, as a matter of fact, there existed a system of authorizations to publish. But there wasn’t much point in authorizing newspapers to publish without having any paper to give them. The same question was repeatedly discussed: how to allocate the paper stocks. Allocation was based on unsold copies. The greater the number of unsold copies, the less paper a newspaper was entitled to receive. So, when there were a lot of unsold copies, a paper began a decline that carried it still lower. It was a very bad system, though inevitable. A large number of newspapers were created, but many disappeared in a year or two.

Paper was not the only problem. People visited us with various requests for things one can have in a prosperous society without asking. But at that time, everything was scarce, including gasoline. None of that thrilled me, but it educated me a little and amused me to some extent. Moreover, I had the feeling that working eight or nine hours in a ministry office was less tiring than reading the Critique of Pure Reason for three hours. The work was enervating and irritating, but it didn’t require any intellectual effort.

b) The Political Virus

D.W. – Let’s return to your journalistic activities. You started writing for Combat in March 1946.

R.A. – Hold on. Before that, I should mention a decision I took, whose consequences for my life were almost unlimited. I think of it today as perfectly irrational, but I took it in full awareness: I returned neither to the University of Toulouse, to which I had been nominated in August 1939, nor to the University of Bordeaux, where I was a substitute before the war, and whose faculty of letters offered me the chair of sociology.

I refused, first, because I was intoxicated with politics. The political virus. I have since lost it. But at the time, I was truly intoxicated. Also, I wanted to live in Paris. I had been in exile for a number of years, all my friends lived in Paris and the idea of living in Bordeaux did not appeal to me. As for living in Paris while teaching in Bordeaux, I told myself that it wasn’t the right thing to do. But it was only a rationalization. I think the real reason was twofold: on the one hand, politics; on the other, the feeling that teaching sociology in Bordeaux to a few dozen students was not really a way to work for the revival of France. I had the illusion that a quasi-political activity in Paris would be more effective, a more direct contribution to what we are trying to achieve. It was a bit naive. The result was that my university career was set back by ten years, which is of no importance; but of more importance is the fact that I became a journalist, something that would never have happened if I had accepted the chair at Bordeaux. I had never written a single newspaper article. My war pieces were periodical articles, rather academic, something between journalism and serious work. I wrote my first newspaper article for Combat.

I said that my decision was irrational. Upon reflection, I am not so sure. It is extraordinarily difficult to know myself whether I chose well or badly. Were thirty years of journalism at Le Figaro a contribution to French political life? A meaningful contribution? It’s not for me to say. However, if I had remained a full-time professor, I would have been nominated to Paris, very probably to the Sorbonne, in 1947, rather than in 1955.

My journalistic career began essentially because I had to earn a living. I didn’t have a cent. I had rejected the university position, the life of a peaceful civil servant, and I had to earn my way. Malraux was a close friend of Pascal Pia, the director of Combat …

J.-L.M. – What was the atmosphere like at Combat?

R.A. – It was a marvelous institution, typically French, a little crazy. There was an exceptional density of gray matter per square inch in the rooms of Combat. Seven or eight people who wrote the short news items became university professors, people like P. Kaufmann, Merleau-Ponty (cousin of Maurice), etc. As for me, I started out by writing a half-dozen articles on the several French political parties. I don’t know why, but they met with a great deal of success in Paris circles. After that, I became one of the two editorial writers. The other was Albert Ollivier. So, I began my journalistic career immediately at the top.

At the time, that amused me. And then there is always the question of pride. I arrived as a professor of philosophy who had written obscure books that few had read. Therefore, I wanted to demonstrate that I, too, could handle this profession. But once I had demonstrated it, I was much less excited after a few weeks or months. A number of philosophers who also wrote for Combat said to me, “It’s curious that you prefer to write articles rather than the Introduction to the Philosophy of History.” I thought they were right, but there was this intoxication with politics, as I’ve told you, and the idea, or the illusion, or the will to participate in political life, in the recovery of France. So I stayed at Combat between March 1946 and April 1947, the era of the first political struggles. I was one of those who led the campaign against the first Constitution, defended by the Socialist and Communist parties. I remember my editorial written the day after the referendum rejecting the Constitution. Its title was, “Sauvé par la Défaite.” I discussed the Socialist party, that was, deep down, very happy to have been beaten in the referendum. It had no desire to find itself part of a duo with the Communist party.

There existed something then that has since died out: debates among editorial writers. They existed during the Third Republic and returned after the Liberation, thanks in part to Camus, Ollivier, and perhaps to myself, and to Mauriac, on the other side, and to Leon Blum. The debates were at once political and intellectual, perhaps too intellectual, but I think their level was often about right. Today, there is no longer a daily “editorialism,” nor any dialogue among editorialists. When I write an article or notice one article or another in Le Monde, it doesn’t seem to be part of a normal dialogue, but, rather, a kind of assault.

At the time, there was real discussion: on the purge, on General de Gaulle and his provisional government, on daily events, on the future of France. That is why the recollection of my time with Combat is more agreeable than all my other memories of journalism. It was much more lively than today. There are now only monologues or insults.

D.W. – There was another interesting milepost during this period. With Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Marleau-Ponty, Malraux, you were one of the founders of the periodical Les Temps Modernes. What did you expect of it?

R.A. – It was Sartre’s magazine. He had already written novels, books on philosophy, plays. He wanted to take part in the political action. That is why he conceived Les Temps Modernes as a periodical that was, I won’t say essentially political, but quasi-political—that is, from the very beginning, a periodical much less literary in nature than action-oriented. So, he asked friends like me, and also some outstanding intellectual personalities like Jean Paulhan and André Malraux, to serve on the editorial committee of Les Temps Modernes. My recollection is that neither Paulhan nor Malraux ever came. I wrote three or four articles for Les Temps Modernes, one of which was relatively good. It was on Petain’s trial. It wasn’t at all conformist, but Les Temps Modernes ran it without any fuss. My other articles didn’t amount to much. I left Les Temps Modernes when I entered Malraux’s cabinet. I didn’t return. The illusion of the Liberation had faded away: the assumption that all the Resistants would constitute a single corps and that there would be republican unity for the reconstruction of France. There were Communists in the Resistance bloc and in view of the kind of relations that immediately developed between the Soviet Union and the United States, I was absolutely convinced a break would occur rather rapidly inside the Resistance group.

I constantly tried to explain at the time—to Sartre, for example—that there was such a close connection between international relations and French domestic politics that Resistance unity wouldn’t last in the event of tension between the superpowers.

Besides, the near-break inside the Resistance began before the cold war. If the illusion of unity persisted for some time at Les Temps Modernes, it was due to the fact that there were no Communists on the editorial committee. But Sartre liked to say, and Merleau-Ponty, also, “My problems with the Communists are just family quarrels” … an expression I found rather naive.

Moreover, I had immediately developed an overall image of the world. As early as the end of 1945, I was convinced the Soviets would remain in East Germany. Consequently, the reconstitution of a united Germany was excluded; there would be two Germanies. I concluded that the Franco-German alliance was practically sealed. I was only a bit ahead of events.

D.W. – Let’s return to Combat of that time. It was a successful newspaper and yet it collapsed very quickly. Why?

R.A. – I often said, jokingly, “In Paris, everyone read Combat; unfortunately, ‘everyone’ amounted to only forty thousand people.” It was true. One could say that in the political and intellectual world, everyone read the editorials of Camus, Ollivier, perhaps my own. The paper was a great success, but an intellectual one, which meant it did not have enough readers. On top of that, it was characteristic of a super-intellectual newspaper and of the climate of the period that everyone wrote what he thought. So, there were often contradictions from one article to the next. Here is an example. Concerning the referendum on the second Constitution, I wrote a long editorial in which I said, with regret, that it should be accepted because we could not continue writing constitutions and rejecting them. The next day, Albert Ollivier wrote an editorial with the title, “Pourquoi pas, ‘non’?” But newspaper readers want, from their regular newspaper, less to be educated or informed than to have their opinions reinforced—I found that out later. From the moment a newspaper supports contradictory opinions, it can perhaps continue to exist as a newspaper of opinion, with a limited public, but it cannot expect to keep the 200,000 readers Combat had in its heyday. In this sense, the decline of Combat was the inevitable consequence of the qualities, or rather, the peculiarities of a newspaper administered and written by intellectuals.

There were crises. Camus left and returned. The relationship between Camus and Pia was difficult. The various Combat journalists reproached each other for the loss of readers. For some, Ollivier was responsible; for others, Raymond Aron; for still others, this one or that one. In fact, we just didn’t know. It was probably a combination of everyone. Each was acceptable to part of the readership; together, they always exasperated some of the readers.

Moreover, the director was himself an intellectual, a novelist. We also had difficulties with the printers. I remember one time when the union members said to us very firmly, “We need a boss!” The printers perhaps looked upon our ideas with favor, and perhaps they looked favorably upon intellectuals—that’s not so certain—but they were workers, they expected their pay and they wanted the opportunity to discuss with someone the enterprise, salaries, etc. However, it is indeed possible to find a manager among intellectuals. Later, Jean JacquesServan-Schreiber, who was in his way an intellectual, was also, without any doubt, a manager.

J.-L.M. – General de Gaulle quit the government in January 1946. Did you approve of his departure?

R.A. – It wasn’t my business to approve or disapprove. I understood his reasons. He was in a situation he considered intolerable. He did not want to govern France in the parliamentary framework or to conduct endless discussions and negotiations with the political parties, even though he had extraordinary talents as a parliamentarian. I heard him once or twice at the Consultative Assembly. If he had wanted to, he could have governed France as prime minister, in view of his historic stature and his talents as a debater. But he did not want to govern France in this fashion.

I knew, however, that he had the desire, hope, and conviction that he would return to power. I remember André Malraux telling me, after a conversation with some people in General de Gaulle’s entourage, “We’ll be back in six months.” It took twelve years. At that time, I saw no imperative reason for his return. I believed that, for what it was worth, the parliamentary regime could last. In Le Grand Schisme, I wrote, “The Fourth Republic can last; it cannot innovate.” That’s pretty much what I thought. It was a piece I wrote in 1947 and it was published in 1948.

D.W. – Concerning General de Gaulle’s departure, we have found an IFOP poll. In March 1946, 40% regretted his departure; 32% were satisfied; 28% were indifferent. People were far from unanimous about de Gaulle!

R.A. – It is important to note that the first de Gaulle government wasn’t very different from a government of the Third or Fourth Republic, except that on this occasion the head of government was an exceptional personality. However, General de Gaulle was not responsible for the economic and parliamentary difficulties, and he could not eliminate them, either. So, in withdrawing in 1946, he didn’t leave behind him the memory of an exceptional head of state, neither among the French in general nor in the political class. When someone would make the observation to me, my reply was always, “Yes, he arrived in power and he had all the power, it’s true, but he lacked a telephone.” That was a little bit the French situation in 1944 at the Liberation. On the other hand, in 1944–1945, de Gaulle was already obsessed with foreign policy, while the French were more concerned with food supply problems and reconstruction. But in terms of domestic policy, de Gaulle didn’t do anything in 1944–1945 that was substantially different than any other prime minister would have done. What’s more, in the argument between Pleven and Mendés-France on the economic program, the intellectuals were the Mendés-France. Were they right? In my opinion, what Mendés-France wanted to do was right, but he lacked the means to realize it. In any case, de Gaulle had chosen Pleven, with the result that he lost some prestige in the eyes of those intellectuals aware of French economic conditions.

In power, de Gaulle was accepted, just as Petain had been accepted in 1940. But because he came to power, not in order to suppress political activity, as Petain had done, but to restore it, the political parties inevitably became active again. Some of the French were on the Right, the others on the Left: Socialists and Communists. To the degree that a party was for or against de Gaulle, party members were themselves more or less in agreement with, or against him. De Gaulle was above and beyond parties, but he could not avoid restoring the party system, though he detested it, because he had decided earlier that, upon returning to France, he would reestablish the Republic and democracy, and he could not do otherwise. But since he did not wish to govern with the parties, he left. It seems to me his decision was logical. So that, in 1946, there were three groups: The Communists, the anticommunists, and a third, a personality who constituted a group by himself, General de Gaulle.

There was, on the one hand, the battle between de Gaulle and all the parties; on the other, there was the battle inside the parties between the Communists and the rest of the members. That was at once the curse and the singularity of the Fourth Republic, which could have lasted longer if it hadn’t been for Algeria. But to try to resolve Algeria and hold out against de Gaulle at the same time was too much for the Fourth Republic.

D.W. – You say, “It wasn’t my business to approve or disapprove of General de Gaulle’s departure.” But it is a fact that you were in the government at that time. Furthermore, why did you want to take that step, that is, to enter the political arena, when you could have influenced events as an intellectual, or journalist?

R.A. – My friendship with Malraux was a factor. I was very close to him. We had a long talk before his first interview with de Gaulle, let’s call it something like the meeting between Goethe and Napoleon. I was involved in Malraux’s conversion to Gaullism, a logical move, it seemed to me. After the war, he was affected, like others, by a national, almost a nationalistic, feeling. At the same time, he had ceased to be a revolutionary, and the only political poetry possible in post-war France was General de Gaulle. Now, Malraux was interested in politics only in their historic or poetic sense. So, it was perfectly normal for him to become a Gaullist.

As for me, I was never a Gaullist in the same way as André Malraux. De Gaulle said so himself. One day, I wrote an article displeasing to the General, “Adieu au Gaullisme.” The next day, he said to Malraux, “He has never been a Gaullist.” If being a Gaullist meant being General de Gaulle’s vassal, or believing in him whatever his opinions, then, indeed, I was not a Gaullist. No more so after the Liberation than before. When I was in the RPF,²⁰ I continued to express opinions totally different from those of General de Gaulle on a number of questions. However, in one sense, and on several occasions, I was a Gaullist. At the time of the Liberation, I thought that General de Gaulle’s government was much the best and that it was necessary to support it. In 1958, I thought that de Gaulle’s return to power, even though the circumstances were unpleasant, was rather desirable because, with him, there was a chance that France might be able to take a decision on Algeria. But my manner of being a Gaullist could not be satisfying to him. To be truly Gaullist, it was necessary to have faith in de Gaulle and to be ready to change one’s own opinions to agree with his. I could not do it, but that didn’t prevent me from being André Malraux’s directeur de cabinet.

J.–L.M. – But this friendship with André Malraux was really astonishing. Your personalities were very different. It was the difference between hot and cold!

R.A. – Absolutely. But do friendships generally spring up between people with similar personalities? André Malraux was eminently cultivated, and we had in common many subjects of conversation: Literature, history, politics. When he wasn’t chasing a will-o’-the-wisp, he was a very acute analyst of political matters. From time to time, his romantic attitude toward catastrophes got the better of his sense of reality. That was true between 1946 or 1950, but we could generally discuss French and international politics with a great deal of pleasure and purpose. Moreover, in friendly relations between two people, there are factors at work that are quite outside the analysis of personalities. There is the chance that something will click between the two individuals; at the same time, the reverse is also possible: that they will be like two ships passing in the night. Between Sartre and Malraux, there never was a “click.” I found myself between the two. In a way, I acted quite differently with one than with the other. I didn’t have the same kind of conversation with each of them. Each was glad to speak about the other, but not always in the most friendly way.

Unfortunately, my friendship with Malraux didn’t last until the end. He gradually became very closed, very solitary. As one of General de Gaulle’s ministers, he was often irritated by what I wrote. I still saw him from time to time, and I retained the same admiration and friendship for him that I had felt over the years. But as we grew older, problems of distance, separation and sadness weighed upon us. A little bit the way it was with Sartre. For men of our generation, it seemed impossible to sustain friendships when political choices did not coincide. Political affairs were probably too serious and too drama-filled for friendships to overcome differences. In the case of my relations with Sartre, that was very clear. As far as Malraux was concerned, I don’t think it was my non-Gaullism or the inadequacy of my Gaullism that was at the bottom of our gradual separation. There was something else, more personal. It would be necessary to talk about the last part of Malraux’s life. But this is not the time.

D.W. – This political virus that you spoke about; how long did it grip you?

R.A. – If by that you refer to the inclination to be a politician, the virus never affected me very much, and, in any case, I was able to rid myself of it very quickly. But if by political virus you mean a permanent attention to political events, then the contamination began during the war and I have never been cured. To the extent that I commented upon events in Le Figaro over a period of thirty years, between 1947 and 1977, I remained permanently a quasi-political person. I have not considered myself a political activist because I was never a candidate for anything. But I was a political journalist or a political writer, who commented on daily events and simultaneously wrote academic works.

I have used the words “virus” and “contamination” because I still remember the philosopher I was before 1939 and the opinion I held at the time of the Ecole Normale graduates who drifted toward politics. I didn’t think well of them. I have occasionally, but very rarely, kept a diary. I found there once a few sentences in which I denounced in advance what might happen to me, that is, to find myself drawn toward political activity. Before 1939, I aired my editorials in conversations. Later, I wrote them. Well, that’s the way it worked out.

c) Yalta: The Legend of the World’s Partition

J.–L.M. – At Hiroshima, in August 1945, the first atomic bomb exploded. How was this event perceived at the time?

R.A. – It was immediately perceived as a landmark event. The discovery of nuclear explosives was a turning point in universal history, and people began to speculate. Did it mean that there could be no more wars? Did it mean that humanity was going to commit suicide? And so on. It is important to emphasize that people immediately began to reflect upon, and write about, the event; no one failed to understand its importance or its historical significance. On the contrary, people rapidly went too far. They began to hope that war would disappear simply because a single bomb could destroy half a city. We didn’t know then that the Hiroshima bomb, with a yield of 20,000 tons of TNT, was a very small thing. Today, we talk about megatons.

J.–L.M. – Was it perceived as a hideous thing?

R.A. – There were no protest movements. The Communist party was enthusiastic. On the whole, it was accepted by public opinion. The American generals were relieved. Thanks to the atom bomb, it was not necessary to invade the Japanese islands. The generals had told President Truman that the invasion could cost as many as 500,000 lives in the first weeks. Hence, there was no moral or spiritual revolt against this weapon. It was much later, with the advent of the cold war, that the arguing began, with the Americans accused of having used the weapon needlessly, just to scare the USSR.

D.W. – However, is it not Hiroshima that partly explains the reserve, even the hostility, of Europeans with regard to the United States?

R.A. – I do not believe that at all. Don’t forget that peoples, or governments, after four or five years of war, are capable of committing the worst atrocities without being aware of it. The bombing of Dresden was just as terrible, and perhaps worse than, Hiroshima. There were 300,000 deaths in one night. The city was crowded with refugees. The great bombing attack on Tokyo, in the course of which the city was burned, cost ninety thousand lives. Everyone accepted these bombings, this blind destruction, as a natural form of war. It was only when people emerged from the delirium of war, from the paroxysm of violence, that they realized men had done things that were, if not comparable to Hitler’s actions, nonetheless absolutely terrible, unjustified and unnecessary for winning the war.

Even if the senseless principle of unconditional surrender had not been adopted, Japan’s imminent defeat was clearly spelled out. The country had no more warships, no more freighters; it was a prisoner of its islands. If there had been a willingness to negotiate, obtaining satisfactory peace terms would have been very feasible. But Roosevelt wanted unconditional surrender, a notion that went back to the Civil War. At that time, the formula made sense because it was the very existence of the United States that was in balance. Those who seceded had to capitulate and accept federal authority. Unconditional surrender made sense in a civil war. In a foreign war, it was absurd. Hiroshima was partially the result of the unconditional surrender precept.

D.W. – Let’s come back to Europe. Would it have been possible to avoid the gradual domination of a part of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union in 1945-1946?

R.A. – First, one saw the gradual Sovietization of the Eastern European countries. The Americans protested because they felt that at Yalta the USSR had committed itself to democratic reconstruction. But democratic reconstruction had a different meaning for the Russians than for the Americans.

Then, one noted that there gradually developed a more or less impassable line of demarcation between the areas occupied by the Soviets and those occupied by the English and the Americans.

Could it have been prevented? My first remark: It was not because of Yalta that Eastern Europe became Communist.

D.W. – Nevertheless, people say that it was Yalta that determined the partition of the world.

R.A. – No, that’s the legend.

D.W. – Then what did happen at Yalta?

R.A. – First of all, there was an agreement about the date and the modalities of Russian intervention against Japan. The date was set at three months after the end of the war in Europe.

The borders of the German occupation zones were also confirmed. These zones had been fixed by an ambassadors’ committee in London and the confirmation took two minutes. So, the occupation zones of Germany were not really discussed at Yalta.

There were other discussions on reparations and secondary questions. And there was one decision whose consequences were considerable. This determined the line at which troops coming from the East and those coming from the West would stop. It was the fixing of this line of demarcation that has mistakenly been considered as the decision on the partition of Europe.

As far as Europe’s future was concerned, there was a final decision on the terms for the democratic reconstruction of the continent. Neither the Americans nor the English had agreed that the countries liberated by the Soviet army would be reconstructed on the Soviet model. Perhaps they should have understood that it be done that way, but they did not believe they had accepted it. The best proof is that the difficulties between the United States and the USSR began on the question of the Polish government. At Yalta, the Soviets had accepted an enlargement of the Lublin Committee, then wholly Communist. A number of Polish political figures came over from the West, theoretically to broaden the Communist government. But after a few months, they were obliged to leave.

In the short term, even in Czechoslovakia, that had been liberated by the Soviet army, free elections were held. The elections in Hungary were also relatively free because the party of the small landowners, absolutely not Communist, obtained a majority. In Czechoslovakia, the Communists received 38% of the vote, thus falling well short of a majority.

So, when people say that the world, or Europe, was partitioned at Yalta, it really is a legend. Before Yalta, an agreement—a secret agreement—had indeed been made between Churchill and Stalin. But the Americans rejected it. Percentages had been set. Ninety percent of Greece would be under British control and 10% would go to the USSR. For Romania, I think, 80 or 90% was to go to the Soviets and 20% to the Allies. This wholly cynical deal was not discussed at Yalta. It was the movement of armies that brought about the partition, not of the world, but of Europe. The West could have foreseen that the point at which their troops stopped would also become the outermost border of Western-type democracies. But they didn’t think about it ahead of time and they did not agree ahead of time to what the USSR ultimately did.

The USSR did in Eastern Europe what it had the intention of doing. Stalin had said to Djilas, “In a war like this one, the victors bring with them their ideas and their regimes.” The West tolerated this Sovietization because there was no way to prevent it. Once Soviet troops are in place, you either bring pressure on Moscow by a threat or an ultimatum, that is, if you have the forces to push the troops back; or else you declare that it is unacceptable—in other words, that you accept it.

That is what happened in 1945 and 1946. The West declared that Soviet conduct in Eastern Europe was unacceptable. But because the Americans had demobilized their troops immediately, they tolerated it, though they protested, and there was some diplomatic tension.

J.–L.M. – Did the West purchase its tranquility by sacrificing the East Europeans?

R.A. – That’s a formula the East Europeans use frequently. Perhaps it is an expression that Solzhenitsyn also uses. It seems to me that the truth is less simple. Soviet troops arrived and occupied a part of Europe, the Western countries took note of this Sovietization that they didn’t like, and that was not in their interest. But they lacked both the possibility and the political courage to use drastic measures to prevent it. It is easy, after the fact, to say that they should not have accepted this development. But how could they convince their peoples that the Soviet Union, that had contributed so importantly to the victory over Hitler’s Germany, had suddenly become the danger, the menace—the devil. A democracy never allies itself in war with the devil. So, because the war had been fought with the Soviet Union, the war had been fought, perforce, with a democracy and not with a totalitarian regime …. As long as the Soviet Union was an ally, it could not be considered totalitarian. There would have been a kind of moral revolt against the fact of having fought a war against one devil, alongside another devil.

Again, it is easy, using hindsight, to condemn the government leaders. Perhaps Roosevelt would have acted differently if he had known better the Soviet Union and Europe. But basically, what took place corresponded to the logic of that war, because it was won by potential enemies; and each of these potential enemies took a half of Europe. But one half was Sovietized and the other half had the opportunity to rebuild itself thanks to American aid, although a number of Frenchmen continue to think that the American influence in Western Europe was (or is) the equivalent of the influence—if it can be called influence—of the USSR in Eastern Europe.

D.W. – But surely people knew what the Soviet Union’s concept of democracy was.

R.A. – You are speaking in 1981. But in 1945 it wasn’t known. Some people knew; Roosevelt didn’t. Roosevelt didn’t believe all that. Churchill was better informed; he had had long experiences as a European statesman. He had no doubt that the Soviets would try to transform the countries it occupied into satellite countries. But he saw no way of preventing it. Was it possible? In a sense, it was, but in the abstract. The United States was much more powerful than the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was exhausted from the war. It didn’t yet have the atomic bomb. But you must remember that the United States had only the two atomic bombs it used against Japan. It didn’t have any others in 1945 or 1946. It knew how to make them, but they were not yet made. Furthermore, as I have said, when the war ended following Ja-pan’s capitulation, the Americans, as is their habit, hastened to demobilize. From that moment on, their ability to influence Soviet decisions was, at the very least, reduced.

It took a few years for the Americans to understand fully what, you could say, every Swiss hotel doorman had immediately realized. That is, the moment Germany was eliminated and there was a void in Europe, that void would be filled by Soviet power. It would have been the same if the Soviet Union had not been Communist. It would have been enough to have an overpowerful Russia with nothing in front of it for there to be a danger.

But there was the aggravating circumstance that Russia was, in fact, the Soviet Union; it was clear that the void had to be filled. First, it was necessary to rebuild those countries that were “victors on paper”: Great Britain, France, and the others. Then, it was necessary to rebuild the vanquished. The need to reconstruct Germany became evident very rapidly to those with any political acumen. It took two or three years for the others to understand that, and they did so only with difficulty, even then. De Gaulle himself had trouble with it, for he repeated incessantly, “Never again the Reich.”

D.W. – In the final analysis, was the partition of Germany and its occupation by the various armies an error? What should have been done?

R.A. – We could not force the Soviets to leave East Germany. Some thought there was a chance to create a unified and neutral Germany. I never believed it, for the simple reason that, as early as the autumn of 1945, the Russians began to Sovietize East Germany. From the moment they began to do so, their intentions to remain there were clear. It was and still is a basic principle of Soviet diplomacy: What is ours must remain ours; the rest can be negotiated. So, the chances of de-Sovietizing East Germany were very slim, while the liberation of Austria, on the other hand, was possible because the Russians did not try (or were not able) to Sovietize that country. It was the sign that they contemplated leaving some day. That is why I thought this liberation would take place in Austria and not in East Germany. Concerning Austria, 250 negotiating sessions were held, with no results. One day, the Communists decided to leave. Only twenty sessions were needed to wrap it up.

But as soon as it was realized that intervention in East Germany was impossible, the reconstitution of West Germany became imperative. Of this, I was immediately convinced and quite categoric. I wrote, as early as 1945:

The historic conflict between France and Germany has ended. For Germany, the 1945 defeat is equivalent to 1815 for France. In the foreseeable future, Germany cannot again be the major danger. The great power in Europe now is the Soviet Union and its satellites. If an equilibrium is to be reestablished, the American presence in Europe is necessary and, additionally, Western Europe must be reconstructed. And Western Germany cannot be reconstructed without West Germany.

That is why, when General de Gaulle, who was no longer in office, drafted a message against the tri-zone, which signalled the beginning of the Bonn Republic, I wrote in favor of the tri-zone. I considered that the creation of the Bonn Republic was necessary. My belief was that, precisely at that moment, we stood the best chance of creating new and personal relations between the Germans and the French. The Germans were at their lowest ebb. And it is when the enemy is beaten that the conqueror must show generosity, that he must not use his superior power, that he must create new ties with the vanquished.

So, I returned to Germany, beginning in 1945–1946. I gave a lecture at the University of Frankfurt in 1946 and resumed my contacts with the Germans immediately. People said to me, “You’re lucky, you can do it because you are Jewish.” It was the only time in my life I was told I was lucky to be Jewish. But it is true that at that particular time, a Jew could write in favor of reconciliation with Germany more easily than others.

D.W. – The Gaullists and the Communists were against reconciliation. Who was in favor?

R.A. – Privately, all reasonable men. Publicly, a few. Nonetheless, a few. The MRP,²¹ Camus, many others, thought the same thing. The difference was that I thought of the reconciliation in a much more political way than the others. But many did find it necessary. All you had to do was to look at the map. The Soviet zone reached to within 200 kilometers of the Rhine River. Very clearly, West Germany was not a great power. Today, it is a great economic power, but not a great military power. However, because the Federal Republic of Germany exists, we are, for the first time, not on the front lines. To the degree that a danger exists, Germany lies between the great threatening power and France.

All of that was evident. Soviet expansionism could leave no one in doubt. The USSR had already Sovietized Poland. It was very rapidly transforming all the countries of Eastern Europe into Soviet regimes. But it is true that for three, four, or five years, it was extraordinarily difficult for the French to accept the fact that, from then on, the danger no longer came from Germany, but from the Soviet Union.

By the time the Korean War began in 1950, I would say that the idea was accepted by the majority of Frenchmen. As for Germany, people had, despite everything, accepted in 1947 its participation in the Marshall Plan; that is to say, they had accepted the idea of cooperative and almost friendly relations between the countries of Western Europe and West Germany.

J.–L.M. – The war resulted in the triumph of two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Europe was weakened; France in particular was no more than a regional power. Was there an awareness of this on the part of political leaders and public opinion?

R.A. – That was not something to. say out loud, but, of course, people were aware of it. You must understand, the 1914 war began as a European war. It became a world war toward the end, with U.S. intervention. The 1939 war began as a European war, won by Nazi Germany in 1940. But, beginning that same year, a second war began which became truly worldwide, first with the participation of the Soviet Union, attacked by Germany, and then with the participation of the United States and the entry of Japan into a great war in Asia. It became thus the first great war that was truly worldwide in scope.

So, the idea of European entente belonged to the past. In the European entente, France had been a great power. In the world entente, France, with forty million inhabitants in 1945, was manifestly not a great power.

J.–L.M. – However, we have two IFOP polls that are not in accord with what you say and that give the impression that the French were dreaming a little. In December 1944, 64% felt that their country had recovered its position as a great power. In March 1945, 70% thought France should annex the left bank of the Rhine.

R.A. – The first poll: We had been accepted as one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. We are still there. In this legal sense, we appear to be a great world power.

Second poll: That was an opinion shared by a large number of the French in 1918. And beyond that, people remembered the events of 1936, that is, the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the turning point. The French and de Gaulle himself continued to be preoccupied by the question of Germany for a few years. De Gaulle wanted reconciliation with Germany, but with a Germany that would not have a central government, that would accept a special status for the Ruhr and, possibly, for the Rhineland. With these reservations, he offered his hand to the Germans.

My own thinking was that it was contradictory to take so many precautions against a danger that belonged to the past, and, at the same time, propose reconciliation with Germany. This reconciliation could not take place with the Länder (the regions) as separate German countries. The Länder without a central government didn’t make sense. Reconciliation was necessary with a West Germany that would indeed have Länder, but also a central government. Now, when people said, “No Reich,” that clearly meant: no central government.

That made no sense … but it was General de Gaulle’s doctrine, and that of André Malraux, until 1950 and later.

J.–L.M. – And the first misunderstandings between France and the United States? Don’t they date back precisely to the period of Liberation?

R.A. – The relations between General de Gaulle and President Roosevelt were always difficult. Roosevelt played the Vichy card for a long time and did not accept General de Gaulle’s legitimacy. As a result, there were resentments on both sides. It must be said also that the Americans were very disagreeable toward France with regard to Indochina. Roosevelt was against the French return to Indochina. Unfortunately, he didn’t succeed in preventing them from returning, which would have been better. But at the time, we were certainly not grateful to him for his attitude. Finally, it is true that Roosevelt, who had earlier been rather pro-French, was so shocked by the French defeat that he had no faith in the reconstruction or in the future of France.

So, there were tensions almost immediately. But most of all, and almost by definition, relations could not be easy between a victorious superpower and a humiliated ex-power seeking to regain its former status. The relations between the two countries were destined to be unpleasant, whoever the men in power.

D.W. – Yes, but at the same time, one has the impression that at the Liberation, the French had almost more gratitude toward the Russians than toward the Americans.

R.A. – Mostly, perhaps, because they didn’t see the Russians, but did see the Americans!

Secondly, American bombings had caused damage outside their targets. There were emotional reactions when American planes dropped their bombs from very high altitudes, in theory very precisely, but in fact less so, thought many Frenchmen, than the English. Also, there certainly existed a Soviet mystique at the time, justified to a degree by the enormous losses suffered by the Soviets. The Americans had suffered a few hundred thousand deaths, which is certainly a lot, but was nonetheless a limited sacrifice when compared to the millions and millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians who had been killed.

Curiously, the French didn’t want to admit that Stalin refused France a zone of occupation in Germany, or that he was even less willing than Roosevelt to have General de Gaulle at the Yalta conference, or that he spoke of the French with still more contempt than the Americans might have done. However, I don’t think that when Europeans, even the French, had the choice of taking refuge either in the Soviet Union or in the United States they were tempted to go East, no.

D.W. – Another poll, taken in November 1944, therefore before the end of the war, underscored once again the good opinion the French harbored for the Soviet Union: 61 % thought the Soviet Union had played the most important role in the German defeat, and only 29% the United States.

R.A. – On that subject, I can recall for you a conversation I had with Pierre Brisson, director of Le Figaro. “Clearly, it was the Americans who won the first World War,” I said to him, “because if they had not begun to arrive in 1917, we would have lost the war.” To that, he burst out, “But they did almost nothing; they arrived at the end. Just compare what they did and what we French did.” And I answered, “Agreed; our was the heaviest, the costliest burden of the war; we were heroic beyond all expression, but those who arrived at the end and won the war were the Americans. Those who win a war are not necessarily those who most merit the fruits of victory; they are simply those who arrive at the end.” As far as World War II is concerned, the Soviet Union would have had great difficulty in hanging on to the end if Great Britain and, above all, the United States, had not kept it supplied. On the other hand, even if the Soviet Union’s contribution to victory was superior to the Americans’ in terms of lives lost, in the last analysis, for us, it was the American contribution that was decisive. I think the American effort was decisive because Great Britain could not have kept up the struggle if it had not been for America’s engagement. And even suppose, and it is an at least dubious supposition, that the Soviet Union, with Great Britain—but without the United States—had won the war; in such a case, the whole of Europe would have been Sovietized.

J.–L.M. – Did the intellectuals share the same favorable prejudice toward the Soviet Union?

R.A. – Yes. There have been cycles in France, periods when the Soviet Union held an attraction for a fairly sizable group of intellectuals and workers.

There was an early period of attraction between 1917 and 1919, which led to the breakup at the Congress of Tours.²² The Socialist party’s majority accepted the Third International’s charter.

In 1936, the restructuring of the unions occurred under Communist direction. Communist party membership increased after it became part of the Left majority.

Then, after the war, the memory of the heroism of a good number of Communist Resistants played a role. The Communists entered the Resistance in large numbers, beginning in 1941, when the Soviet Union came into the war. The phenomenon was such that many Frenchmen tended to mix up in their thinking the courage of the Communist Resistants and the courage and heroism of the Soviet soldiers. At that time, I said to Malraux, who subsequently adopted the phrase, “The Soviet myth today is the Red Army, rather than Marxism.”

So, at the end of the war, there was the distant greatness of the Soviet Union, heroic and victorious. And then in a few years, people rediscovered the nature of the Soviet regime, especially because Stalin was, after the war, super-Stalinian, if I may put it that way. For example, all the Soviet prisoners, civilian or military, repatriated to the USSR against their wishes, were put in concentration camps. You are aware that the British and the Americans repatriated them forcibly. One learned about it, but slowly, very slowly. That was among the things one didn’t want to know.

D.W. – It was at that time that you entered Le Figaro. Your first article was dated June 29, 1947. Can one say that Raymond Aron chose the Right at that time?

R.A. – No, he chose between Le Monde and Le Figaro. I’ve told the story several times. When I left Combat, I had proposals and, I’ll say it now, financial proposals, that were about the same from both sides, each just as modest as the other. I hesitated. It was Malraux who determined my choice. He said to me, “You will have less difficulty getting along with André Brisson than with Beuve-Méry.” He was right.

There was another reason, a little silly. At Le Monde, I would have had to do my journalistic work in the morning. But I wanted to save my mornings for serious work, university work. So I preferred to write for a morning, rather than for an evening, newspaper.

However, let me add that if Le Figaro was traditionally considered a newspaper of the Right, Brisson voted for the Socialist party after the war. And he favored the Labor party in England. The fact is that I would have had a great deal of difficulty in agreeing with Beuve-Méry on the big foreign policy decisions. Nevertheless, I don’t know …. In 1977, when I was hospitalized, I received a letter from Beuve-Méry that touched me deeply. He told me that he had very much hoped I would join Le Monde and that even now (at the time of my illness) he regretted my decision. He thought that if I had gone to Le Monde, the evolution of that newspaper would possibly have been different and the conflicts between Le Monde and Le Figaro would have taken a different turn. In any case, that was in 1977, and I had made my decision in 1947, thirty years earlier. I was at Le Figaro exactly thirty years, between the spring of 1947 and the spring of 1977. A long story.

Funny and wise