Raymond Aron & the power of ideas.(Critical Essay)

It is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil.

--Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings.

--Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

Freedom of criticism in the USSR is total.

--Jean-Paul Sartre, on returning from Russia, 1954

Santayana's alarming thought that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" has at least as much relevance to the world of ideas as to the world of action. This is one reason that rereading is just as important as reading. Time has a way of blunting the keenness of truth, muting its claim on our attention. The admonition we heeded yesterday we forget today: no emergency intervened to keep its lessons fresh. Human nature is a constant. The temptations and errors it faces do not change. But because circumstances are always shifting, truths need constantly to be restated if they are to maintain the grip, the purchase of truth. Re-reading is one of our richest sources of restatement. Putting us back in touch with what we once knew, what we still half-remember, re-reading can restore us to misplaced convictions, revitalize insights that have fallen fallow. Rereading reminds us that nothing seems more vital than old truths rediscovered: as with friends, our intimacy is deepened by previous acquaintance.