Raymond Aron

Rome is a stone dropped down a well.
A word like commissus reverberates
from Lucilius to when Church quarrels
made Benedict XVI abdicate.

Demosthenes feels like open sea, sorties
mid-channel; and the French news cycles
of 1938-40,
by contrast. Raymond Aron idles

at the kerb, in Paris of old exhaust.
Penser la guerre, so democracy lasts
even when the result is fraught.
Rome’s divination with Law seems past,

with Demosthenes just the other day.
History’s the road, not the parking bay.

Woodford Halse - 12 May 2026

Raymond Aron ( 1905 -83), the French political philosopher and strategist, and the Athenian statesman and orator Demosthenes ( 384 -22 BCE).

The semantic field in Latin about commissus and committo gives us a sordid spider’s web of words relating to crimes, secrets, joins and joints and connections and combinations.

Penser la guerre - to think War. Interesting because Demosthenes was never a commander, or strategist in that sense, but had fought as a hoplite; while Aron served in the Armee de l’air in 1940, before joining France Libre in London, though in no respect was he other than a civilian thinker on power.

Was Aron of the Left or the Right ? He was of the Liberal Power State. His intellectual origins were Socialist, though he was as critical of dialectical materialism as he was of Friedrich Hayek, whom he accused of an anti-Marxism that bore Marxism’s errors. He was as much a foil for Alexandre Kojeve as Jean-Paul Sartre.