Aleksander Smolar - My introduction to Raymond Aron (42/201) скачать в хорошем качестве

Aleksander Smolar - My introduction to Raymond Aron (42/201)

To listen to more of Aleksander Smolar’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Aleksander Smolar (Political scientist)   Aleksander Smolar (b. 1940) is a Polish writer, political activist and adviser, vice-president of the Institute for Human Sciences and president of the Stefan Batory Foundation. [Listener: Vitek Tracz] TRANSCRIPT: So I came and Pierre met me and took me to Raymond Aron, to his office in the Latin Quarter along with another eminent economist who is still the editor of a very influential, intellectual liberal-conservative publication, 'Commentaire' which at that time was in its earlier incarnation known as 'Contrepoint', but it was the same group of Aron’s people. Jean-Claude Casanova who had a similar role in politics to mine – he was an adviser to Prime Minister Barre, he was… shall we say he was involved in politics but he was an economist and he was rector of a huge school of political sciences called Sciences Po. They were accompanying me when Pierre said, ‘Ah, I forgot to tell you… I forgot to tell Aron that you don’t speak French’. I thought I was going to pass out. I could speak a tiny bit but it was almost nothing. I thought I was going to faint – he was making a complete idiot of me. I was going to see a Frenchman, the attitude of the French towards their language – later there was a 15-year period during which any scientific conferences which were funded by the French government couldn’t be held in any language other than French. It was complete madness. The attitude of the French towards their language hasn’t altered to this day. In any case… what was I going to say? I said nothing. We went to Aron, and there he was, this little old, bald man – I recognised him from photographs. He was tiny but he had a very deep voice which completely didn’t match his appearance. We began to talk and he started asking me all kinds of things. It was a conversation in which he was trying to gather information, but at the same time it was an intellectual discussion. This was someone who never made small talk. He was interested in issues… he would ask what did I think, so within the boundaries of what I could say, our conversation was pleasant, without a conclusive end. He invited me back the following day to have dinner with him in his house. Pierre and Casanova were both delighted saying this was a good sign. I was speaking with him in English – he didn’t show the slightest… to him it was completely normal that we should be speaking in English. And we talked and talked again, it was very pleasant and his wife was there. I’m struck by something that I later became used to, these bourgeois customs which still survive in the countryside that one never used the familiar ‘you’ which was the same in Poland where in the older families in villages, parents were always addressed with the formal ‘you’, so that in French there is no ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ only the formal ‘you’. He spoke to his wife and that’s how she addressed him. At the end of the conversation – right, well, we’ve taken care of this year, you‘ll get your grant. As to the future, we’ll see.