Revolution Is Not a War: Raymond Aron and the Clausewitz Formula. A review of Campi A and De Ligio G (eds.) (2023) Teoria dell’azione politica. Corso del Collège de France 1973. By Raymond Aron. Venice: Marsilio

Abstract

This review reconstructs Raymond Aron’s 1973 Collège de Francee course on
the Theory of Political Action and shows how Aron reinterprets Clausewitz’s formula – war as the continuation of politics by other means – against both Marxist and “cynical” realist readings. Engaging Mao’s writings on revo-lutionary and protracted war, Aron insists on a sharp distinction between war and politics: the former concerns coercion and the defeat of an enemy; the latter concerns the conquest and exercise of legitimate power within a community. From this vantage point, he criticizes inversions of the formula (“politics as war by other means”) and disputes Schmitt’s concept of absolute enmity, while also distancing himself from realist anthropologies that flatten political action into sheer power. The review situates Aron’s project vis-à-vis Lenin, Mao, Schmitt, Morgenthau, and Foucault, arguing that Aron’s “heter-odox realism” preserves the moral and institutional dimensions of legitimacy without lapsing into naïveté about force. In an age of “hybrid war” and “grey zones,” his clarification of the war–politics boundary remains a powerful an-tidote to metaphorical militarization of domestic politics.