Time & Perspective Quote by Raymond Aron

Foreknowledge is power, but Aron’s line is really about how the promise of foreknowledge becomes a political weapon. He’s writing as a Cold War liberal who distrusted both utopian certainty and revolutionary romance; the 20th century had already shown what happens when leaders claim history is “on their side.” In that climate, “the future” isn’t a neutral timeline. It’s a story you can brandish to discipline your own camp and to rattle the opposition.

The sentence is built like a tidy piece of strategic realism. It doesn’t flatter supporters as enlightened citizens; it reduces them to an audience that can be steered by forecasts, prophecies, and plans. The subtext is cynical but not nihilistic: even the people who think they’re choosing freely can be herded when someone convinces them that tomorrow is settled. “Makes it possible” is doing quiet work here, implying manipulation isn’t inevitable, just newly feasible when prediction enters the room.

Aron is also pointing at a symmetry that political rhetoric prefers to hide. Foreknowledge doesn’t merely help you “beat” enemies. It helps you manage allies: keep them calm through promises, keep them loyal through fear, keep them compliant through the claim that dissent is futile because the outcome is already known. The real target is any ideology that advertises itself as a science of history. Once the future is presented as legible, politics becomes less debate than stagecraft: a contest over who gets to narrate inevitability.