Raymond Aron

Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron (14 March 1905, Paris – 17 October 1983) was a French philosopher, sociologist and political scientist, well known to the broad public for his life-long, often critical, friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre and for his skeptical analyses of the post-war vogue in France for ideologies that largely took their inspiration from a Marxist tradition.

Life and career

Aron, the son of a Jewish lawyer, studied at the École Normale Supérieure where he met Jean-Paul Sartre (who became his friend and lifelong intellectual opponent). He took the first place in the Agrégation of philosophy in 1928, the year Sartre failed the same exam. In 1930, he received a doctorate in the philosophy of history from the École Normale Supérieure. In 1939, when World War II began, he had been teaching social philosophy at the University of Toulouse for a few weeks; he left the University and joined the Armée de l'Air. When France was defeated, he left for London to join the Free French forces, and between 1940 and 1944 edited their newspaper, France Libre (Free France).

At the close of the war, he returned to Paris to teach sociology at the École Nationale d'Administration and at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (also known as "Sciences Po"), maintaining that the government of Vichy France and Marshal Philippe Pétain had chosen the lesser of two evils in collaborating with the Nazis during World War II. From 1955 to 1968, he taught at the Sorbonne, and after 1970 at the Collège de France.

A lifelong journalist, Aron in 1947 became an influential columnist for Le Figaro, a position he held for thirty years until he joined L'Express, where he wrote a political column up to his death. In 1953, he befriended the young American philosopher Allan Bloom, who was teaching at the Sorbonne.

Infused as he was with a liberal disposition, Aron's views on multiple citizenship and dual nationality were pessimistic. In his 1974 article, "Is Multinational Citizenship Possible?" he clearly considered it an anachronism, totally incommensurate with the logic of the sovereign-state system. Aron argued that multiple citizenship could not break the indelible link between the individual citizen and his nation-state. Citizenship, according to Aron, was a special relation between the individual and the state; citizenship defined the state's rule within a specific territory, and in turn the state determined who its citizens were and what rights and obligations bound citizens to the state.

Political commitment

When sojourning in Berlin, Aron saw Nazi book burnings and developed from that an aversion to totalitarian systems. In 1938, he participated in the Colloque Walter Lippmann (Template:Fr Colloque Walter Lippmann) in Paris.

After the war, he opposed Jean-Paul Sartre and Marxist ideologies, without also always backing Charles de Gaulle or other right-wing political movements.

Works

La Sociologie allemande contemporaine, Paris: Alcan, 1935; German Sociology, London: Heinemann, 1957
Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire. Essai sur les limites de l'objectivité historique, Paris: Gallimard, 1938; Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1948
Essai sur la théorie de l'histoire dans l'Allemagne contemporaine. La philosophie critique de l'histoire, Paris: Vrin, 1938
L'Homme contre les tyrans, New York, Editions de la Maison française, 1944
De l'armistice à l'insurrection nationale, Paris: Gallimard, 1945
L'Âge des empires et l'Avenir de la France, Paris: Défense de la France, 1945
Le Grand Schisme, Paris: Gallimard, 1948
Les Guerres en chaîne, Paris: Gallimard, 1951
La Coexistence pacifique. Essai d'analyse, Paris: Editions Monde nouveau, 1953 (under the pseudonym François Houtisse, with Boris Souvarine)
L'Opium des intellectuels, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1955; The Opium of the Intellectuals, London: Secker & Warburg, 1957
Polémiques, Paris: Gallimard, 1955
La Tragédie algérienne, Paris: Plon, 1957
Espoir et peur du siècle. Essais non partisans, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1957
L'Algérie et la République, Paris: Plon, 1958
La Société industrielle et la Guerre, suivi d'un Tableau de la diplomatie mondiale en 1958, Paris: Plon, 1959
Immuable et changeante. De la IVe à la Ve République, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1959
Dimensions de la conscience historique, Paris: Plon, 1961
Paix et guerre entre les nations, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1962; Peace and War, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966
Le Grand Débat. Initiation à la stratégie atomique, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1963
Dix-huit leçons sur la société industrielle, Paris: Gallimard, 1963; Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967
La Lutte des classes, Paris: Gallimard, 1964
Essai sur les libertés, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1965
Démocratie et totalitarisme, 1965
Trois essais sur l'âge industriel, Paris: Plon, 1966
Les Étapes de la pensée sociologique, Paris: Gallimard, 1967; Main Currents in Sociological Thought, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965
De Gaulle, Israël et les Juifs, Paris: Plon, 1968
La Révolution introuvable. Réflexions sur les événements de mai, Paris: Fayard, 1968
Les Désillusions du progrès, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1969; Progress and Disillusion: The Dialectics of Modern Society, Pall Mall Press, 1968
D'une sainte famille à l'autre. Essai sur le marxisme imaginaire, Paris: Gallimard, 1969
De la condition historique du sociologue, Paris: Gallimard, 1971
Études politiques, Paris, 1972
République impériale. Les États-unis dans le monde (1945–1972), Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1973; The Imperial Republic: The United States and the World 1945-1973, Little Brown & Company 1974
Histoire et dialectique de la violence, Paris: Gallimard, 1973; History and the Dialectic of Violence: Analysis of Sartre's Critique de la raison dialectique, Oxford: Blackwell, 1979
Penser la guerre, Clausewitz, Paris: Gallimard, 1976; Clausewitz: Philosopher of War, London: Routledge, 1983
Plaidoyer pour l'Europe décadente, Paris: Laffont, 1977; In Defense of Decadent Europe, South Bend IN: Regnery, 1977
with Andre Glucksman and Benny Levy. “Sartre's Errors: A Discussion”. TELOS 44 (Summer 1980). New York: Telos Press
Le Spectateur engagé, Paris: Julliard, 1981 (interviews)
Mémoires, Paris: Julliard, 1983
Les dernières années du siècle, Paris: Julliard, 1984
Ueber Deutschland und den Nationalsozialismus. Fruehe politische Schriften 1930-1939, Joachim Stark, ed. and pref., Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1993
Le Marxisme de Marx, Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 2002
De Giscard à Mitterrand: 1977-1983 (editorials from L'Express), with preface by Jean-Claude Casanova, Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 2005

Other media

Raymond Aron, spectateur engagé. Entretiens avec Raymond Aron. (Duration: 160 mins.), DVD, Éditions Montparnasse, 2005

Bibliography

Launay, Stephen, La Pensée politique de Raymond Aron, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995
Anderson, Brian C., Raymond Aron: The Recovery of the Political, Rowman & Littlefield, 1998
Mahoney, Daniel and Bryan-Paul Frost (eds.), Political Reason in the Age of Ideology: Essays in Honor of Raymond Aron, New Brunswick/London: Transaction Publishers, 2006
Stark, Joachim, Das unvollendete Abenteuer. Geschichte, Gesellschaft und Politik im Werk Raymond Arons, Wuerzburg: Koenigshausen und Neumann, 1986
Stark, Joachim, Raymond Aron (1905-1983), in Dirk Kaesler, Klassiker der Soziologie, Vol.II: Von Talcott Parsons bis Anthony Giddens, Munich: Beck, 5th ed., 2007, 105-129
Davis, Reed M. A Politics of Understanding: The International Thought of Raymond Aron. Baton Rouge LA.:Louisiana State University Press, 2009 ISBN 978-0-8071-3517-4

External links

Profile page for Raymond Aron on the Find-A-Grave web site