Raymond Aron

Raymond Aron (1905-1983) excelled as an academic scholar, teacher, and journalist. He applied the methods of sociology to the study of economics, international relations, ideology, and war.

Raymond Aron was born in Paris, France, on March 14, 1905, the year that brought the separation of church and state in that country. His father, Gustave, was a professor of law who had married Suzanne Levy. After the world depression struck France, Raymond married Suzanne Gauchon on September 5, 1933. Their union produced two girls, Dominique (Mrs. Antoine Schnapper) and Laurence.

Aron had already graduated from the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure, the intellectual center of some of France's greatest thinkers, and in 1928, when only 23 years old, he won his agrégation in philosophy. Over the next 10 years he expanded into sociology and economics and received a State Doctorat in 1933. He had already started his career with a lectureship at the University of Cologne in Germany (1930-1931) and as a staff member at the Maison Académique of Berlin (1931-1933).

Having departed just as Hitler assumed power, Aron returned to his native land to become a philosophy professor at the Lycée of Le Havre (1933-1934), and from there he became the secretary of the Center for Social Documentation of the Ecole Normale/Supérieure (1934-1939). Just before World War II began in 1939 he joined the humanities faculty of the University of Toulouse as associate professor of social philosophy. He was active in the military defense against Germany in 1939-1940, and when France fell he joined Gen. Charles De Gaulle in London. Here he began his career as a journalist, serving as editor-in-chief of La France Libre and, after the liberation of France, as an editorial writer of Combat (1946-1947) and Le Figaro, a right of center newspaper within the old liberal tradition of France. Aron referred to himself as a "Keynesian with a certain nostalgia for economic liberalism." For over 20 years he was one of the leading French columnists and thrived in the liberty allowed him by the paper. Later, when the newspaper was taken over by right-wing financiers led by Robert Hersant, he resigned in 1977 to preserve the editorial liberty that he had devoted his adult life to defending.

Aron remained a man of many talents, combining journalism, university teaching, and voluminous writing. He served as professor at the Ecole Nationale d'Administration and at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (1945-1955). He then moved to the Sorbonne, where he joined the Faculty of Letters (1955-1968), and finally, in 1970, to that pinnacle of France's educational system, the Coll'e de France, where he served as professor of sociology until his death in 1983.

Aron's long career as teacher and writer brought him many honors. He was elected to almost all the major academies: Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (honorary foreign member), British Academy, and Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung. His prizes include Prix des Ambassadeurs (1962) for his book Paix et guerre entre nations; Prix Montaigne (1968) for the body of his work; Prix des Critiques (1973) for his République impériale; and Prix Goethe. He was elected as a chevalier, later officer of the Legion of Honor, and was awarded several honorary doctorates.

Aron's publications may be summarized by a book review by Stanley Hoffman published in the New York Times Book Review of June 17, 1979:

The range of Raymond Aron's interests is immense. He is a philosopher, a sociologist, a political scientist, an economist; he is a scholar and a journalist. His 40-odd books and innumerable articles fall into two broad categories. Some are profound, often erudite reflections on the meaning of history, on the nature and forms of modern industrial society, on international conflict through the ages, on the evolution of political and social thought. … The second category consists of books and articles suggested by current events and debates, and especially by the political and intellectual tides in France… What is common to both is Raymond Aron's relentlessly analytical and critical mind and his passionate defense of political liberalism. He is a descendant of the Philosophies of Enlightenment, and his intellectual godfathers are Montesquieu and Tocqueville.

Aron had for many years an intellectual mission: to defend the liberal order of the western world and to expose the left-wing myths that undermine the liberal tradition of freedom and private property. His views tended to range him with conservatively oriented groups; however, he insisted that, as a Keynesian liberal, he was neither rightwing nor left on all issues. His position depended on the issue: economic policy, North African policies, or relations between East and West.

His opposition to Marxism was based on several beliefs. In one of his most popular books, The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955, 1957), he contended that Marxism is mental opium and that many learned people create and believe false myths. These myths include the belief that history is progressive and liberating (whereas the victory of Marxism in Russia led to totalitarian controls), and that the proletariat is the collective savior of humanity, while in fact most workers, rather than becoming bearers of Marxism, just want a middle class standard of living.

Another highly influential publication, The Century of Total War (1954), presents a study of the inability of men to shape their destiny. "Since … bourgeois Europe entered into the century of total war, men have lost control of their history and have been dragged along by the contradictory promptings of technique and passions." What was most decisive about World War I was the "technical surprise," the vast use of deadly weapons. Industry discovered the means to provide the "mass production of destruction." This happened with the replacement of old-time professional armies with armies of people, the masses. Popular passions hardened ideologies, especially nationalism, with the result that the war created a "Europe of nationalities." The folly of men led to World War II, a conflict that became global but failed to bring the peace and liberty that west Europeans sought. "European democracy and freedom and civilization are the victims, even more than Germany, of a victory won in their name." Raymond Aron died in 1983.

Further Reading

Reviews of Aron's work can be found in New York Times Book Review (June 17, 1979); TIME (July 9, 1979); Commentary (September 1979); Best Sellers (September 1979); and National Review (November 9, 1979).

Additional Sources

Aron, Raymond, Memoirs: fifty years of political reflection, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1990.

Colquhoun, Robert, Raymond Aron, London; Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1986. □

ARON, RAYMOND

ARON, RAYMOND (1905–1983), French sociologist and writer. Aron, who was born in Paris, taught at Le Havre, Toulouse, Cologne, and Berlin. In 1956 he was appointed professor of sociology at the Sorbonne, and director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris in 1960. During World War ii he was editor of Free France – La France Libre, published in London, and subsequently contributed both as writer and editor to Combat, Le Figaro, and the European Journal of Sociology, and other periodicals. In 1979 Aron was awarded the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt, a major literary award of West Germany. Philosophically, Aron was deeply influenced by the neo-Kantian Léon *Brunschvig and the phenomenologists Heidegger and *Husserl; in sociology he was influenced by Max Weber, and his critical study of several German sociologists, Sociologie allemande contemporaine (1936; German Sociology, 1957), reflects this influence. His most erudite and probing work is Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire (1938; Introduction to the Philosophy of History, 1961), supplemented by Les grandes doctrines de sociologie historique (2 vols., 1960–62; Main Currents in Sociological Thought, 2 vols., 1965–67). In these works, Aron attempts to strike a balance between a humanistic sociology and a philosophically conceived treatment of the history of ideas, a combination of empiricism and phenomenology. His main interest was the analysis of modern industrial society which, in his opinion, is not so much defined by the class struggle as by the clash of competing political systems. Hence he was rather an exception among French thinkers of his time, and his commitment to liberal democracy set him apart from the then Marxist-dominated intellectual tendencies. Strongly opposed to Sartre's political views, he nevertheless joined him in the movement advocating the rights of Vietnamese refugees in the late 1970s. The return to pluralism and democracy in most French political philosophy in the 1980s and 1990s led to the rehabilitation of his works, which are now considered fundamental. He was a sophisticated commentator on the antecedents of modern society, on the dialectic between democracy and totalitarianism, on international relations, and on the terrifying issues raised by the cold war. Among his major works on these topics are L'homme contre les tyrans (1946); L'Opium des intellectuels (1955; The Opium of the Intellectuals, 1957); Espoir et peur du siècle (1957); Le développement de la société industrielle et la stratification sociale (2 vols., 1956–57); Dimensions de la conscience historique (1961); Paix et guerre entre les nations (1962); Progress and Disillusion (1968); Histoire et dialectique de la violence (1973); Penser la guerre, Clausewitz (1976; Clausewitz, Philosopher of War, 1983); Plaidoyer pour l'Europe décadente (1977; In Defense of Decadent Europe, 1984). His Mémoires were first published in 1983 (Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection, 1997).

Although not involved in Jewish affairs, Aron remained a conscious Jew. In a series of essays published as De Gaulle, Israel and the Jews (1969), he concluded that even if the French president was not himself an antisemite, his notorious press conference after the Six-Day War certainly encouraged the anti-Jewish elements in French society.

bibliography:

M. Howard, in: Encounter, 30 (Feb. 1968), 55–59. add. bibliography: D.J. Mahoney, The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron (1992); N. Baverez, Raymond Aron, un moraliste au temps des ideologies (1993); S. Launay, La pensée politique de Raymond Aron (1995); B.C. Anderson, Raymond Aron: The Recovery of the Political (1998).

[Alvin Boskoff and

Werner J. Cahnman /

Dror Franck Sullaper (2^nd ed.)]

Aron, Raymond (1905–83) A controversial French sociologist, Aron was professor of sociology at the Sorbonne from 1955 to 1968, and for some years a prominent member of the Mont Pelerin Society (although he later resigned). He was instrumental in introducing German sociology (especially Tönnies, Simmel, and Weber) to French social science via his German Sociology (1935). He also wrote an influential introduction to sociological theory (Main Currents in Sociological Thought, 1960 and 1962) in which he gave a special emphasis to the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. Aron disagreed profoundly with Marxism as a social science, and it was partly on these grounds that he was often a target of criticism, because in post-war French social philosophy Marxism was the dominant paradigm. Aron, by contrast, was more impressed by the work of Max Weber, an influence which is evident in publications such as Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society (1956). He played an important part in the debate which followed the student protests of 1968 (see The Elusive Revolution, 1968
), and also wrote more generally about the nature of power, political élites, and political organization. He had a specific interest in the work of Vilfredo Pareto in his approach to élites.

Aron's work is distinctive because of the attention which he gave to international relations and war—topics which are frequently neglected by sociologists. This interest is reflected in Peace and War (1962) and Clausewitz (1985).