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 (2nd ed.)