A Politics of Understanding : The International Thought of Raymond Aron (Political Traditions in Foreign Policy Series)

Frequently hailed as one of the greatest defenders of democratic liberalism in postwar Europe, French philosopher, sociologist, and political commentator Raymond Aron (1905-1983) left behind a staggering amount of published work on a remarkably wide range of topics both scholarly and popular. In A Politics of Understanding, Reed M. Davis assesses the originality and consistency of Aron's body of work, drawing a connection between Aron's philosophy of history and three of his abiding interests: the nature of industrial society, international relations theory, and strategic theory. Davis begins with a brief biography of Aron, known for his skepticism toward political ideologies in the post-World War II era and as an intellectual opponent of Jean-Paul Sartre. After spending three years in Germany in the early 1930s, Aron, a Jew, returned to France in 1933. When war broke out, he fought for a year in the French army and, after the fall of France, escaped to London, where he edited the newspaper of the Free French, La France Libre. He returned to Paris after the war and remained there for the rest of his life, working as a professor and journalist. He wrote an influential political column for Le Figaro for thirty years and authored many books, including The Opium of the Intellectuals (1935), The Algerian Tragedy (1957), and Peace and War (1962). From World War II onward, Davis shows, Aron sought to construct a science of human action that had as its goal charting the way of human progress in light of two fundamental realities, industrialization and the existence of nuclear weapons. Throughout his long career, he continually asked himself whether human life was becoming better as it became more technologically rationalized and more scientifically advanced. In his close analysis of Aron's thought, Davis carefully describes how Aron fused Max Weber's neo-Kantianism with Edmund Husserl's phenomenology to create an original theory of historical knowledge. The central theoreti