The Weekly Sage hopes to regularly bring brief profiles of key contributors to thought and faith before a Christian audience for historical education and awareness of valuable resources.

Raymond Aron

• “Why is it so difficult to evolve an ideology, in the sense of a total system of interpretation and action? For contemporary societies, scientific and technological progress has acquired a kind of inevitability, an almost irresistible movement that no government is willing either to halt or slow down. Perhaps no government is able to harness it completely. Progress in science and growth in production are inseparable, and taken together, they create a future the broad lines of which are foreseeable but which is unpredictable, in human terms, beyond the next ten or twenty years.”[1]

Raymond Aron (1905-1983) was a French academic and philosopher whose prolific writings stood in contrast to some of the major intellectual movements of his time, particularly existentialism and Marxist-Leninism. From his days as a student at the prestigious French Ecole Normal Superieure, where he met and developed a friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre and other leading intellectuals of his day, Aron was surrounded by the new milieu of ideas evolving in a Europe shattered by World War I and the ensuing economic crisis.

World War II intervened before Aron and his contemporaries had fully made their mark on the modern mind, and Aron himself was directly involved, fighting first as a member of the Armee de l’Air, France’s air force. After France’s swift defeat, Aron persevered in his opposition to totalitarianism, departing for London to join the Free French forces and editing the movement’s newspaper.

Following the war, Aron returned to France and commenced an academic career of great influence, teaching at the University of Paris and the Paris Institute of Political Studies, preeminent institutions then and now. One of his main concerns was the development of the industrial society, defined by progress, science, and economic growth. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, who emphasized the ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union, or the “free world” and “Communist bloc” more broadly, Aron pointed to their similarities, to thinkers willing to be objective. Both were embracing a centralized federalism, large corporate and bureaucratic structures, and material betterment goals for their citizens. To Aron, this environment made possible a turn away from the dangerous, radical ideologies, whether imperialism, nationalism, communism, or fascism, that ruined the world in his youth.

Aron was not a utopian optimist. He admitted that his aspiration for stable rapprochement, avoiding nuclear catastrophe, could only be brought about through well-informed, restrained policy-making, perhaps best embodied in foreign policy and economics, where the constraints of others’ needs and desires require compromise and patience. In these zones, steady and reformative progress are the highest hope, but this should prevent their practitioners from falling into the radicalism and extremism that destroy an idea’s legitimacy and corrupt the spirits of its practitioners. Thus, while contemporaries like Herbert Marcuse, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre sought to re-engage with original philosophical questions and generate new ideologies, Aron was content to focus on present realities, ameliorating conflict through humility and combatting dangerous ideologies with criticism.

Unfortunately, having not founded a “school,” Aron’s depth and scholarship are too little recognized today. Describing Aron’s mind as “fertile” or “productive” is a serious understatement; from 1938 to 1983 he wrote numerous books and articles touching on sociology, politics, international relations, history, and more. Many of these works have now been translated into English, with The Opium of the Intellectuals, Peace and War, and Politics and History serving as outstanding examples of Aron’s thought. As a thinker with intellectual roots in Tocqueville, Comte, and Montesquieu, Aron was capable of extending impactful analysis to any policies, forms, or contexts that related to modern democratic and scientific societies characterized by mass politics, secularization, and left-right battles.

Reading Aron’s publications is not only a mentally enriching experience. His ability to maintain an objective tone and spirit, granting the limitations of his arguments and treating his opponents with humble restraint, is an instructive example for all participants in the rough-and-tumble world of social media incivility. He did not live to see the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Western prophets of an “end of history,” but he would likely have felt more at home in our own time than the heady days of the 90’s, as we have witnessed utopian hopes fall in the pessimism of recessions, asymmetrical warfare, refugee crises, and trade wars. In such a moment, his patient, diplomatic sociology is more relevant than ever.

• “No society known to history has avoided injustice, luxury for the privileged few, and poverty for the majority. What is new is that the luxury enjoyed by the few does not prevent improvement for the masses.”[2]
• “Every historical prediction must take account of the plurality of causes and the possibility of chance occurrences and accidents. Whether for good or evil, we cannot predict the future.”[3]
• “Policy, like strategy, is an art in which everything depends on execution….The isolationist will prefer to sulk in his tent; the globalist will try to win every match. What tradition teaches is not cynicism but Aristotelian prudence – the supreme virtue in this world under the visited moon.”[4]

Bonus quote – “Among the human sciences history is supreme – on condition, of course, that historians are first of all economists, then sociologists and perhaps also philosophers.”[5]

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[1] Raymond Aron, The Industrial Society, (New York: Frederick A. Prager, Inc., 1967), 147.

[2] Ibid, 177.

[3] Raymond Aron, 18 Lectures on Industrial Society, Trans. M.K. Bottomore, (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1961), 242.

[4] Raymond Aron, The Imperial Republic: The United States and the World, 1945-1973, Trans. Frank Jellinek, (NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974), xii, 329.

[5] Raymond Aron, 18 Lectures on Industrial Society, Trans. M.K. Bottomore, (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1961), 231.