| 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 theoretical impulse in all of Aron’s works,
Davis explains, is that of reconciling freedom and necessity.
The ways in which Aron attempted to reconcile these two polarities
in his earliest writings had a direct bearing on the manner
in which he sought to reconcile realism and idealism in his
international thought. By attempting to bring reason and necessity
into the same loose orbit, Aron tried to construct a theoretical
approach to international relations and statecraft that could
hold the middle ground between realism and idealism.
Many scholars have simply abandoned efforts to understand
the more philosophical dimensions of Aron’s thinking
because of its technical difficulty. With A Politics of
Understanding, Davis provides a concise and clearly written
explanation of the basic concepts at work in Aron’s
philosophy and ties them directly to his later thinking, especially
concerning international relations.
Reed M. Davis is professor and chair of
the Department of Political Science at Seattle Pacific University.
He lives in Maple Valley, Washington. |
