Background

Raymond Aron was born on March 14, 1905, in Paris, France. He was a son of Gustave Emile Aron and Suzanne Aron. He also had two brothers.

Education

Raymond Aron entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1924. In 1928, he received an agrégation, a degree in France that gives the right to teach in a secondary school. In 1930, he received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in the philosophy of history.

Career

Raymond Aron started his career as a professor of Philosophy at the Lycée of Le Havre in 1933. He left this post in 1934 and became the secretary of the Center for Social Documentation of the École Normale Supérieure. In 1939, Aron took up a post of an associate professor of Social Philosophy at the University of Toulouse. However, soon he joined the French Army and was active in the military defense against Germany until 1940. In 1940, he moved to London and began his career as a journalist, serving as editor-in-chief of La France Libre until 1944. He also worked as an editorial writer at Combat magazine from 1946 to 1947 and editorial writer at Le Figaro newspaper from 1947 to 1977.

In 1945 Raymond Aron became a professor at École Nationale d'Administration. He held this post until 1955 and then became a professor at the Faculty of Letters at Paris-Sorbonne University. In 1968 he left Paris-Sorbonne University and in 1970 took up a post of a professor of sociology at the Collège de France where he served until his death in 1983.

Raymond Aron published his first book La Sociologie allemande contemporaine in 1935. Later he wrote such books as L'Homme contre les tyrans, Le Grand Schisme, La Tragédie algérienne, La Lutte des classes and many others. Some of his books were translated into English, Russian and Spanish.

Achievements

• Raymond Aron was a French educator, journalist, philosopher, and writer who was famous for his works about totalitarianism, liberalism, Communism. His most famous book is The Opium of the Intellectuals.

Works

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• book

  • The Opium of the Intellectuals

    (Raymond Aron's 1955 masterpiece The Opium of the Intellec...)

    1951
  • Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity 1961

Politics

In Berlin, Raymond Aron witnessed the rise to power of the Nazi Party and developed an aversion to all totalitarian systems. He argues that Max Weber's claim that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force does not apply to the relationship between states. In the field of international relations in the 1950s, Aron hypothesized that despite the advent of nuclear weapons, nations would still require conventional military forces.

Views

Raymond Aron was affected by Marx and much inspired by Max Weber, however, he was the avowed heir of Montesquieu and de Tocqueville. He regarded historical and political forces, rather than social and economic structures, as ultimately shaping human collectives.

Aron sought to defend the value of freedom and to preserve the irreducible subjectivity of human experience and the open-endedness of history from sociological and historical determinism. Aron's prewar concerns were with epistemological and formal problems in sociological thought and the philosophy of history. After the war his work had a different orientation, addressing the immediate concrete political, economic, social and international problems of twentieth-century life.

Aron contended that the Marxists had confused Marxist goals with Stalinist practice, that their adherence to the idea of ‘historical inevitability' was destroying their critical judgment and turning them into fanatics. A liberal and constitutional pluralist, Aron criticized both right and left for reinforcing centralizing and statist tendencies in their plans and practices.

Quotations: "The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or from an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings, participates in living communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism."

Membership

Raymond Aron was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Connections

Raymond Aron married Suzanne Gauchon on September 5, 1933. The marriage produced three children.

Father:

Gustave Emile Aron

Mother:

Suzanne Aron

Brother:

Robert Maurice Aron

Brother:

Adrien Aron

Wife:

Suzanne Gauchon

References

• Political Reason in the Age of Ideology: Essays in Honor of Raymond Aron A little over one hundred years after his birth, and not quite twenty-five years since his death, interest in the French political philosopher and sociologist Raymond Aron (1905-1983) continues to grow. Aron is now widely recognized as one of the most significant intellectual figures of the postwar period, whose wide-ranging reflections played a key part in preserving liberal democracy in Europe and abroad.
  2006
• Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers This Biographical Dictionary provides detailed accounts of the lives, works, influence and reception of thinkers from all the major philosophical schools and traditions of the twentieth-century. This unique volume covers the lives and careers of thinkers from all areas of philosophy - from analytic philosophy to Zen and from formal logic to aesthetics.
  1996