Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Raymond Aron’s books stand out as an example of lucid political judgment in an age of extremes in which many intellectuals shunned moderation and were attracted to various forms of political radicalism. This paper discusses one of the faces of moderation—Aron’s “committed observer”--by commenting on Aron’s views on the role, virtues, limits, and possibility of moderation in political life. The paper will also address the issue of political judgment in Aron’s works. Although he brilliantly played the role of the spectateur engagé, he never gave a clear theoretical statement about the features of the “committed observer.” Therefore, one has to reconstruct the portrait of the spectateur engagé piece by piece by using scattered insights from Aron’s own books in which he described his own political engagement. This is the purpose of this paper which draws on a representative selection from Aron’s writings covering more than three decades of his life.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper reviews a neglected area in the burgeoning scholarship on Raymond Aron, namely, his writings on the pursuit of "grandeur" as an end of French foreign policy. Aron was remarkably ambivalent about the pursuit of grandeur by the French, a trait that emerges especially in his reflections on the creation of a "force de frappe," or France's nuclear force, and in his writings on the Algerian problem. In examining Aron's views on grandeur, we will compare and contrast his views with Charles DeGaulle's, who was among the first to note a marked inconsistency in Aron's thinking here. This essay will relate Aron's ambivalence over grandeur to a fundamental inconsistency in his philosophy of history, an ambivalence that seems only to have been intensified by conflicting feelings toward DeGaulle.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Aron is amongst the best known thinkers of the twentieth century. He is also one of the few front rank political thinkers to have devoted a good deal of his work explicitly to the problem of international relations. Yet whereas the work of French theorists trip of the tongues of contemporary IR theorists without a second thought, Aron has been surprisingly neglected - some honorable exceptions (like Stanley Hoffmann) excepted. This paper seeks to offer a reinterpretation of Aron's international thought, linking it to his philosophical ideas more generally and to his historical, political and polemical writings as well. It will also argue against the interpretations of Aron's international thought contained in excellent studies such as Mahoney's Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron, and Andersons equally excellent Aron: The Recovery of the Political. Instead it will offer an account of Aron's international thought as what I term a 'Cartesian Realism' a particular blend of liberal and realist thought that still has much to offer contemporary students of world politics. The paper will close, finally, with a critique and assessment of Aron's 'Carteisan realism'.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Raymond Aron devoted the early years of his intellectual career to Creating what he termed an "epistemology of understanding," a theory of knowledge that could transcend the absurd, solitary world of human existence and discover an objective world of shared values. This "epistemology of understanding" was to provide the theoretical foundation for a "politics of understanding," or a diplomacy capable of creating an international political equilibrium predicated on some shared sense of moral purpose. This paper traces Aron's approach to such a diplomacy, especially as it finds expression in his great treatise on international relations, Peace and War Among Nations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Near the end of his long and distinguished career, Raymond Aron explained that he had never ceased "to think, or dream or hope--in the light of the idea of Reason--for a humanized society." For Aron, as for Kant, a truly humanized society is one which recognizes the freedom of the individual to enhance his or her own moral worth under laws of his or her own making. More specifically, Aron searched for progress in the light of what he considered to be the two dominant facts of the modern age, namely, industrialization and nuclear weapons. By a sort of "cunning of history", Aron observed, industrialization and nuclear weapons have converged to make war less rational than before. The purpose of this paper is to examine how Aron's liberalism manifested itself in his theorizing about international relations and in some of his less abstract diplomatic recommendations. I argue that some of the tensions and even contradictions in Aron's foreign policy prescriptions have their origins in this ambivalence over the source and character of human reason.