Raymond Aron (1905–1983)

Raymond Aron was born to a secular Jewish family in Paris, France. His father was a lawyer. After lycée, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure, from which he received a doctorate in the philosophy of history in 1930. He took first place in the civil service agrégation exam in philosophy in 1928. He took a lecturer position at the University of Cologne and focused on major German philosophers, sociologists, and political and military thinkers. Witnessing the rise to power of the Nazi regime and book burnings in Berlin in 1933 Aron presciently concluded that war was inevitable and returned to France. He married Suzanne Gauchon the same year. In 1935, he published his first book, La Sociologie allemande contemporaine (Contemporary German Sociology). He was a professor of social philosophy at the University of Toulouse when World War II broke out in 1939, and he volunteered for the French Air Force. After the fall of France to Nazi Germany, he went to London to join the Free French forces of General Charles de Gaulle in exile and edited their newspaper, La France Libre (Free France), from 1940 to 1944. On his return to Paris at the end of the war, Aron became a sociology professor at the École Nationale d'Administration. From 1955 to 1968, he was professor of sociology at the Sorbonne. From 1970, he was a professor at the Collège de France. Throughout his career. Aron also worked as a journalist, and in 1947 he became an influential columnist for Le Figaro, a position he held for 30 years. In 1977, he left Le Figaro and began to write a political column for the weekly magazine L'Express. Aron had a decisive influence on the political culture in France and in Europe. Through his writings, he gave force to anti-totalitarian liberalism and rationalist humanism, and was often contrasted with his great contemporary (and former classmate) Jean-Paul Sartre, an existentialist and Communist. Among Aron's most influential works were L'Opium des intellectuels (The Opium of the Intellectuals, 1955), La Tragédie algérienne (The Algerian Tragedy, 1957), and République impériale: Les États-Unis dans le monde, 1945–1972 (The Imperial Republic: The United States and the World, 1945–1973). A constant theme running through his writings was the subject of violence and war, as in Paix et guerre entre les nations (Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, 1962) and his books on the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. Aron also wrote an influential history of sociology entitled Les Étapes de la pensée sociologique (Main Currents in Sociological Thought, 1967). He published his Mémoires shortly before his death in 1983.