The Anthem Companion to Raymond Aron

By Anthem Press

Raymond Aron is an exceptional figure among twentieth-century sociological and political thinkers. The book focuses on the sociological work of this author of the century, who analyzed his age both in its grand-scale political and socio-economic traits and in the complex social ramifications of its day-to-day life.

Aron experts from a total of seven countries examine his sociology in detail starting with his epistemological studies on the limits of objective knowledge in history and the social sciences in which he moves away from Durkheim's approach and instead adopts Max Weber's sociology of understanding. His comparative sociology of industrial society in its market economy and planned economy variants, its social stratification, the structure of the ruling elites and the pluralistic and one-party political regimes are presented, as is Aron's analysis of the dialectic of modern society between the idea of equality and the authority structures in the state and the economic process. This is accompanied by Aron's lifelong criticism of those intellectuals who hope that a messianic ideology will abolish all social contradictions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839980053

Book preview

The Anthem Companion to Raymond Aron

Anthem Companions to Sociology

Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Series Editor

Bryan S. Turner – City University of New York, USA/Australian Catholic University, Australia/University of Potsdam, Germany

Titles in the Series

The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville

The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte

The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills

The Anthem Companion to Émile Durkheim

The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch

The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes

The Anthem Companion to Ferdinand Tönnies

The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde

The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel

The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt

The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim

The Anthem Companion to Karl Marx

The Anthem Companion to Maurice Halbwachs

The Anthem Companion to Max Weber

The Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick

The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff

The Anthem Companion to Pierre Bourdieu

The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah

The Anthem Companion to Robert K. Merton

The Anthem Companion to Robert Park

The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons

The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen

Praise for the Series

The Anthem Companions to Sociology offer wide ranging and masterly overviews of the works of major sociologists. The volumes in the series provide authoritative and critical appraisals of key figures in modern social thought. These books, written and edited by leading figures, are essential additional reading on the history of sociology.

—Gerard Delanty, Professor of Sociology, University of Sussex, Brighton

This ambitious series provides an intellectually thoughtful introduction to the featured social theorists and offers a comprehensive assessment of their legacy. Each edited collection synthesizes the many dimensions of the respective theorist’s contributions and sympathetically ponders the various nuances in and the broader societal context for their body of work. The series will be appreciated by seasoned scholars and students alike.

—Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, University of New Hampshire

The orchestration and emergence of the Anthem Companions to Sociology represent a formidable and invaluable achievement. Each companion explores the scope, ingenuity, and conceptual subtleties of the works of a theorist indispensable to the sociological project. The editors and contributors for each volume are the very best in their fields, and they guide us towards the richest, most creative seams in the writings of their thinker. The results, strikingly consistent from one volume to the next, brush away the years, reanimate what might have been lost, and bring numerous rays of illumination to the most pressing challenges of the present.

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The Anthem Companions, those that have appeared already and those that are to come, will give every sociologist a handy and authoritative guide to all the giants of their discipline.

—Stephen Mennell, Professor Emeritus, University College Dublin

The Anthem Companion to Raymond Aron

Edited by

Joachim Stark and Christopher Adair-Toteff

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

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© 2022 Joachim Stark and Christopher Adair-Toteff editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021951106

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-003-9 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-003-6 (Hbk)

Cover Image: Portrait of Raymond Aron, ca.1976, © Dominique Schnapper, Private Collection.

This title is also available as an ebook.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Retracing Aron’s Routes to Sociology

Joachim Stark

Chapter OneThe Subject, Pluralism and Équité: Raymond Aron and Sociology

Joachim Stark

Chapter Two Aron, Weber and Nationalism

Christopher Adair-Toteff

Chapter Three Equivocal and Inexhaustible: Aron, Marx and Marxism

Scott B. Nelson

Chapter Four The Opium of the Intellectuals

Leslie Marsh and Nathan Cockram

Chapter Five A New Era in the Human Adventure: Industrial Society and Economic Growth

Scott B. Nelson and Joachim Stark

Chapter Six Raymond Aron: La lutte de classes

Alessandro Campi

Chapter Seven Political Philosophy Meets Political Sociology: Raymond Aron on Democracy and Totalitarianism

Daniel J. Mahoney

Chapter Eight The Contradictions of Prometheus: Wisdom and Action after the Disillusionment of Progress

Giulio De Ligio

Chapter Nine The International Problem and the Question of the Best Political Regime

Frédéric Cohen

Chapter Ten War and Irrationality: Aron and Pareto

Alan Sica

Conclusion: Aron on Liberty

Christopher Adair-Toteff

Notes on Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It cannot be taken for granted that a book, consisting of the contributions of 10 authors from six countries, could be more or less published on time, in view of the restrictions that the entire public life worldwide, including science and research, was exposed to in 2020 and 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

We, as editors, would therefore like to thank the authors of this volume for writing their respective chapters on the works of Raymond Aron despite the profound restrictions and, at times, considerable personal burdens. A special thank you goes to Scott B. Nelson, whose help was indispensable when it came to writing a chapter that was about to not being realized. And we thank Mme Dominique Schnapper for providing the cover photo.

Anthem Companion to Sociology series editor Bryan S. Turner suggested to us this volume about Raymond Aron as a sociologist. We would like to thank him and Anthem Press for advice and support. As usual, the editors alone are responsible for any shortcomings that this book project may show.

April 2021

INTRODUCTION: RETRACING ARON’S ROUTES TO SOCIOLOGY

Joachim Stark

Raymond Aron is an exceptional figure among twentieth-century sociological and political thinkers. His endeavor to enrich the social sciences with a comprehensive, encompassing examination of human life in society may even qualify him as an author of the century in which he worked, on a par, for instance, with Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Ralf Dahrendorf, a sociologist with intellectual roots in both the German and Anglo-American contexts, once said of him:

Great men must possess a high degree of that basic human quality: individuality. Nevertheless, let me say this: Raymond Aron is the only social scientist of recent decades who, in view of his wide sphere of interest, his combination of analysis and action, commitment and power of understanding, his blend of critical revolt and critical reserve, may be compared in terms of significance with Max Weber. (Dahrendorf 1980, 30; see also Hübinger 2019, 365–67)

The sociologist Edward Shils concurs: I think that no academic of this century—certainly no academic social scientist, with the possible exception of John Maynard Keynes—was so widely known and appreciated as Raymond Aron (Shils 1985, 4). While renowned universities across the globe invited him to hold guest lectures or conferred honorary doctorates upon him, his fame transcended the academic sphere, with leading policymakers in France and the United States turning to him for analysis of foreign policy and matters of national security.

His work is without doubt a shining beacon amid the hazardous cliffs and treacherous depths of the modern history of ideas and social thought, particularly with regard to the twentieth century. His oeuvre’s luminosity stems in part from its sheer size and diversity, yet also, and indubitably, from the lifelong mission pursued by its author, the task of understanding his age both in its grand-scale political and socioeconomic traits and in the complex social ramifications of its day-to-day life. Throughout this, Aron remained consistently dedicated to the ideals of truth and reason while never losing sight of the limits of the human capacity for knowledge. His singularity arises from the decisive approach he took towards specific issues, but without actually identifying himself with political parties or ideologies.¹ This thoroughly independent stance proceeded from a conception of the thinking, doubting individual as endowed with the ability and the duty to take responsibility for a decision rather than pointing to historical and social conditions as its sole determinants. It was an attitude that led, on occasion, to Aron being misunderstood, isolated or indeed subject to hostile attacks by political and intellectual contemporaries of the positivist, existentialist, Marxist and structuralist schools.

Aron was not among those sociologists, such as Durkheim, Parsons and Bourdieu, who left us a body of teachings conducive to the establishment of a distinct sociological school (see, e.g., Baechler 1985, 64; Châton 2017, 100). Instead, he taught a philosophical-phenomenological method whose point of departure was the subject and its sociological and historical entanglements and which sought, in the face of history’s imponderabilities, to find a position from which it might be possible to do sociology grounded on the limits of reason. Aron’s aim was for the findings of this sociology to provide a genuine prospect of illuminating the conditions most likely to generate a social and economic balance of interests while enabling the retention of political and individual freedoms. An endeavor of this kind demanded that the social scientist and the intellectual remain continuously open to examining their own values and convictions. And that they keep seeking to understand why they had chosen that particular topic to investigate.

In the Kantian spirit, which consistently characterized Aron’s own philosophical training, he teaches us to strive for the consistency, to focus on the empirical with all its concomitant conditions and limitations and to pledge ourselves to truth by attempting to gain a comprehensive view of our subject. In addition to this, Aron’s sociological oeuvre in the narrower sense is uniquely interwoven with the global developments his era saw in terms of the economy, society and ideas, to the extent that the focus of his sociological attention is inseparable from social philosophy, the theory of knowledge, critique of ideology, political theory, international politics and strategic issues of war and peace; nor can we regard it as discrete from the political leading articles and commentaries he wrote for French daily, weekly and monthly press periodicals. This multifaceted character of his work threatens to obscure Raymond Aron’s sociological work in the narrower sense from our view. We might be tempted to focus instead on Raymond Aron the political thinker, the critic of political ideologies and doctrines, the defender of pluralist, constitutional democracy and of a liberalism characterized by a commitment to the welfare state, the international political analyst and strategist, the political commentator.² Aron’s principal contribution to twentieth-century political thought is his rediscovery and expression in new terms of the centrality of the political to human life in society or, more precisely, in modern industrial society (Stark 1986, 206–8; Audier 2004, 17–19). Therefore, it remains essential to keep discussing Aron’s political thought, such as the variant he proposed of a liberalism aligned with that of Tocqueville and Weber. However, if we are to take full account of the close intertwinement of political and sociological thought in Aron’s work, we must logically include his sociological thought, which his liberal position underlies and which constitutes one of the threefold pillars of his oeuvre alongside his observations on politics and history and his studies on international relations.

This volume provides a close focus on Aron’s sociological oeuvre in its more precise sense and enables us to reinvigorate the conversation around his contribution to the sociology of industrial societies in particular. Aron experts from a total of six countries will examine his sociology in detail. This internationality mirrors as it were Aron’s decades of international activity. It deserves special mention that all authors of this volume have successfully overcome the challenges their research was confronted with by the Covid-19 pandemic.

As noted above, it does appear that Aron’s specifically sociological thought has found itself somewhat consigned to the background over the decades (Baehr 2013). That said, more recent work has referenced it on numerous and repeated occasions, albeit tending to examine particular excerpts thereof rather than turning to the big picture (Aron 1988; Schnapper 1988 (e/fr); Stark 2002, 2007; Paugam 2006, 2015; Steinmetz-Jenkins 2018; Meszaros and Dabila 2018). The field has remained without an attempt to create an overarching analysis that would locate Aron’s sociology in its relationship to industrial society, to modern society more generally and its dialectics and to the social conditions required for the operation of liberal, pluralist democratic systems of government. Aron’s specific terminology as developed in the 1930s is also missing such as the phrase plurality of modes of consideration, contemporary attention to which (Marrou 1939; Baechler 1985, 62) fell victim to the circumstances of the time. This volume’s endeavor, then, has been to explore Aron’s key sociological works in the narrower sense of the term. The volume’s size has not allowed for a dedicated chapter on each of Aron’s sociological monographs, which include Sociologie allemande contemporaine (Aron [1935] 1981, Engl. 1957) and Main Currents in Sociological Thought (Aron 1965/67), but its chapters make multiple reference to these works.

This introduction to the volume will engage with the task of retracing Aron’s routes to sociology, proceeding from his life and particularly his education. His years at school and university passed under the influence of the Third Republic’s secular education system. His upbringing in a liberal, bourgeois family with republican attitudes likewise left its imprint on his personality, having likely laid the foundations for a nonconformist, critical self-awareness, which enabled him, even when faced with intense ideological hostility and ostracization, to remain confident in his fundamental beliefs. We might enumerate these beliefs as follows: the belief that it is possible to tell truth from falsehood despite the limitations of the human capacity for knowledge and insight; that it is possible to pledge oneself to reason and, thanks to the progress of science and technology, secure a stable ground for the continued thriving of humanity; that it is possible to defend, by means of fairness and respect, the freedoms of the individual and her opportunities to develop her potential, in spite of the constraints imposed by societal norms and by a state continuously intensifying its regulatory interventions in the process of securing essential public services for individuals and groups. Aron remained true to these convictions until late in life, in the continuous knowledge that history has a powerful capacity for tragedy and in the awareness of increasing doubts around whether societies could maintain stability and liberty in the long term in the emergent absence of a consensual idea of good society or of the traits and virtues of a model citizen.

A Republican Family

Raymond Claude Ferdinand Aron was born in Paris on March 14, 1905, the third and youngest son of the legal professional and teacher of law Gustave Aron and his wife Suzanne. Gustave and Suzanne were both from wealthy Jewish families that owned textile businesses in Lorraine and northern France and held strong French republican and patriotic attitudes. Aron’s father, Gustave, had eschewed employment in the family business for a law degree in Paris, but his placing in the competitive agrégation examination in the history of law was insufficient to allow him to progress to a university professorship. His inheritance, alongside the dowry brought into the marriage by Suzanne, enabled the couple to have a house built in Versailles, into which they and their three sons moved in 1915. Gustave, who had invested heavily in stocks and shares, lost his fortune and income in the global economic crisis of 1929, meaning the house had to be sold in 1930. The memory of his father’s failure to achieve an academic career and his subsequent financial ruin appears to have stayed with Raymond Aron throughout his life; his memoirs tell of his sense of having long been deep in his father’s debt, as the bearer of his parents’ great hopes for the university career that his father had been denied (Aron 1983, 16; Engl. Aron 1990, 10). It was not until around four decades after his father’s death that Aron felt he had repaid this debt: in an acceptance speech he noted that his election to the Collège de France and the honorary doctorate conferred upon him by the University of Jerusalem would have made his father happy (Aron [1972] 1989, 185–90; Baverez 1993, 336).

Some interpreted this mention of his father as exemplary of his Jewish heritage, a reading Aron himself did not agree with (Aron 1983, 16; 1990, 10). Indeed, the family in which he grew up was largely secularized, without a thorough induction into Jewish traditions or the Jewish faith; instead, the young Aron received a very rudimentary introduction to Judaism (Aron 1983, 12–13, 500). His Jewish heritage was of no relevance to him in his school and university years, beyond the occasional anti-Semitic insult directed at him as an 11- or 12-year-old boy in the schoolyard (19). It was not until the racist anti-Semitism of Germany’s National Socialists entered the European scene that Aron began to explore his origins, an activity that did not extend its influence to his research interests. He accepted and acknowledged his Jewish heritage, especially after the full extent of the atrocities committed by the Nazis came to light in 1945 (Aron 1981, 313–14). At the same time, Aron by no means considered himself a practicing Jew or a person of faith and identified as a citizen of France only and not of Israel, despite the irresistible sense of solidarity with the latter country which he professed in an article for Le Figaro littéraire on the eve of the Six-Day War in June of 1967 (Aron 1983, 500; 1968, 70; Hacohen 2009; Manent 2017).

The Great Depression and Marx’s Kapital

The financial ruin suffered by his parents in the Great Depression of 1929 may have been a key motivation for Aron’s eventual rejection of the idealistic philosophy that dominated his university years and his concomitant turn toward engagement with the economic, social and political realities of his time. Around 1929/30, Aron, like others of his generation, sought an explanation for the economic crisis through the study of Marx and his analysis of capitalism. Marx’s critique ultimately failed to convince Aron, who was soon attempting, in the spirit of social liberalism and republicanism, to identify a form of politics that would both open the door to economic progress and prosperity for broad swathes of the population and simultaneously ensure the establishment and maintenance of a liberal, pluralist, democratic state founded on the rule of law. The articles he published in journals during the 1930s allow us to retrace this development in his thinking (Aron 1993a,b). Aron eventually laid the foundations, drawing on philosophy and the theory of knowledge, for a pluralist social science discipline in 1938, in his Introduction à la philosophie de l‘histoire (please refer to the chapter that follows this Introduction).

The young Raymond and his brothers enjoyed a highly liberal family and school life, which placed few constraints on their thought and its expression. Their parents treated the siblings as equals to them and to one another and encouraged them to join in discussions in the family circle or when eminent academics were visiting the home (Aron 1983, 19). In addition Aron’s lycée in Versailles had a philosophy teacher who left a profound impression on Aron the schoolboy, demonstrating the search for truth via reflection and expecting his pupils to avoid settling for supposed certainties (21).

Aron Discovers Philosophy

These philosophy classes at the lycée, which Aron took from the age of 16 onward, proved key to his intellectual development. Particularly, in Aron’s own view, it was the 1921/22 academic year that he termed crucial to the future direction of his life. To Aron, studying philosophy brought the experience of understanding that his own existence could be changed, rather than merely passively borne; that each individual possessed a degree of freedom in making his or her life; and that each one could learn in dialog with the great philosophers of the past (Aron 1983, 21; 1990, 14).

Aron took his licence in philosophy after two years at the École normale supérieure. Drawn above all to abstract concepts and metaphysical questions, he gave seminar presentations on Aristotle, Spinoza, Anselm of Canterbury and Kant. His degree thesis, completed in his third year, was on "La Notion de l’intemporel dans la philosophie de Kant: Moi intelligible et liberté." He considered the study of philosophy at the École normale to have additionally taught him humility, asserting that the work of Kant in particular had cured him permanently of vanity (Aron 1983, 22; 1990, 14). In his fourth year of study, he had the opportunity to gain more profound knowledge of French teachings on society, encountering Rousseau and Auguste Comte, among others, in the curriculum. The written assignment on Comte that Aron completed in 1928 has been preserved for posterity (Leboyer 2016). About thirty years subsequently, Aron returned to Comte during a lecture at the Sorbonne which served to prepare candidates for the agrégation (Aron 1983, 38) and was later published in Main Currents in Sociological Thought (1965/67).

In 1928, Aron’s passion was for philosophy, and his interest in sociology was not yet strong. He was, however, politically aware and active; he believed firmly in social justice and felt strongly for economically underprivileged social strata, and in 1926/27 he was briefly a member of the then French socialist party SFIO (Baverez 1993, 56). A pacifist by conviction, he was a supporter of Franco-German reconciliation. He left the SFIO after a short period of membership. Reflecting in his memoirs, however, he remembers that, at as early a stage as his philosophy classes in Versailles, he had likely begun to sense a gap between philosophy’s intellectual rigors and his emotions—his compassion for those disadvantaged and oppressed, his disapproval of the privileged and powerful and his perception, yet diffuse at that time, of a lacuna between philosophy and social reality which he had yet been unable to bridge using intellectual means (Aron 1983, 22; 1990, 15; Busino 1986).

In the mid-1920s, Aron’s political activities remained untroubled by any knowledge of the workings of a free market economy and the global financial and currency system. It was not until the Great Depression cast its shadow that he began to pay closer attention to economic and financial politics and policy. In 1936, as the economic policy pursued by the French Front populaire under Léon Blum once again faced severe economic challenges, Aron published his first article in this area, analyzing the government’s erroneous judgments (Aron 1937).

It was not until the early 1930s, as he began to engage with German sociology—particularly that of Max Weber—that Aron identified an approach that would enable him to bring together abstract, general ideas and an active commitment, undergirded by a rationale, to a specific form of society. Both his sociological oeuvre and the expansion of his radius of engaged thought to almost all areas of societal being and political action were dedicated to the bridging of the lacuna between philosophical knowledge and action as a citizen or politician. After the end of the Second World War in 1945, analysis of financial and economic policy was a firm component of Aron’s journalistic repertoire.

Aron: A Liberal to His Core

It is impossible to reduce to one specific factor alone the conditions and circumstances that shaped the fundamentally liberal attitude which Aron retained, by and large, throughout his life and which came to characterize his sociology. We cannot, for instance, put it down solely to his observation and rejection of National Socialist and Stalinist totalitarianism, or to the influence of Max Weber’s work. There are many diverse, divergent answers to the question of whence Aron’s liberalism arose. We referred to the role of his parental home above, likewise to the culture of open discussion and debate at the lycée he attended and at the École normale, peopled by professors who were tolerant, undogmatic, yet with high standards and expectations, such as Léon Brunschvicg and Célestin Bouglé. The young Aron encountered authors whose pacifist convictions stood alongside their intellectual independence, including Émile Chartier (Alain), and was a member of discussion circles such as Paul Désjardins’s Union pour la vérité (Stark 1992; Beilecke 2003). Thus continuously steeped in liberal surroundings which welcomed discussion and debate, he was always unlikely to have developed into a dogmatic authoritarian. He is, however, also an example of the fact that, in the final analysis, it is an individual’s own choices that determine who[m]‌ we wish to be (Aron 1971, 33): whether we will take the route of doubt, of considered weighing up of ideas against one another and of permeating uncertainty, or whether we will throw in our lot with certainties, with supposed inalienable truths, as may be embodied in a religious faith or a secular ideology that appears to promise salvation. The choice of Aron’s contemporaries Sartre and Nizan fell on dogmatic Marxist positions; Nizan’s decision came as early as the beginning of the 1930s (Les chiens de garde, 1932), while Sartre’s came after the Second World War in the shape of his attempt to marry Marxism to existentialism.

Studies in Germany and la condition historique du citoyen

After completing military service from the fall of 1928 to the spring of 1930, Aron took up a position as a teaching assistant in French at the University of Cologne, Germany, arranged by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Commencing the post in March 1930, he engaged in reading that included Husserl, Heidegger and Marx’s Das Kapital, which inspired him to conduct his thèse d’état on the philosophy of socialism. He selected Marxist analysis of the global economic crisis, its impact on Germany and the Marxist ideas of history and liberty as his areas of focus (Baverez 1993, 76, 78; Nelson 2019, 113–14). Yet in the fall of 1930, he abandoned the project, having become conscious of the complexity involved in comprehending social and historical developments, which made it impossible for the dialectical relationship proponed by Marx between private ownership of the means of production and history as a series of class struggles to suffice as an academic predictor of an eventual classless society. Looking back, Aron pinpointed a walk taken on the bank of the Rhine in Cologne in the spring of 1930 as the moment in which he turned to the objective of gaining an encompassing understanding of his social and historical situatedness, alongside the concomitant acceptance of the limits set him in such an endeavor in the theory of knowledge—limits which he had previously encountered in his study of Kant. This was Aron’s discovery of that which he termed la condition historique du citoyen ou de l’homme lui-même (the historical condition of the citizen or of man himself) (Aron 1983, 53; 1990, 39); that is, the fact that a human being, socialized into a specific society—in his case, as a Frenchman and a Jew—and situated at a particular point in time in the process of history, cannot escape the fact of his or her limitation to a specific point of view in the perception and cognition of society. The subject in search of objective knowledge of social contextualities is itself steeped in the reality it seeks to examine. Aron regarded this situatedness as posing him two challenges: to come to understand his age with as much integrity and objectivity as possible, without ever losing sight of the limitations on his capacity to do so; and to stand back, as far as possible, from contemporary events, without settling comfortably into a spectator’s role (Aron 1983, 53; 1990, 39; 2012/13, 1048). This moment of conversion, closely related to the study of Marx that Aron was pursuing at the time, served to definitively mark Aron’s repudiation of a Marxist philosophy of history and of an ideologically driven blending of describing reality with philosophical values.

Weber’s approach to sociology proved key to Aron’s critique of Marx and Marxist concepts. That Aron criticized Marxist ideology is well known; less so the direct intellectual contention with Marx in which he had been engaged since the beginning of the 1930s. Albeit rejecting Marx’s philosophy of history, Aron held him in esteem as a theoretician of capitalism and of industrial production. The important lectures he gave on Marx in 1962/63 (Aron 2002) reveal profound insights into Aron’s endeavor to attain an academic understanding of Marx’s development while retaining an impartial perspective in retracing in detail this engagement with Marx. Scott Nelson in his chapter points in particular to Aron’s continuing interest "in the mysteries of Capital" and his attitude that has always been shaped by intellectual generosity. At the same time Aron was convinced that Marxism is not a science but an existential choice, a philosophy, an attitude, whose success was rooted in the seductive mixture of rationalism, Prometheanism and Christian aspiration. It is likely that Aron’s initial thoughts in this direction gained greater nuance in the period from fall 1931 to August 1933, which he spent in Berlin, frequenting the Prussian State Library to engage in a thorough reading of Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Mannheim, Georg Simmel, Wilhelm Dilthey, Heinrich Rickert, Hans Freyer and Alfred Schütz (Baverez 1993, 79–80; Aron 1983, 67–68; Bosquelle 2005). This intense period of study formed the foundations of his first sociological book, La sociologie allemande contemporaine (Aron [1935] 1981), and two works on the theory of knowledge, La philosophie critique de l’histoire and Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire (Aron ([1938] 1986 and [1938] 1987). A central component of Aron’s time in Berlin was his study of Max Weber’s works in sociology, which he found to be of infinitely greater persuasive and stimulatory power than those of Durkheim, the principal among which he had studied closely at the École normale. To Durkheim, the individual, ultimately, was nothing but the expression of societal systems of behaviors and values; Weber, by contrast, sought to track down the motives and rationales underlying individuals’ and groups’ alignment of their actions and behaviors to value and belief systems, societally dominant or otherwise.

During the 1933–34 academic year, teaching philosophy at the lycée in Le Havre, Aron continued his study of Weber and his work on La sociologie allemande contemporaine. Subsequently, in the fall of 1934, he took up employment as secretary of the Centre de