Raymond Aron: Philosopher of Liberties

The name of Raymond Aron is often strangely missing from the canon of the twentieth-century’s great philosophers. He is sometimes thought of as a “Cold War intellectual,” but not as a philosopher of the first rank. This would be a mistake. Aron helped to articulate a distinctively French style of liberal political theory. Unlike Anglophone liberalism that has been a doctrine of rights, Aron’s exemplified a certain ideal of human character—rational, skeptical, open-minded—that defines liberalism at its best. His heroes were Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Weber. Aron articulated these views when liberalism was under attack from the combination of Marxism and Existentialism that dominated the post-World War II period in France. His example will be useful today when liberalism is once more under attack from both the extreme Right and the extreme Left.