Word: aron
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...Aron's work is a patient and insistent debunking of utopias: any sociology that smuggles answers into the way it poses questions, and philosophy of history that sees patterns where there are none, ideologies which sacrifice men today to a vision of the future, or statecraft that promises more than it can deliver, all come under Aron's pitiless onslaught. The purpose of such demolition is not to clear the way for a pure and total science of society. Aron sees society as far too complex and changing to allow for any general theory valid for all times and places...
Hoffmann's introduction is modest. Aron is not only a columnist; he is the best of the West's myriad political commentators. Reading him, one cannot help feeling he has achieved the optimum mix of compassion and realism. The Great Debate is an example of neutral analysis in the service of compassion. Aron analyzes the nuclear apocalypse before which much of Harvard shudders as millenial Christians before the imminent Judgment, and he deals with it in a calm, utterly convincing...
...ballistic missile, and then the arms race. Was the source of the arms race the deep mutual suspicion that H. Stuart Hughes stressed in An Approach to Peace? (If this is the case, an American policy of unilateral disarmament intiatives to dispell suspicion would evidently be sound). No, Aron attributes the cold war "permanent alert" to the frank realization on both sides that there will be no interval, such as Britain had in World War II, to reactivate defense industries when the stratagems of peace had failed. Each side realizes it may have to fight with what...
...weapons have changed both war and politics, Aron says. In typically compact language he explains: Three radically new elements are instrumental in determining the three major concepts of strategic theory, concepts that suggest the three responses so far worked out to the triple challenge of monster weapons, permanent alert, and annihilation of entire nations without the need first to disarm them. The first is deterrence, symbolic of the effort to substitute the threat of force for its actual application; the second is stability, replacing the obsolets notion of balance of power and designating the theoretical situation in which no nation...
...merit of the McNamara doctrine, according to Aron, is that it reduces the immediate danger of "nuclear spasm," as American theorists refer to all-out war. But it does so at the cost of increasing the likelihood of conventional or guerrilla wars in which (since massive retaliation is not as imminent) firmness of intent may be tested. Thus Aron speaks of both Russia and the U.S. wielding conventional "swords" behind a nuclear "shield," as the U.S. did when it used the Navy to stop Russian ships during the Cuban missile crisis. The act was possible because of local American superiority...