Word: arons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...today. It was back in 1961-2 that nuclear disarmament was the problem to which one was committed. Now the demonstrations are about civil rights and American policy toward the revolutions in underdeveloped countries. Yet America's policy toward these revolutions is to an astounding degree, as Raymond Aron suggests in The Great Debate, a result of the relationship between the American thermonuclear force and the Soviet one. Aron outlines with incredible brilliance the whole theory of power (the McNamara Doctrine) behind American foreign policy...
...Raymond Aron? Stanley Hoffmann, professor of Government, has published a description in the Nation that merits quotation...
Professionally, he is both a professor at the Sorbonne and a columnist for Le Figaro; Intellectually, he has pursued a triple career as a philosopher, a social scientist, and a citizen... Aron's work is a relentless Interrogation of contemporary society in all its forms: what are its main features, how does it differ from its own past, where is it going, or rather what kind of choices are open? His sociology is essentially historical; he is not interested in the abstract system-building of "grand theory" divorced from history, and since he considers concepts useful only as long...
...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...
...Gaullist who stuck by the General during the desert years from 1953 to 1958, when he completely withdrew from politics. A machine gun insignia marks those who fought in the Resistance. Any kind of affiliation with De Gaulle, past or present, qualifies a man for the Directory. Thus Raymond Aron, now an opponent of De Gaulle, is listed along with heir-apparent Michele Debre and obscure hatchetmen like Jean-Baptiste Biaggi. "Minister of the word" Andre Malraux ("an elderly uncle whose whims are tolerated with amused indulgence") appears along with plotters, soldiers, relatives and arch-traitor Jacques Soustelle...