A Politics of Understanding

Frequently hailed as one of the greatest defenders of democratic liberalism in postwar Europe, Raymond Aron left behind a staggering amount of published work on a remarkably wide range of topics, both scholarly and popular. Trained in philosophy, Aron nevertheless left his mark on such fields as economics, sociology, nuclear strategic thought, and international relations. Given all of this, the fundamental purpose of A Politics of Understanding is to assess the originality and consistency in Aron's corpus, especially in the areas of international relations theory and strategic thought. ¶ The central theoretical impulse that runs throughout all of Aron's works is that of reconciling freedom and necessity. By attempting to bring reason and necessity into the same loose orbit, Aron worked to construct a theoretical approach to international relations and statecraft that could hold the middle ground between realism and idealism. The central difficulty of this approach concerns the erratic and unsteady course of its idealistic impulse. While seeking to apply a formalized ethic to political realities, Aron's idealism often overshot its mark and threatened to dissolve the very structural or historical necessities he relied on to justify a politics of moderate and prudent reform. The author concludes it was easier for Aron to imagine a moderate alternative to realism and idealism than to call one into existence.

Reed M. Davis is professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at Seattle Pacific University.