Volume 4, Number 8 · May 20, 1965
Raymond Aron and the Liberal Tradition
By George Lichtheim
Main Currents in Sociological Thought. Volume I: Montesquieu-Comte-Marx-Tocqueville—The Sociologists and the Revolution of 1848
by Raymond Aron, translated by Helen Weaver, by Richard Howard
Basic Books, 272 pp., $4.95
French universities are notoriously short of space. If there is ever a student uprising similar to the recent one at Berkeley, it will be directed not against bans on political activity—no one in France would be insane enough to impose one—but against lack of classroom facilities. There are a hundred thousand students in Paris alone (three times as many in the country as a whole), and although new buildings are being rushed up as fast as possible, many thousands still have to cram into the Sorbonne: the aged and wheezing mater et magistra founded in 1215 by Philip Augustus to commemorate his victory over the English at Bouvines. Now that France once more has a monarch (though an elective one) capable of routing the Anglo-Saxons, better days may dawn for students and lecturers, but some of the extra space will be needed to accommodate the growing audience which for years has followed M. Raymond Aron's lecture course, 'Les grandes doctrines de sociologie historique.' It was time this was made available to foreigners, and the text of the lectures (substantially unaltered, so far as one can judge) has now been published in a handsomely edited English translation.
Review, 2844 words
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