Volume 12, Number 1 · January 16, 1969
Savvy Savant
By J.P. Nettl
La révolution introuvable: Reflexions sur la revolution de mai en toute liberté
by Raymond Aron
Fayard, 187 pp., 15 F
What makes Raymond Aron such a distinguished figure? Certainly not just the quantity of his writing, which has piled up in French and English, a ville radieuse of reason and common sense. It has long been hinted that Aron is perhaps the only political scientist in France whose work De Gaulle reads attentively—in spite of the fact that Aron's political writings have been more and more specifically critical of Gaullism, which he recently characterized as personal, authoritarian, an extreme version of traditional French bureaucratic government, whose rigidity was compounded by the General's unique style. On the more academic side, too, Aron's reputation as a social analyst of wisdom, a doughty champion of common sense, stands high not only in France but in America, Germany, and Britain. Among contemporary social scientists he is obviously an important figure. Why?
Review, 3994 words
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