Aron’s lectures were published in French and never translated. According to Perrine Simon-Nahum in The Companion to Raymond Aron, ‘The 1965 Gifford Lectures and a series on 1967 talks published as La Conscience historique dans la pensée et dans l’action presented Aron with an occasion to revisit his theory of history and to continue his engagement with Thucydides’ analysis of political action and warfare’.
Raymond Aron was born on 14 March 1905 in Paris. He is best known as a sociologically oriented political commentator and philosopher. While Professor of Social Philosophy at the University of Toulouse, he joined the French Air Force during the Second World War. When France was defeated, he served in the Free French forces of General Charles de Gaulle in London and edited the newspaper, La France Libre. He was appointed Professor at the École Nationale d’Administration, in 1955, Professor of Sociology at the Sorbonne in 1968, and moved to the Collège de France in 1970.
In 1947, he became an influential columnist for Le Figaro, and in 1977, began writing a political column for L’Express. Aron adhered to a rationalist humanism often contrasted to the Marxist existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. Notable works include La sociologie allemande contemporaine (1936), Introduction a la philosophie de l’histoire (1938), L’opium des intellectuels (1955), and La lutte de classes: Nouvelles lecons sur les societies industrielles (1964). Robert Colquhoun published Raymond Aron in 1986.
