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Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection

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Raymond Aron was unique among intellectuals: at once a journalist and scholar, he was a prolific writer on, and noted expert in, a huge aray of subjects from philosophy to military strategy to economics. As it turns out, his life was also fascinating: he was a classmate and best friends with Sartre before becoming his great adversary during the post war debates on Marxism, was in London for the French resistance during the war, and became a television personality late in life.

In French, Aron writes with a grace and clarity that are astonishing. Now I have finally read his memoires, one of the last things he wrote. When you compare any contemporary intellectual to him, they simply can't measure up.

Simply put, Rayomd Aron's memoir is proufound and interesting. Those who want to affect society in terms of knowledge should read this book. Aron just before his death tells us what intellectual ethics is, how unconscious intellectuals can be far from mass, and why we need philosohpy to understand society. Through the entire of the book, there is a specter of Sartre who used to be Aron's "little comarade" but turned out to be his ideological enemy. In contrast to a Sartre's monstrous genius who declined a Nobel prize, Aron commits himself as a humble humanutarian. This book is a critical review of the French intellectual history.

Raymond Aron is one of the most interesting intellectuals of this century. His writing is deeply appealing. He is not just telling the political history of the century he lived. The pages are like a wave that drifts from the right to the left inside the parties, from his childhood to poetry, passing through comunism, nazism, the wars, the fall of the ideologies, till reach the decade where the giant (USA) starts its fall - the seventies. He throws you into the political sense, into the racionality of the inteligentsias throughout Europe. It's not just about past, present and future. It's a different history. It's a guest for reason, it's a guest for the most challinging steps of man.