Customer Reviews

Raymond Aron

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I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in contemporary political philosophy or, for that matter, 20th century history. It is briskly written, and really explores Aron's thought on history, totalitarianism, pluralism, and other imprtant debates.

Anderson identifies Aron with a range of thinkers from Max Weber to Carl Schmitt, and the idea that prudence is the central quality of political responsibility, moreover it is anti-nomic, in other words, not particularly concerned with legality. According to Aron: "[t]o be prudent is to act in accordance with the particular situation and the concrete data, and not in accordance with some system or out of passive obedience to a norm... it is to prefer the limitation of violence to the punishment of the presumably guilty party or to a so-called absolute justice; it is to establish concrete accessible objectives... and not limitless and perhaps meaningless [ones], such as "a world safe for democracy" or a world from which power politics has disappeared." Anderson argues that this connects to a "conservative" tradition of prudence. Whatever he means by that, it cannot be of much use to the current generation neo-conservatives and their world-made-saving rhetoric.