Resurrecting a neglected theorist: the philosophical foundations of Raymond Aron’s theory of international relations

Abstract

Raymond Aron is a neglected theorist, at least if we understand by ‘neglected’ a theorist whose theory no longer engenders critical scholarly debate. More often than not, students of international politics either ignore Aron altogether or wrongly subsume him under the rubric of classical Realist. This is not to deny points of agreement between Aron and theorists like Carr and Morgenthau, but merely to indicate that many scholars fail to articulate and to take into consideration the numerous fundamental differences between Aron and other classical Realists. Aron’s Peace and War is probably ‘more quoted than read’ today, and it is doubtful whether more than a handful of students seriously study this monumental work at all.J. Hall, Diagnoses of Our Time: Six Views on Our Social Condition (London, 1981), p. 164.

The Honored Outsider

“… 8. And Anglo-American liberal or liberal conservative ones: see, notably, Anderson (1995), Anderson and Mahoney (1997), Davis (2009), Frost (1997, 2006), Jennings (2003, and the essays that follow in that journal issue), Judt (2007, 2011), and Mahoney (1992, 2011). Stanley Hoffmann has also written voluminously on Aron. …”