It presents the contents of this dossier focused on the work of this remarkable French sociologist, infrequently taught at universities and whose legacy has been poorly valued at research in social sciences in the Argentina.
Keywords: Raymond Aron, Sociology, Politics, 20th century. Cita sugerida: Laleff Ilieff, R. Los otros, dejando aparte la asistencia del ayudante, eran abandonados a su suerte. Esencialmente, el profesor dictaba las llamadas clases magistrales. Se suprimieron las tesis de universidad, se implantaron la de tercer ciclo. El problema no era en todo caso el nihilismo, sino el totalitarismo. Referencias Amaral, S. El movimiento nacional-popular. Gino Germani y el peronismo. Aron, R. La philosophie critique de l'histoire.
Paris: Vrin. Buenos Aires: Losada. Machiavel et les tyrannies modernes. Paris: Editions de Fallois. Paris: Gallimard. L'Homme contre les tyrans. Le grand schisme. Les guerres en chaine. Aron , Raymond and F. The only book on Raymond Aron in English, Robert Colquhoun's brilliant biography is an intellectual and literary tour de force. Massip , R. Maulnier , T. Review of Le Grand Schisme a. Sartre , J.
Seabury , P. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. They become deeply inscribed in habit and custom. Legitimation: unsurprisingly, it is electoral competition and regular elections that are the source of political legitimacy in pluralist regimes.
However, Aron also notes the legitimizing function of elections in some totalitarian regimes. Given the party monop- oly, these quickly degenerate into acclamatory ritual and, like the principles of demo- cratic constitutions in regimes in which those principles remain unlived, lose their legitimizing potential.
Their place is taken by the historic goal that the regime has set itself and society, while fear remains a major source of regime stability. In pluralist regimes, in contrast, elections are the periodic expression and test of party competition.
They are vital and distinctly non-ceremonial parts of the constitution. Civil society: in the case of pluralist regimes, this is heterogeneous and organized. In totalitarian regimes the natural heterogeneity of complex industrial societies, divided as they necessarily are into classes, professions, occupational groups, and so on, cannot find its expression. The pluralism of civil society, and with it civil society itself, is suppressed by the party-state and disguised by the fiction of a common historic goal.
While for Montesquieu it was the aristocracy namely, his own class which was to play the role of intermediate or secondary institution moderating central power, this function has been taken over by unions, interest groups and, we can add, social movements, NGOs, and so on. One final point should be noted to conclude this exposition.
Rather he offers supple- mentary arguments which he considers sufficient for us not to take the two cases simply as instances of a single political phenomenon. Secondly, fascism and Nazism enjoyed, at least initially, the support of sections of the ruling and privileged classes. Finally, they have distinct aims informed by quite different ideologies. Nor can one simply adopt his arguments wholesale and apply them to other contexts.
Indeed, his own epistemological position forbids it. If that environment changes significantly, then we have to find new ways of understanding the regime that accompanies those changes. In this con- text, it is worth remembering that at the time Aron was writing about industrial society, others, including his compatriot Alain Touraine, were already proclaiming the arrival of post-industrial society. Current analysis of the state of democracy is characterized by something of a paradox.
With respect to the global diffusion of democracy that has occurred over the last thirty years, it has been conclusively shown that the spread of democracy and of markets are closely correlated see Simonds et al.
There are also powerful arguments to the effect that this correlation is by no means accidental notably Sen, On the other Downloaded from jcs. One strategy would then be to derive from it a set of questions that can be addressed to regime forms that did not — or could not — occupy him as much as they do us — for example, theocracies, post-communist regimes, and so on — and ask: what are their natures and what are their principles?
Nevertheless, he provides us with a very useful ideal type against which subsequent changes in the nature of Western democracies and societies can be measured.
In some ways it is as reassuring an example as that of the Weimar Republic was terrifying. This is far removed Downloaded from jcs. What Aron is describing is, if you will, the wrong kind of political engagement. What worries con- temporary analysts of the democracies of Western Europe and the USA is much more an apparent lack of sustained engagement of any kind among large sections of the gov- erned see Dalton, , for a detailed empirical analysis ; an indifference that can perhaps be politically mobilized only in the form of far-left, but more commonly far- right, populism.
It can, however, be invalidated by subsequent changes in these social and institutional parameters. His analysis of the relationship between economic and political elites and of the nature of political parties and the role of opposition illus- trates well this context-bounded validity.
Not only is the state seen as having no goals or modi operandi different from those of market actors, but it is seen to gain by subordinating its activities as much as possible to those of market actors. The putative breakdown of institutional pillarization, or decline of the pub- lic domain, has, it is argued, a number of detrimental effects on the quality of democratic governance. The remodelling of state capacities in the image of the market and the firm — for example, the creation of internal markets in health care, the outsourcing of the pro- vision of public services, and so on — has made the state—market boundary more Downloaded from jcs.
These conditions no longer apply, according to more recent arguments, where the manual working class has shrunk to a point where social democratic parties can no longer hope to build a workable coalition of electoral forces upon the basis of a core working-class support Crouch, Do they represent whom they claim to represent?
It is a system of rule that relies not on Downloaded from jcs. Contemporary styles of governance are, in the view of many analysts, consociationalism writ large see, for example, Papadopoulos, If we were to set out the image of political steering via horizontal coordination that emerges in recent governance literature in the language of Aron, the result would look something like Table 2.
Governance enthusi- asts — that is, those who view horizontal coordination as a potentially more inclusive and flexible mode of governing19 — would probably be inclined to the former view; the more sceptical analysts with whom I have largely been concerned, to the latter.
Were the contemporary analysts of governance to adopt the Montesquieu- inspired language of corruption, they would probably talk about indifference rather than hostility, a too weak rather than excessive party commitment, and the increasing subor- dination of the logic of politics to that of the market.
This is the direct result of consistently practising a sociology of politics that insists on a close relationship between institutional and social environments.
When the one changes, so does the other. The estimate is taken from Przeworski et al. See Jennings for a brief but informative account of the political controversies that still surround Aron and his followers — particularly at the Centre Raymond Aron — on the French intellectual scene. It may be necessary to add a caveat. Or perhaps not entirely safe hands.
For a thinker — whether of the left or right — to claim a degree of ideological neutrality, as Aron did, requires a disciplined and genuine engagement with opposing positions if the same suspicion that Aron raised against Pareto and co. By and large Aron maintained that discipline.
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