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“... Raymond Aron died of a heart attack on 17 October, a few weeks after the publication of his memoirs. He died on the steps of the Paris courthouse where he had been testifying on behalf of his friend Bertrand de Jouvenel, who had been violently attacked in a book on French Fascism. The case was not a simple one, as de Jouvenel had said and done some imprudent things in the Thirties ...”

“... In lieu of Sartre and Raymond Aron, future historians of French intellectuals in the Eighties and Nineties may well be condemned to structuring their narratives around the post-Marx brothers of French intellectual life, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. This is not a case simply of contemporary thinkers being dwarfed by the giants of the past – the familiar lament about the decline of French intellectuals is rather unfair ...”

“... of the ‘revolutionary year’ 1989). Yet it is sometimes difficult to know whether the wisdom of Raymond Aron is celebrated here simply because it is ideologically compatible, or on the contrary because Aron finally won, by sheer dint of living on into a period in which his old enemies were either dead or ...”

“... to exercise intellectual authority in the name of that power. To make their point, they put up Raymond Aron to take down Sartre. The most distinguished living symbol of the one école was publicly, and in Bourdieu’s view resentfully, set against the grand old man of the other. The remorselessly liberal author of The Opium of the Intellectuals, La ...”

“... it still gives me an eerie feeling to read about people like George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Raymond Aron, to say nothing of less admirable characters of the Melvin Lasky stripe, taking part in surreptitiously subsidised anti-Communist ventures – magazines, symphony orchestras, art exhibitions – or in the setting up of foundations in the name of ...”

“... were now countries in their own right.France chose to ignore his advice. The previous year, Raymond Aron had come up with very different findings in an essay titled ‘Economic Consequences of Political Developments in Black Africa’. Aron took the view that colonialism had involved a hefty investment of French ...”

“... world, Collini finds, was always smaller than we like to think; meanwhile, both the Americans and Raymond Aron have imagined Britain as the place where the intellectual can live a happy and well-rewarded life. Collini’s book ought to put a stop to such fantasies. Not least among the virtues of Absent Minds is that it spares us another extended account ...”

“... put in place systems of government based on a mixture of central planning and market intervention. Raymond Aron, worrying about the appeal of communism in Asia in the 1950s, suggested that non-liberal policies and institutions appealed to many state-builders in Asia because it was clear to them that liberal methods in politics and economics were doomed to ...”

“... fine book. ‘The very situations that bring about a modern war are destroyed in its wake,’ Raymond Aron wrote. ‘It is the battle in and for itself, and not the origin of the conflict or the peace treaty that constitutes the major fact and produces the most far-reaching consequences.’ In the First World War, the battle itself was dramatically ...”

“... exclusively to academic intellectuals. The pages of the mainstream press had long been open to a Raymond Aron in France (clearly one of Tony’s inspirations), or a Habermas in Germany, and their impact had long been discounted. He was well aware of the risks, personal and professional, he ran in attacking the combined forces of US global conquest, the ...”

“... Thus it is thanks to Hexter that I have learnt that, around 1930, Becker was a relativist, just as Raymond Aron was to become one on our side of the Atlantic a few years later. In the aftermath of the crisis of 1929, Becker came to acknowledge the truism that historical research only answers the questions one has prepared in advance to put to it. The 18th ...”

“... they were almost all exhilaratingly equivocal. In none of the arguments which deployed them, as Raymond Aron used repeatedly to say, was there a straight answer to the straight question: was revolution desirable, and if it was, how then was it to be brought about? Was it, as Aron himself hoped, introuvable, or ...”

“... likely that some of them, at least, will be critical of the role that Simone de Beauvoir played. Raymond Aron has already said that his relations changed from the day that Sartre met her. Until then Sartre liked to have him as his companion, someone with whom he could talk: once Simone de Beauvoir had taken on this role, he was no longer interested in ...”

“... well as to Bourdieu) to use the life to amend the theory. Perry Anderson has compared Bourdieu to Raymond Williams, another scholarship boy who turned into a social critic – and, however reluctantly, into a kind of social success. Surely there are further conclusions to be drawn from such stories – not least that lowly origins can themselves serve as a ...”

“... One Monday morning in September 1940, Raymond Aron was lying in bed at a camp for Free French soldiers in Aldershot. His roommate, who had arrived the previous afternoon, asked him the time and, when told, replied: ‘Déjà sept heures moins vingt.’ Aron left the room. When he returned, his companion had shot himself ...”