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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 1997

BRYAN-PAUL FROST
Affiliation:
University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette

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.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1997 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The author wishes to thank Steve Bernstein, Daniel Mahoney, Stanley Hoffmann, Alex Lo and especially David Welch for reading and commenting upon earlier versions of this article.