Nicolas Baverez; Pierre Manent, "Rayond Aron: Political Liberalism Civic Passion, and Impartial Judgment," Society, 41, no. 3 (2004): 17-20.

Excerpt:

“Even if he did not live to see the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union,  Aron largely summed up the history of the 20th century. One must recall that he was born in 1905 and died in 1983. A graduate of the prestigious Ecole Normale  where he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy, in his youth he—like most of the students of his generation—was a socialist and a pacifist. Then he went to study in Germany in 1930. There he saw the rise of Nazi-ism and, unlike many, he realized that something new was occurring in politics, something extraordinarily dangerous on the philosophic and strategic plane.”

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