Raymond Aron (1905–83) was a distinguished French philosopher, political thinker, social scientist, and journalist. He wrote influential columns for Le Figaro (1947–77) and L'Express (1978–83) and played a major role in shaping moderate and conservative opinion in France in the years after World War II. Today, he is widely acknowledged to be one of the most prominent twentieth-century representatives of the French tradition of political liberalism. He was profoundly shaped by his experience of witnessing the rise of National Socialism in Germany as a student in that country in the early 1930s. As he put it in his 1970 inaugural address at the Collège de France, the experience of a civilized country descending into barbarism permanently cured him of “facile progressivism,” the illusion that “history automatically obeys the dictates of reason.” It was during this period that Aron discovered the sociological and historical reflection of the German sociologist Max Weber, whose thought he…