The Dawn Of Universal History
Selected Essays From A Witness To The Twentieth Century
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
In this collection of essays written over a period of almost forty years, Raymond Aron explores the rise of nationalism in Europe through the two world wars and the subsequent disintegration of her empires. With a richness of detail and sweeping breadth of historical examples, he chronicles and analyzes the history of the opposite ideological extremes of Fascism and Marxism and their descent into totalitarianism via secular religiosity. Aron also examines French imperialism through the examples of Algeria and Indochina, as well as America's role as an "imperial republic" during and after World War II. Aron was never orthodox in his ideology; neither his republican political penchants nor his dialectical intellectual orientation ever gained the upper hand over his devotion to empirical reality. The result here is an intellectual history that seems less concerned about where it falls on the political spectrum than about getting it right.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This collection of essays and book excerpts covering seminal moments in the political history of the 20th century by French intellectual and Le Figaro columnist Aron-who died in Paris in 1983-might be a little dense and daunting, but close, patient readers will be amply rewarded for their efforts. Written between 1939 to 1973, the bulk of the pieces date from the 1950s, when Aron was concerned with examining the causes and global effects of World Wars I and II, European nationalism, French imperialism, Marxism, Fascism and more. It's not a big stretch to find ideas that will still speak to the present: Aron, a realist, consistently refuses to conflate military and moral superiority. Nor does he view war as an inevitability, but rather as an ever-present possibility that should be avoided through the correct choices: "perhaps the absence of a great war will strike historians of the future as the equivalent of a great peace." His was not an optimistic voice, but a powerful, worldly and challenging one.
