ABSTRACT
In 1924, Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre met for the first time. Aron, a serious, bookish type, sought and finally received the approval of the popular, brilliant, rebellious, and tyrannical Sartre. After World War II the two friends broke on the issue of anti-communism. From then on Aron and Sartre entered one of those classic French intellectual duels where ideas, politics, morals, and personal character become so intertwined that eventually the participants seem to become archetypes. At the level of politics, the difference is patent between Aron's good sense and careful judgment and Sartre's contorted apologetics for some of the worst regimes in human history. Sartre's freedom as negation was a way of expressing a settled hostility to the world as a world, hostility that sought in every way possible to subjugate it, and indeed finitude itself, to will.
