ABSTRACT
Among the major themes with which the name of Raymond Aron was linked in the 1950s and 1960s were the contemporary peculiarities of “Industrial Society” and “The End of Ideologies.” Aron, who later criticized “the pathos” of that dissertation, conceded that he was spurred on by a certain personal necessity, and that he considered it justifiable to examine the truthful viability of the ideas of various authors without going into each and every aspect of all the works concerned. Aron was never a Marxist—even when he called himself a socialist—but always a student of Marxism. In the 1950s it was not so much the Communists as the pro-Communist and “progressiste” Parisian ideologues that Raymond Aron was attacking. Aron demonstrated that Sartre only seemingly harmonized with his Marxism the Existentialism he never abandoned, and merely achieved a fictitious synthesis. Aron wanted to teach, to instruct, to persuade, but he never sacrificed a nuance of his thought in order to gain approval.
