ABSTRACT
In the analysis of the West and the East, the chapters of this book which take up the penultimate and largest segment demonstrate well the strengths and weaknesses of Aron's continentalism. History, Truth, Liberty is the second collection of Raymond Aron's essays to appear recently. The first, Politics & History, was published several years earlier. A third collection of essays, promised for 1988, is to be called Sociologists, Power and Modernity. The core of History, Truth, and Liberty is less concept-oriented than people-saturated. Individual greats uniquely embody important concepts. Even the essays on presumably sociological themes gathered in the fourth and sixth segments are more an extension of Aron's historical concerns than with the actual conduct of empirical research. Aron's great strength, and unique contribution, was to live comfortably in a world striving for democracy, while lacking adequate theories, rather than to opt for pure theories that yield so little in the way of practical liberties.
