ABSTRACT
History, Truth, Liberty is the second collection of Raymond Aron's essays to appear recently. The first, Politics & History, was published several years earlier. Details drawn from the current events of the late 1950s and early 1960s kept getting in the way of Aron's Clausewitz-like effort at synthesis. In part at least, this is due to an innate liberalism in Aron that was far deeper than any imputed conservatism. The three essays comprising The Industrial Society are linked more by M. Aron's remarkable person than by any systematic presentation of ideas. Thus, however one may wish to resist the temptation to indulge in the sociology of political knowledge, to examine such a volume otherwise is simply not to take seriously perhaps the most important singular factor in the book as such: Aron's aesthetic vision. Aron's position is that rational choice should not be equated with a plan for social life to proceed through inexorable stages of history.
