ABSTRACT
When the second Thirty Years' War began to give way to the trentes glorieuses, the survivors felt as if they had passed through a nightmarish North Atlantic gale in mid-winter and were now sailing into the Caribbean sun. In one respect Raymond Aron was an unusual theorist of the convergence of systems. He treated political and socioeconomic developments as if they were almost totally separate. However, Raymond Aron did not succumb to one error that has to be mentioned because it gave rise to so many others—the belief that a convergence of systems would be a good thing and therefore desirable. Some wondered whether the term class struggle was still appropriate for the condition. It makes sense to distinguish between the great struggles for entitlements, or citizenship rights, and the incremental claims for redistribution at the margin among those who already enjoy the rights of citizens.
