Saperi all'ombra della guerra fredda. Raymond Aron, le relazioni internazionali e il pensiero strategico (original) (raw)
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's two main prewar works were entitled La Sociologie allemande contemporaine and La Philosophie critique de l'histoire. From these two works, the young doctoral student at the École normale supérieure retained throughout his career two essential teachings which helped him to approach international problems in an original way. The first, drawn from the work of Max Weber, is the centrality of the political in human affairs and the need to understand the world in terms of power relations, both within and outside political units. The second is the Hegelian (and Marxist) idea of the gradual emergence of the meaning of history, which nobody wanted as it is, but which emerges from the confrontation and conflict between different perspectives on the world. As expressed in a paraphrase of Marx Aron was fond of, "men make their own history, but do not know the history they make". Rather than the centrality of economics, Aron used this dialectical tool to replace the Marxist class struggle vision with that borrowed from Weber, yet without ignoring economic interests in his analysis. These are the most salient methodological principles of a reflection that he himself linked to "historical sociology", a tradition born in Germany in the wake of Weber's writings and which Aron had analyzed at length in his first work on German-language sociology. For him, it is a tradition that makes it possible to encompass the entire field of the human sciences and to neglect none of the dimensions relevant to the analysis of the complex phenomena they deal with. Rejecting any reductionism to economics, as in Marx's case, as well as to politics or psychology, this approach remained throughout Aron's intellectual journey his special way of approaching major political problems, both internal and external. 2 This original perspective, received during his intellectual training, pushed Aron to adopt a point of view that is both inclusive and politically focused on international relations and, more particularly, on the emerging nuclear dialectic in the post-Hiroshima era. While postwar strategists quickly integrated the existence of atomic weapons into their studies, usually to underline its radically new character at the strategic and operational levels, Aron was more circumspect and insisted from his first analyses, as early as 1945, on 1 Early English translations were published in book form under the title On War : Atomic Weaopns and
2015
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Front matter, including title page and table of contents, for Science in the Cold War