Cumhuriyet Üniversitesi İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Dergisi

Abstract

Raymond Aron, who undertook the moderate liberal tradition, which contrasts with France's revolutionary and radical past, with his academic studies in various fields, draws attention as one of the important French liberal intellectuals of the twentieth century. This study, which aims to project the world of thought of Aron, who has intellectual richness in a very deep and wide range of fields such as politics, history, philosophy and international relations, especially sociology, through political philosophy, also has a double-layered purpose. In the context of political philosophy, Aron reveals the possibility of contingency, freedom in the actions of individuals and the autonomy of politics through his criticism of the deterministic explanation of history, and analyzes in depth how the opposite is the source of totalitarianism that destroys social and political pluralism. The constitutional-pluralist regimes he presents as an alternative to the reductive and one-dimensional world of meaning of the relevant ideological approach, which he characterizes as secular religions, prove the conceptual dimension of his continuation of the Tocquevillian tradition (acceptance of negative-positive freedom, primacy of politics, moderation and prudence). The second layer of the work is a refutation of a presupposition. Aron's synthesis of his sociological analysis of the reflections of the change in mentality that emerged with the industrial society with philosophical inquiries into the unchanging essence within all these changes is valuable for understanding his intellectual position. Because, as a member of the philosophical intellectual heritage of Continental Europe, he has a distinguished place in terms of holding both traditions in an era of intense criticism that Anglo-American-centered approaches in political sociology have lost their philosophical roots and depth.