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Aron’s Faith Without IllusionsBurleigh also pays his respects to “one of the finest minds in twentieth century France, the liberal conservative sociologist and journalist Raymond Aron.” He praises Aron (1905–83) for his sobriety and for his “impassioned but limpidly expressed lucidity,” as accurate a description of Aron’s voice that I have ever come across. Burleigh is particularly impressed by Aron’s magisterial two-part analysis of the secular religions (“The Future of Secular Religions”) that first appeared in the exile journal La France Libre in July and August 1944.5 Aron stands out among Burleigh’s intellectual guides in part because he was not a believer. A self-described “de-Judaized Jew,” he nonetheless had genuine respect for religion. He liked to say that while he could not affirm the truth of transcendental religion in any unqualified way, he had no wish or right to “negate” it. He was an incisive critic of Marxist “prophetism,” of Marxism’s revolutionary historicism and its conflation of facts with desires. He despised the “idolatory” as well as the fanaticism inherent in the Marxist religion of “hyper-rationalism” and pointed out its deep roots in the modern project of making human beings “sovereign lords of nature through knowledge and his own will.” In his writings in La France Libre during the Second World War, Aron took particular aim at “the pessimistic irrational religion of the Nazis.”
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Last Updated on Friday, 09 October 2009 13:00 |