dc.description.abstract | Raymond Aron was too respectful of each person's freedom to found a school of thought. But his mark in French political history and thinking is just as profound due to the fact that, far from relying on a network of disciples and institutions, it is anchored in an intellectual heritage that transcends partisan differences or academic studies. Aron succeeded in continuing and revitalizing, in the midst of the century of ideologies, the tradition of French political liberalism. More than that, he was the academic teacher and the intellectual who defended the primacy of politics in an era dominated by social sciences and economy. The rebirth of the political thinking in France in the 1980s is his legacy. In France, his attitude and his writings - particularly the publication of L'Opium des Intellectuels (1955) - contributed decisively in progressively detaching the intellectuals from antiliberal regimes and, from there, to the resistance of French society to antiliberal regimes. At the same time, Aron's action and thinking were of tremendous importance in the conversion of a large part of governmental and administrative elite to the Atlantic Alliance and the building of the European Community. Abroad, he acquired a huge moral notoriety and had a privileged relationship with numerous scholars, philosophers, and statesmen, such as Henry Kissinger with whom he maintained a frequent dialogue. Aron thus is a unique example of a twentieth-century French intellectual who was both patriot and European, republican and liberal, antitotalitarian and cosmopolitan. In the face of collective passions and demagogy, which overtake regularly democracies in general and French political life in particular, Aron played the major part, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss of a ‘teacher of intellectual hygiene.’ | en |