DINO COFRANCESCO

Raymond Aron: lettura dei classici e teoria dei regimi politici

N. 171

Summary — For the whole of his life, Raymond Aron has studied the great political thinkers from antiquity to the nineteenth-century. Thucydides and Aristotle, Machiavel and Hobbes, Tocqueville and Comte have always been his guides. The Aronian political science cannot be comprehended without this love of classics, unusual for contemporary political scientists. The concept of industrial society (Comte, Durkheim), the Tocquevillian analysis of democracy, the élite theory (Mosca, Pareto, Michels), the realistic assessment of politics in terms of power and control (Machiavelli, Weber) are the foundations of his political theory. In classifying the forms of government of our time, Aron uses Montesquieu’s typology and the lessons of his loved classics. The primacy of politics, however, induces him to underline politics as a field of conflicting interests rather than the locus of a regularized or crystallized principle of conduct (institution).