In this chapter, Aurelian Craiutu documents key elements of Tocqueville’s political thought that are either anticipated or shared by the so-called Generation of 1820. Like Tocqueville, this cohort came of age in France during the time of the Bourbon Restoration. It included figures such as Théodore Jouffroy, Charles de Rémusat, Félicité Robert de Lamennais, and others who struggled like Tocqueville to make sense of the dawning tide of democratic equality. Their writings also reckon with problems of individualism, skepticism, and the loss of authority that all regarded as characteristic of the democratic age. Most importantly, however, Craiutu suggests in this chapter that many of Tocqueville’s insights – including his interest in the United States – may be explained by the influence of his kinsman François-René de Chateaubriand, whose earlier visit to America and subsequent writings shared much with Tocqueville’s vision.

The introduction begins with a critical biographical overview of Aron’s career as a whole. This overview, which opens with an account of Aron’s emergence in the 1970s as an anti-totalitarian icon, serves as a point of entry into the larger questions addressed throughout the book. Both the 'French liberal revival' and Aron’s specific contribution to it have, it is argued, previously been treated more in laudatory evaluative terms than critical analytical ones. While the liberal status of Aron’s political thought has been largely taken for granted, the French liberal renaissance has been analysed on its own terms such that its claims for the historical illiberality of French political culture in particular have often been taken at face value. These points lead into a brief historiographical review which links the literature on Aron and the liberal revival to recent debates around the history of French and European liberalism more broadly.

This chapter focuses on Aron’s interpretation of Montesquieu and Tocqueville and his influential self-description as their ‘belated descendant’ in his book Main Currents of Sociological Thought. It argues, firstly, that in this book Aron’s invention of a ‘French school of political sociology’ represented by these liberal forbears was part of wider efforts among sociologists to rewrite their discipline’s history at a time when it was becoming unprecedentedly popularised and institutionalised. It shows that the decline of Durkheimian hegemony at this juncture had opened up a consensus gap between French sociologists, some of whom - including Aron - responded by rewriting the discipline’s past to legitimate their competing visions of its future. The chapter also shows how Aron read Montesquieu and Tocqueville through the lens of his earlier philosophical writings in an attempt to revise the epistemological basis of his political thought. Ironically, this project was substantially indebted to previous readings of Montesquieu and Tocqueville by some of the same Durkheimian colleagues against whom Aron defined himself and the ‘French school of political sociology’ in Main Currents.

This chapter considers Raymond Aron’s position in the intellectual history of liberalism from several angles. It argues that in relation to the Dreyfusard liberalism of his teachers’ generation his attitude was mostly critical but that he played a crucial role in the formulation of what has since come to be known as cold war liberalism. The chapter also offers a critique of the notion of a ‘French liberal revival’ and concludes by considering the implications of Aron’s oeuvre for the crisis of liberalism in the early twenty-first century.