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Article: A Witness.(The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century)(Book Review)
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- November 11, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century, by Raymond Aron (Basic, 544 pp., $35)
Jean-Paul Sartre's apologias for Stalin and Mao; Michel Foucault's praise for Iran's Islamic revolutionaries; the recent Parisian bestseller that claimed September 11 was an elaborate right-wing hoax- all too often, France's intellectual life has shown contempt for the hard-won decencies of liberal democracy and become infatuated with madness and tyranny. Yet one giant of 20th-century French thought always stood rocklike against the nonsense that swirled around him: the philosopher and social thinker Raymond Aron.
In an amazingly ...