Overview
Raymond Aron’s Main Currents in Sociological Thought is a two-volume study of the founding figures of sociology, presented as a series of systematic expositions, each followed by a critical assessment. The chapters grew out of a lecture course, and they retain the shape of a course: Aron reconstructs a thinker’s doctrine in its own terms, sets out the major works and arguments in order, and then steps back to judge the coherence, the evidence, and the political implications of what he has presented. The work is not a history of sociology as an institutional discipline, and it makes little attempt to trace influences between the figures treated. It is, rather, a comparative examination of a small number of thinkers whom Aron regards as having defined the questions that sociology poses—about the nature of social order, the causes of historical change, the relation of the individual to the collective, and the possibility of a science of society.
Volume One
The first volume opens with a long introduction in which Aron asks what sociology is and whether it can be a science. He observes that the writers he treats do not agree on the answer, and that their disagreements define the field. He distinguishes broadly between those who conceive sociology as a positive science modeled on the natural sciences, seeking laws and explanations, and those whose work belongs more to political philosophy and the analysis of regimes and societies. He also announces the method of the book: an exposition of each doctrine, followed by a critical commentary in which he asks what is still valid in it.
Montesquieu
Aron treats Montesquieu as a founder of sociological thought, above all for The Spirit of the Laws. He sets out Montesquieu’s conception of law as a necessary relation arising from the nature of things, and examines the famous typology of governments—republic, monarchy, and despotism—together with the “principle” proper to each (virtue, honor, and fear respectively). He considers Montesquieu’s account of the influence of climate, soil, and commerce on laws and customs, and his treatment of liberty, culminating in the analysis of the English constitution and the separation of powers. Aron presents Montesquieu as a thinker who sought to explain institutions by a plurality of causes rather than by a single principle, and who combined empirical observation with comparison. His critique notes the looseness of some of Montesquieu’s causal claims and the tension between his determinism about climate and his commitment to political liberty.
Auguste Comte
The chapter on Comte centers on the Course in Positive Philosophy. Aron explains the law of the three stages—the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive—as the organizing principle of Comte’s thought; the hierarchy of the sciences, ascending from mathematics through astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology to sociology; and the conception of sociology as the most complex and last-arriving science, which depends on biology but has its own object. He sets out the division between social statics, concerned with order and the conditions of social cohesion, and social dynamics, concerned with progress, and describes the positivist method of observation, experiment, comparison, and the historical method. Aron then turns to the later System of Positive Polity, with its religion of humanity, its priesthood of sociologists, and its program for the reorganization of society. His judgment is largely critical: he finds Comte’s early conception of a positive science of society valuable, but regards the later construction as a transformation of sociology into a religion, and he notes Comte’s hostility to the individual and to political liberty.
Karl Marx
Aron’s treatment of Marx is the longest and most contentious in the first volume. He distinguishes the philosophical Marx—the young author concerned with alienation—from the mature Marx of economic analysis, and he considers the relation between the two. He expounds historical materialism: the idea that the mode of production of material life conditions social, political, and intellectual life; the notions of productive forces and relations of production, of base and superstructure, and of ideology; the conception of class struggle as the motor of history; and the theory of the state as an instrument of class domination. He then presents the analysis of capitalism developed in Capital: the commodity and the distinction between use value and exchange value, the labor theory of value, surplus value, the distinction between constant and variable capital, the tendencies of accumulation and concentration, the falling rate of profit, crises, and the reserve army of labor. Aron asks throughout what in Marx is science and what is prophecy, examines the class structure Marx attributed to capitalist society, and considers the predictions about the future of capitalism and the transition to socialism. His critical remarks concern the ambiguity of the labor theory of value, the passage from economic analysis to historical prediction, and the difficulty of separating Marx’s scientific claims from his philosophical commitments. He repeatedly compares Marx with Tocqueville, treating them as offering rival diagnoses of modern society.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The chapter on Tocqueville treats Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution. Aron presents Tocqueville’s central theme—the inexorable advance of equality of condition—and his analysis of the “social state” of democracy, the sovereignty of the people, and the institutions that moderate or endanger it: local government, associations, the jury, and the mores and religion of a democratic people. He expounds Tocqueville’s fears of the tyranny of the majority and of a soft, administrative despotism that leaves individuals free in form but dependent in fact, and his insistence that liberty is preserved only by active political participation. From The Old Regime, Aron presents the argument that the Revolution was not a rupture but the culmination of a long process of state centralization, and that its intellectual causes lay in the condition of the French nobility and the grievances of the peasantry. Aron emphasizes Tocqueville’s comparative method and his insistence on the primacy of political institutions and mores over economic causes—a position directly opposed to Marx’s. The critical commentary considers the limits of Tocqueville’s account and the difficulty of his attempt to be impartial between aristocracy and democracy.
The Sociologists and the Revolution of 1848
The volume closes with a chapter in which Aron returns to several of the thinkers already discussed in order to compare their responses to a single event, the revolution of 1848. Drawing on their writings about the February revolution and its aftermath—among them Tocqueville’s recollections and Marx’s analyses of French politics—he shows how their general theories issued in divergent interpretations of the same crisis, and uses the comparison to bring out the difference between liberal, positivist, and revolutionary readings of modern history. The chapter functions as a comparative conclusion to the volume, illustrating Aron’s conviction that sociological doctrines are best tested against concrete political events.
Volume Two
The second volume turns to three figures whom Aron treats as the great systematic sociologists: Durkheim, Pareto, and Weber.
Émile Durkheim
Aron expounds Durkheim’s program for a science of society, beginning with The Rules of Sociological Method: the definition of the social fact by its exteriority and its constraint upon the individual, the distinction between the normal and the pathological, the rule that social facts are to be explained by other social facts, and the use of comparison as the equivalent of experiment. He then presents The Division of Labor in Society, with its distinction between mechanical solidarity, based on resemblance and reinforced by repressive law, and organic solidarity, based on interdependence and expressed in restitutive law, together with Durkheim’s account of the pathological forms of the division of labor. The analysis of Suicide follows: the treatment of suicide rates as a social fact, and the typology of egoistic, altruistic, and anomic suicide, understood through the varying degrees of integration and regulation of the individual by society. Finally, Aron presents The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: the distinction between the sacred and the profane, totemism as the simplest form of religious life, the notion of collective effervescence, and the thesis that religion is society worshipping itself and that the categories of human understanding have a social origin. The critical commentary focuses on Durkheim’s “sociologism”—the tendency to explain the individual entirely through the collective—and on the difficulty of deriving moral and political conclusions from a positive science of society.
Vilfredo Pareto
Aron presents Pareto as the theorist of a rigorously “logico-experimental” sociology. He expounds the distinction between logical and non-logical actions, the analysis of the ways in which people rationalize their conduct through “derivations,” and the theory of “residues”—the relatively constant sentiments and tendencies that underlie the changing justifications people offer. He sets out Pareto’s theory of elites and the circulation of elites, his treatment of social heterogeneity and of the equilibrium of society, and his polemic against humanitarianism, pacifism, and the socialist doctrines he had examined in his earlier work. Aron notes the sharp contrast between Pareto’s mathematical economics and his sociological writings, and he is critical of Pareto’s claim to a purely experimental method, of his cynical tone, and of the conservative political uses to which his elite theory lends itself. He nevertheless treats Pareto’s account of the non-rational in social life as a genuine contribution.
Max Weber
The final and longest chapter of the second volume deals with Weber, whom Aron clearly regards as the greatest of the sociologists treated. He begins with Weber’s methodological writings: the distinction between the natural sciences and the sciences of culture, the concept of understanding (Verstehen) as the specific method of the social sciences, the construction of ideal types, and the demand for value-freedom in analysis alongside the recognition that the selection of problems is governed by values. He then presents The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: the characterization of the capitalist “spirit,” the analysis of the Protestant—especially Calvinist—ethic of inner-worldly asceticism, the doctrine of predestination and the anxiety it produced, and the thesis that a religious ethic unintentionally favored the development of rational capitalist conduct. Aron explains the image of the “iron cage” in which modern economic life confines the individual, and he surveys the comparative studies of the economic ethics of the world religions, in which Weber examined the relation between religious traditions and the rationalization of conduct in China, India, and ancient Judaism.
Aron then expounds the sociological concepts of Economy and Society: the typology of social action, the distinction between class, status, and party, and above all the three types of legitimate domination—traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal—with bureaucracy as the pure type of the last. He presents Weber’s definition of the state as the monopoly of legitimate violence, his sociology of law and of the city, and his account of the progressive rationalization and disenchantment of the world. The chapter closes with Weber’s political writings and the lectures on science and politics as vocations, including the distinction between the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility and Weber’s reflections on the fate of politics in a bureaucratized world. Aron’s assessment is largely admiring: he sees Weber as combining scientific rigor with an unflinching engagement with the political questions of his time, and as the thinker who most clearly grasped the tension between the scientific study of society and the exercise of political responsibility.
Character of the Work
Throughout both volumes Aron is concerned less with the accumulation of detail than with the comparison of answers to a common set of questions. He repeatedly asks whether sociology can be a science, what it can and cannot explain, and how the sociological analysis of society relates to political judgment. His own liberal sympathies inform the critical sections—he is skeptical of Comte’s religion, of Marx’s predictions, of Durkheim’s sociologism, and of Pareto’s cynicism—but the expositions are conducted with a consistent effort to present each thinker’s case in its strongest form before assessing it. The result is a study of the foundational alternatives within sociological thought rather than a unified narrative of its development.
Significance
The book’s distinctive contribution is to present classical sociology as a set of rival diagnoses of modernity rather than as a single cumulative science. Aron reads each author as offering a coherent account of what modern society is and what freedom can mean within it. Hence the prominence of themes that recur across the chapters: the growth of centralized administration, the extension of equality, the place of religion in a disenchanted world, the conflict between classes, and the fragility of liberty under mass conditions. Aron’s expositions are designed to make these diagnoses comparable, so that the reader can see where they converge and where they remain incompatible. The result is less a history of sociology than a critical inventory of its foundational options, valuable both as an introduction to the texts and as a demonstration of how sociological theory remains bound up with political and philosophical judgment.
