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 considers Raymond Aron’s role in the ‘liberal moment’ of the 1970s and 1980s, when a significant broadening of interest in liberalism occurred among French intellectuals. It begins by considering the significance of intellectual anti-totalitarianism in these years. Rather than reducing late twentieth-century French intellectual anti-totalitarianism to anti-communist politics, the chapter shows how French intellectuals’ preoccupations with the problem of totalitarianism informed significant innovations in historiography and political theory. It also shows how the notion of ‘the political’ entered into widespread use among intellectuals in these years and considers Aron’s influence on this development. On the broadening of interest in liberalism the chapter argues for the existence of two main strands to the French liberal moment: one associated with Aron that emerged in hostile opposition to the events of May ’68 and another associated with Claude Lefort that viewed the events and legacy of 1968 in an altogether more positive light.