In Defense Of Decadent Europe Raymond Aron Alan Rosenthal by Raymond Aron; Alan Rosenthal 9781351310185, 9781560008941, 1560008946, 1351310186 instant download after payment.

Raymond Aron’s In Defense of Decadent Europe was first conceived at a time of great uncertainty for the Western democracies. The postwar economic boom had been interrupted by “stagflation”—a combination of high unemployment and inflation—while Communist and Socialist parties in Italy and France were on the ascendant. A certain “malaise” had descended on the prosperous democratic world, which appeared less and less capable of collective action, riven with social conflict, and apprehensive of the future. Post-Marxist intellectual currents in the West carried antinomian theories dominated by anticapitalism and an extreme, even irrationalist libertarianism. At the same time the liberal democracies were exhibiting these symptoms of “decadence” the Red Army was poised, as ever, on European borders, inexorably arming itself and continuing its manipulation of left-wing groups and peace organizations throughout the West. 

It was against this background that Aron was asked in 1975 by Jean-François Revel, one of the editors of the French series Libertés 2000, to write a defense of political and economic liberty that would demonstrate the superiority of the liberal democracies over the Soviet-styled regimes of the Eastern bloc. The editors were not entirely happy with what they received. As Aron indicates in his introductory comments to the book, finding a title was not easy. Inspired by his friend Fr. Gaston Fessard, S.J., who had written thirty years earlier two books anticipating Aron’s central argument—France, Beware Your Freedom and France, Beware Your Soul—he wavered between two titles: In Defense of Decadent Europe and In Defense of Liberal Europe.