Liberty and Equality

“An important philosophical contribution highlighting the thoughts of one of the more important postwar advocates of liberalism in the 20th century.” * Library Journal *“To speak politically about political ideals is to practice the rare virtue of prudence, and to combine such moderation with radicality in theoretical inquiry is the hallmark of truly philosophic statesmanship. Aron’s lecture provides a model and an ideal of such statesmanship… . We should be grateful to Pierre Manent for editing Aron’s final lecture, and to Samuel Zeitlin for his careful translation. There exist few more sober, reliable, or serious guides to thinking about the virtues and vices of liberalism than Raymond Aron.”—Paul T. Wilford, City Journal

Raymond Aron (1905–1983) was one of the most important political philosophers and sociologists of the twentieth century. His many books include The Opium of the Intellectuals.

Samuel Garrett Zeitlin is Lecturer in Modern Intellectual History at University College London. He is the coeditor and translator of Carl Schmitt’s Early Legal-Theoretical Writings and Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation and the translator of Schmitt’s Dialogues on Power and Space and The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts.