Raymond Aron’s Sociology of Collaborators, 1940–1944

Abstract

AbstractRaymond Aron (1904–1983) was one of the most renowned French intellectuals of the twentieth century. Eighty years after the Second World War, the scholarship is incomplete on his management of La France libre in wartime Britain (1940–1944). While his contributions to sociology in the 1930s and post-war have been established, this study examines his contributions to sociology during the war in the first volume of his articles 'From the Armistice to the National Insurrection'. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach in intellectual history and sociology, this study closely reads Aron’s articles, placing them in the context of his Interwar research on German sociology and the context of Free France in wartime London. It identifies the sociological methods Aron employed to typologize the backgrounds and motives of prominent French collaborators of Nazi Germany and deduces where his writings situated him politically. Aron’s sociology of collaborators yielded a classification of two categories—integral and opportunistic collaborators. His methods evoked Simmel’s systematic sociology and Weber’s historical causality. His articles had nuanced political implications: he was firmly against collaboration, but he hoped opportunistic collaborators would still rally the resistance in the early stages of the war. Aron’s classification stands the test of time, but more importantly, his sociological method was unique to him. Furthermore, his theoretical interpretations—formulated with limited knowledge, resources, and next to no hindsight—prefigured well-known theories by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon Epstein. His political position demarcated him from other “Gaullists” without excluding him from broader Gaullism.