The Contemporary Debate in International Relations Theory and Raymond Aron's Epistemology and Ontology

Abstract

This article is a contribution to recent Anglo-American metatheoretical discussions in international politics. Its topic of research is Raymond Aron's Aristotelian theory and its relation to Kenneth Waltz's Galilean ideal of science. The study departs from the assumption that Aron's theory can be better understood if interpreted from the point of view of his epistemological thought. This starting-point leads to Wilhelm Dilthey's critique of historical reason, which first appeared in Aron's doctoral dissertation in the 1930s where he used it as a working name for his own project. Later, Aron very seldom referred to this period of his life. As very few explicit references in Aron's texts on international politics to Dilthey's hermeneutics can be found, I have constructed some of the main topics of critique of historical reason and tried to analyse their meaning for Aron's theory. Concepts like Erlebnis, objective spirit, bifurcation and teleological causality are important keys to Aron's epistemology, which seems to have an antinomic relationship with Kenneth Waltz's structural systems theory.