A few weeks ago, when I was in Paris, I went to have lunch at my friend Jean-Claude Casanova’s home. As I entered the great doors of the building on the Boulevard St. Michel, I had one of those experiences which only an American amateur of things French would call Proustian. I felt a sudden shock, a powerful awareness of an absence linked to the entire substance of my adult life. I recognized that this was where Raymond Aron had lived and that I would find him there no longer.

I could not pretend to be his student or his friend, but he was the teacher and friend of all my friends, admired by everyone I admired on both sides of the Atlantic. He was the protective tent under which we lived, the urbane and always benevolent defender of reason, freedom, and decency when all these were passing through unprecedented crises. He incarnated the bon sens which is supposed to be the leading characteristic of liberal democracy and assumed the responsibility for presenting and representing that political possibility. He interpreted liberal democracy’s purposes, outlined the threats to it, and continually discussed the strategies required to protect us from them. He had the broadest views and used them to guide his study of the remote details required for policy. His disappearance is equivalent to the loss of the framework in which we lived, believing it was permanent.

Aron (1905-83) was a member in good standing of that last generation