Values at War: Selected Tanner Lectures on the Nuclear Crisis

by Raymond Aron, Freeman Dyson, Joan Robinson

Dyson discusses the grave problem of nuclear weapons, defining poetry as the whole range of literary reaction to war and weapons. He believes that human cultural patterns are more durable than weapons technology or the political arrangements in which weapons have become embedded and, thus, that hope is reasonable. Aron juxtaposes the concepts of arms control and peace research and analyzes the origins and present state of the armaments debate in an attempt to create a basis from which to deduce principles of action. He asks two crucial Are hostile states able to come to an essential agreement about the relationship between their forces, and Have we learned the causes of war and the means for preventing it? Robinson reviews the steps by which the world has come to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. She considers international economic and military complicity, national egoism, and high-level failure of morals in shaping a plea for a sane retreat from the edge of the abyss.

132 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1983

About the author

Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron (French: [ʁɛmɔ̃ aʁɔ̃]; 14 March 1905 – 17 October 1983) was a French philosopher, sociologist, journalist, and political scientist.
He is best known for his 1955 book The Opium of the Intellectuals, the title of which inverts Karl Marx's claim that religion was the opium of the people – Aron argues that in post-war France, Marxism was the opium of intellectuals. In the book, Aron chastised French intellectuals for what he described as their harsh criticism of capitalism and democracy and their simultaneous defense of Marxist oppression, atrocities, and intolerance. Critic Roger Kimball[2] suggests that Opium is "a seminal book of the twentieth century." Aron is also known for his lifelong friendship, sometimes fractious, with philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.[3]
He is also known for his 1973 book, The Imperial Republic: The United States and the World 1945-1973, which influenced Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, among others.
Aron wrote extensively on a wide range of other topics. Citing the breadth and quality of Aron's writings, historian James R. Garland[4] suggests, "Though he may be little known in America, Raymond Aron arguably stood as the preeminent example of French intellectualism for much of the twentieth century."