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Parmi les courants de pensée française de l'après-guerre, le marxisme joua un rôle très important, en imposant les thèmes par rapport auxquels les philosophes se situèrent. Les débats sur le marxisme ne sont pas séparables de l'existence du pays qui prétendait le réaliser dans toutes les sphères de sa vie. La politique comme une action collective en vue de la transformation de la société par les débats et par l'émancipation n'a pas été développée, ni dans les pays qu'on disait socialistes, ni dans les pays dits « bourgeois ». En même temps, nous pensons que les intellectuels français de gauche dans l'après-guerre ont considérablement contribué au renouveau de la pensée socialiste. Il y avait ceux qui adhéraient au PCF, et d'autres, comme Jean-Paul Sartre, devenaient « compagnons de route ». D'autres intellectuels encore, comme Cornélius Castoriadis et Claude Lefort, voulaient former des groupuscules indépendants en critiquant la politique du PCF staliniste et du PCI trotskiste. La crise du socialisme réel, les luttes anti-bureaucratiques dans les pays d'Europe de l'Est et la découverte de la vérité sur les camps soviétiques, ont provoqué des ruptures de certains de ces intellectuels avec le marxisme. Les changements démocratiques en ont conduit certains à envisager la perspective d'une révolution démocratique au-delà du « socialisme réel ». Le but de notre thèse est de montrer que pour fonder une nouvelle société il faut une émancipation des travailleurs à travers la politique et à travers les débats des intellectuels... / The philosophy of Marxism had a very strong influence in the Post-war France. The discussions about Marxism are inseparable from the existence of USSR, the country that pretended to have realized the socialism in its social life. We mean by politics a collective action with the view of transformation of society by public discussions and by emancipation. In this sense, politics has never been developed both in so-called socialist countries and in capitalist countries. At the same time, we think that French philosophers of Left have considerably contributed to renew the socialist thought. Ones of them joined French communist party; others like Jean-Paul Sartre became Fellow Travelers. Some intellectuals like Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort wanted to create independent political groups. They criticized the politics of the Stalinist PCF and the Trotskyist PCI. The crisis of the « real socialism » and the anti-bureaucratic struggles in Eastern Europe and the discovery of the truth about Soviet labor camps resulted in exodus of French intellectuals from PCF. Some of them envisioned a perspective of democratic revolution against totalitarianism. The aim of our work is demonstrate that this revolution can be done only by emancipation of working people, especially through learning about the experience of discussions of the intellectuals...

Raymond Aron is widely recognised as France's greatest twentieth-century liberal, but the specifically liberal quality of his thought has not received the detailed historical analysis that it deserves. His work appears to fit so well within widely accepted understandings of post-war European liberalism, which has been defined primarily in terms of its anti-totalitarian, Cold War orientation, that its liberal status has been somewhat taken for granted. This has been exacerbated by an especially strong perception of a correlation between liberalism and anti-totalitarianism in France, whose late twentieth-century renaissance in liberal political thought is viewed as the product of an 'anti-totalitarian turn' in the late 1970s. While the moral authority accumulated through decades of opposition to National Socialism and Soviet communism made Aron into an anti-totalitarian icon, his early contribution to the rediscovery of France's liberal tradition established his reputation as a leader of the renaissance in the study of liberal political thought. Aron's prominence within this wider renaissance suggests that an historical treatment of his thought is overdue, but while the assumptions underpinning his reputation are not baseless, they do need to be critically scrutinised if such a treatment is to be credible. In pursuit of this end, two main arguments are developed in the present thesis. These are, first, that Aron's liberalism was more a product of the inter-war crisis of European liberalism than of the Cold War and, second, that his relationship with the French liberal tradition was primarily active and instrumental rather than passive and receptive. The first argument indicates that Aron's liberalism developed through a dialogue with and partial integration of important strands of anti-liberal crisis thought during these inter-war years; the second that earlier liberals with whose work he is frequently associated - notably Montesquieu and Tocqueville - had no substantial formative influence on his political thought. These contentions are interrelated in that Aron's post-war interpretation of his chosen liberal forebears was driven by a need to address specific problems arising from the liberal political epistemology that he formulated before the Second World War. It is by establishing in detail the link between Aron's reading of Montesquieu and Tocqueville and these earlier writings that the thesis makes its principal contribution to the existing literature on Aron, but several other original interpretations of his work are offered across its four thematic chapters on 'Political Epistemology', 'Anti-totalitarianism', 'The End of Ideology' and 'Instrumentalizing the French Liberal Tradition'. Regarding Aron's relationship with the wider late twentieth-century recovery of liberal political thought in France, it contends that the specific liberal renaissance to which he contributed most substantially emerged not as part of the anti-totalitarian turn, but in hostile reaction to the events of May 1968. This informs a broader argument that French liberal renaissance of these years was considerably more heterogeneous than is often assumed.