Class Struggle -- A New Interpretation of Industrial Society: A New Interpretation of Industrial Society

Author: Raymond Aron
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-06-01
Features: In 1962, when I published Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society, I wrote the following passage: "These lectures were actually given at the University of Paris between 1955 and 1956, and their content was mimeographed by the university's documentation center. To this day, I still refuse to present the manuscripts in their original form to a broader readership. I will immediately explain to the readers my reasons for this hesitation. These lectures offer a research opportunity and a learning tool for university students, inspiring a research methodology, outlining certain concepts, and providing some phenomena and insights. The lecture notes retain, and indeed cannot but retain, the traces of the lectures and impromptu remarks. The courses were not written in advance and were therefore oral in nature, inevitably flawed. Although revisions have been made since to reduce these shortcomings, they cannot be entirely eliminated." Eighteen Lectures was well-received by readers, and several foreign publishers expressed interest in translating and publishing it, which prompted me to decide to publish this second volume. However, I still wish to reiterate the caution I offered regarding the previous book. The nineteen lectures in this volume were given at the University of Paris between 1956 and 1957. This book is an important work by Raymond Aron. Based on the current state of industrial society, the author analyzes and studies the status of class and class struggle in industrial societies, including Western capitalist societies and Soviet-style societies. He points out that due to the process of industrialization, the development of productive forces, the overall improvement in people's living standards, the reduction of inequality, class mobility, and the increasingly blurred boundaries between social groups, there is difficulty in defining classes in industrial societies, as well as the growing ambiguity of the class nature of the state in modern nations. The struggles in industrial societies are primarily conflicts and contradictions between groups, rather than the life-or-death "class struggle."