Abstract
This article analyses the recurring topics in the epistemology of the leading 20th-century French sociologist and political theorist Raymond Aron, drawing on his doctoral dissertation Introduction to the Philosophy of History (1938) and on a range of works he published in his later years. The author first discusses six different reasons for Arons conspicuous absence from many contemporary handbooks on the social sciences: his deliberate avoidance of developing a system in his work, his disinclination towards abstract theoretising, his lack of interest in empirical research, and his refusal to specialise in one field, and also the changes that occurred in the social scientific context in which his work was received and changes in the surrounding political and social circumstances, most notably the collapse of the communist regimes.
The author notes that a major feature in Arons epistemological thought was his neo-Kantian awareness of the limits of strictly scientific knowledge, which he identified with