El rol de los intelectuales en la segunda posguerra, a través de las perspectivas de Raymond Aron, Jean-Paul Sartre y Herbert Marcuse

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the tensions concerning the role of the intellectuals, based on the works of Raymond Aron, Jean Paul Sartre and Herbert Marcuse, in the context of the "Cold War". Given the goal of this work, which is placed within the perspective of "intellectual history”, we have selected these authors by considering them to be relevant in the philosophical and political thought of this period, as well as also because their reflections express some of the critiques to the role played by the intellectual Europeans during the second postwar period (particularly in the French and German context). To this end, we have chosen the following works: The opium of the intellectuals (Aron, 1955), The End of Utopia (Marcuse, 1968) and Autour de 68, Situations VIII (Sartre, 1972), since we consider these works gather their reflections about their own actions about both intellectual and activist roles, conditioned by the experience of the Second World war. Summarizing our findings, we observe that, while R. Aron possesses a reformist perspective upon the society of postwar period, strongly marked by his own disenchantment towards the Soviet project, J. P. Sartre and H. Marcuse find in this juncture the historical opportunity to generate a structural transformation, in which the intellectuals would have a central participation in the awareness of the European proletariat.