Aron's sociology of industrial society is deeply embedded in the tradition of sociological thought starting in the nineteenth century. It is inspired by Saint Simon and Auguste Comte, who introduced the concept of industrial society as an element of their philosophy of history. Marx, too, had a philosophy of history and influenced Aron's sociology of industrial society in his emphasis on the economy and social classes as the starting point for the analysis of society and history. Finally, Tocqueville, Weber and Pareto are significant. In his comparative approach Aron has an elective affinity with Tocqueville and Weber, using the ideal type of “industrial society” to compare the societies of the twentieth century. Finally, Pareto taught Aron to pay attention to the role of the elites in the socialist revolutions of the twentieth century.

Aron was of the mind that, with the emergence of industrial society, humanity entered a new phase of its history, as its growth economy, based on rationality, innovation and increasing productivity, influenced the living conditions of all future societies across the globe: “By industrial society I mean neither an historically singular society nor a definite period of contemporary societies, but a social type that appears to open up a new era of the human adventure.”

Today's theory of economic progress “has become an integral part of the awareness men have of themselves and of their collective destiny” and

Industrial society contributes to the dialectics of universality, to “globalization” or “planetarization”; it makes war less likely because increasing productivity is less costly than wars of conquest, as in preindustrial times. But Aron was aware that technology is also perceived as a cause for unequal development and that an increasing number of states demand a sovereignty “which theoretically is defined by their right to choose between peace and war.