The Opium of the Intellectuals
by
Raymond Aron,
Howard Mansfield (Introduction),
Adina Dinițoiu (Goodreads Author) (trad.),
Robert McCutcheon (Foreword by)
3.98 · Rating details · 321 ratings · 30 reviews
Raymond Aron's 1955 masterpiece
The Opium of the Intellectuals, is one of the great works of twentieth- century political reflection. Aron shows how noble ideas can slide into the tyranny of "secular religion" and emphasizes how political thought has the profound responsibility of telling the truth about social and political reality-in all its mundane imperfections and tragic complexities.
Aron explodes the three "myths" of radical thought: the Left, the Revolution, and the Proletariat. Each of these ideas, Aron shows, are ideological, mystifying rather than illuminating. He also provides a fascinating sociology of intellectual life and a powerful critique of historical determinism in the classically restrained prose for which he is justly famous.
For this new edition, prepared by Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson as part of Transaction's ongoing "Aron Project," political scientist Harvey Mansfield provides a luminous introduction that underscores the permanent relevance of Aron's work. The new edition also includes as an appendix "Fanaticism, Prudence, and Faith," a remarkable essay that Aron wrote to defend Opium from its critics and to explain further his view of the proper role of political thinking. The book will be of interest to all students of political theory, history, and sociology. (less)
Paperback, 382 pages
Published January 31st 2001 by Routledge (first published 1955)
Write a review
Apr 26, 2011
Aron explodes the three "myths" of radical thought: the Left, the Revolution, and the Proletariat. Each of these ideas, Aron shows, are ideological, mystifying rather than illuminating. He also provides a fascinating sociology of intellectual life and a powerful critique of historical determinism in the classically restrained prose for which he is justly famous.
For this new edition, prepared by Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson as part of Transaction's ongoing "Aron Project," political scientist Harvey Mansfield provides a luminous introduction that underscores the permanent relevance of Aron's work. The new edition also includes as an appendix "Fanaticism, Prudence, and Faith," a remarkable essay that Aron wrote to defend Opium from its critics and to explain further his view of the proper role of political thinking. The book will be of interest to all students of political theory, history, and sociology. (less)
Paperback, 382 pages
Published January 31st 2001 by Routledge (first published 1955)
Write a review
Apr 26, 2011
Szplug rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Although his name has recurrently cropped-up in books I've read over the past several years—in particular those of the late Tony Judt—I had yet to partake of Raymond Aron straight from the source, though I've a handful of his work on the shelves. His mild and genial appearance on the back cover—lean frame, jug-handle ears, depleted combover, ovoid skull with soft hound dog eyes and a pleasant smile—somewhat disarm the reader heading into TOOTI; but make no mistake, this is a challenging read, written in a style commensurate with that of those intellectuals in the lineage of Marx, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger who dominated the postwar French Left and tirelessly attacked the Western democracies whilst carrying water for Stalinist Russia.
Aron, raising a voice of impartial reason to set against the ideological fanaticism he saw prevailing from these intellectuals of import, ponders within a central question: what is it about these Marxist disciples and their utopian ideology that stirs them—by all indications in good faith—to mercilessly condemn the liberal democratic culture they were born into—that of Western Europe and its trans-Atlantic offspring—refusing it any acknowledgement for its threaded efforts to address its undeniable flaws and failures, whilst simultaneously offering firm and unbending support for the Bolshevik strain of totalitarian communism, despite their understanding of the appalling toll in broken bodies and spirits, mass prisons and graves, that had been amassed in the latter's name during the long years of its iron despotism? Aron took their philosophical purview seriously and sought his answer within the structures of the hermeneutical language they used; and he organized his conclusions as a series of essays that explored what he had determined to be the mythologies of the Left, Revolution, and the Proletariat, all ordered within an idolatrous conception of History that served as a modern and pseudo-scientifically immanent changeling for God, its dogmatic End the secular sibling of theological salvation.
The opening section sees Aron unwinding the first trilogy of myths that he has discerned amongst his fellow Gallic thinkers, with a select eye for his contemporaries Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. It is a complicated and detailed explication, with much of relevance to that particular era in postwar French society, when he deemed a dangerous current of anti-Americanism swelling; but as an exegesis of Marxist thought, and what he held to be the erroneous ideas and metaphysics that served as the foundation of that ideology, it has an enduring value. Starting with the Left, Aron traces the development of the Left throughout modern history, with a focus upon the French flavors. He deemed the state of confusion and lack of coherent political objectives amongst the various parties a result of the ideological chaos stemming from the conflicting conceptions of the Right-Left antithesis; as against a belief in a single, unitary Left moving with purposeful History towards the Revolution of the Proletariat, the great eschatological watershed in Marxist philosophy, he posits a French Left that, by its association with the Stalinist regime—and thus with its crimes and perversions of the Leftist Ideal—along with its distaste for parliamentary reform and a growing dissociation between political and social values, had forsaken practical and real gains for the workers it claimed to represent in lieu of a drive for an impossible and unrealistic ideal. Indeed, this drive, and its adherence to the Bolshevist claim to Historical primacy, had channeled the Left into a position where, fervid for the liberty of African colonials but aloof from the same freedom for the East Germans or the Poles, pity was a one-way virtue, a truth the Aron held cancerous for the Left's soul.
He follows this with a deconstruction of the myth of Revolution—one with a particular and obvious connexion with the French—another of the Left's progressive memes, a continuous and evolving movement through time to that great and globally-liberating moment when the Proletariat, aware of itself and its historical destiny, arise in revolution against their capitalist oppressors and bring about the End of (Pre)History. From the opening lines Aron flatly states that the Left has always misunderstood this concept, stemming from an ideologically-tinged reworking of the past. Whereas he states that the minds that had provided much of the direction towards that seminal event of 1789 had quickly realized the appalling catastrophe that the French Revolution had wreaked upon the realm, the Left, in its eternally odd admixture of optimism and pessimism, had managed to forget the Terror, the destruction, the endemic warfare, all of which had lead to the despotism of Napoleon—even to the internecine quarreling that contributed in large part to the unstable nature of French politics in the nineteenth century. The Revolution became instead a symbolic fetish of a break with the past, the making of a new start for a world shrived of the sins of money and wage-labour. With the myth of Revolution and the following look at that of the Proletariat, Aron comes again and again to the question of why a reasonable person, still surrounded by the rubble of the Second World War, would place their belief in the conception that an economic class—a minority in the vast country where the first revolution took its (bloody) hold—would embody a Historically Necessary liberation for the wide and disparate populace of the globe. He compares the economic and political development and reforms of the Western Democracies as against Bolshevik Russia; the intricacies and complexities of a technologically-blossoming world, where productivity was increasing at a consistent rate, and held the latter—with the reforms achieved through governmental fiat and labour unions—had made more in the way of real gains for workers than could be reasonably expected from a Russian-bound Revolution that, thirty-five years after its initial uprising and mired in an economic system that replicated many of the capitalist contradictions, still operated through terror, murder, and relentless coercion on all fronts, and had made the Party supreme over the proletariat that allegedly held the key to mankind's freedom.
How explain such an ideology, espousing tenets so at odds with the observable facts? Aron sees the answer in the Idolatry of History, the cultish turn of a philosophy of history which—claiming a universal truth derived from its logical and irrefutable dogma centered upon a progressive and material historical dialectic—when exposed to the light of clarity stood revealed for what it was: a secular theology. This is a long and difficult section, in which Aron seeks to refute the principal arguments of Merleau-Ponty's Humanism and Terror whilst casting sidelong darts at the Existentialists like Sartre, whose philosophical output he read as buttressing the Left's support for the Stalinist regime's historical necessity. In a brilliant essay on Churchmen and the Faithful Aron digs inside of the Moscow show trials and their doctrinal justification, the infallibility of the Party, combining wit and logic in making Merleau-Ponty's defense out to be fuzzily abstract. At the most basic level, he points out that by assimilating any voice of opposition into that of a traitor, after enough time this state of affairs precludes any opposition—and the Party will rule with an infallibility that eludes refutation and is thus outside of truth. A better guidebook to tyranny could not be written. This is followed by a dense, slow-moving deconstruction of the Leftish conception of a philosophy of History, one that moves forward in a continual motion of progress, ensuring via the dialectic that the societal—that is, economic—structures necessary for the eventual triumph of the Proletariat come into existence at the appointed era. Aron tries this view on for size and declares that it just doesn't fit. Through a long chain of reasoning he endeavors to depict history as a construct of a plurality of values, that can be used through the rigors of understanding and reason to formulate theories of what happened, and these to create predictions about the future's potentiality; but any measure of certainty, or claims to a universal interpretation, tumble into the realm of metaphysics and cannot compete, as it may wish, with the rigor of the sciences.
This middle section on History is replete with the author's sallies into the fields of economics, philosophy, and sociology, comparing and contrasting the claims of Capitalism's inevitable collapse, its crippling contradictions, its being swept along in the powerful current of historical necessity, with the actuality of the Bolshevik achievement, the adaptability of Capitalism under a variety of differing Western democratic governments, and the impossibility of declaring any manner of victory, or assuredness to global dominance, for socialism. Throughout, Aron attempts to elucidate the reason why intellectuals are so attracted to the Revolution; he postulates that change and the unintelligible irritate them; the Communist interpretation never fails. He also returns several times to the peculiar admixture of optimism and pessimism that abound in the intellectuals: the first state is provided by the assuredness of a delivery from vulgar toil and the feudalism of money, of a logical endpoint in which peace will reign over a humanity fully aware of, and reconciled with, itself, laboring out of a willingness to contribute to a global society in which there exists no want or suffering; and then time passes and seemingly mocks their great doctrine; or, in the seizing of power, the mundane needs of everyday life continue to press their relentless claims—and, in lieu of a beautiful peace, a requirement for continual bloodshed and violence in order to compel the sullen collectivities to pursue the rational goal of History; and they become consumed by a pessimism, one that drives them, in an even more committed manner, towards an end that they no longer truly believe in and that seems to fade ever further from view with each day that passes.
Which leads us, then, directly into the third, and most fascinating, of the book's sections: Aron's minute examination, speculation, and rumination on the status of the members of the Intelligentsia—the Scribes, the Experts, and the Men of Letters, who in the twentieth century can be located within the ranks of the bureaucrats, the technicians and professionals, and the writers and artists respectively. This is a far-ranging effort, with a primacy for those thinkers of France, but with sidelong departures into the intellectual ranks of Great Britain, Germany, Japan, India, and, in the most relevant comparison, of the two global giants of allegedly diametrical opposition: the United States and the Soviet Union. This is an exceedingly variegated, rich and, at times, almost muddled intermingling of the themes from the preceding two parts, moving back and forth across time and ideology: the birth of the intellectual within the ranks of the Enlightenment; the budding and building sense of optimism that flourished as this elite class of thinkers—flush with the belief in reason and of man's ability to rationally understand the Nature that had previously always bewildered and terrified him—labored on behalf of liberty against the bonds of feudal state and hierarchical church; the introduction of pessimism into that regnant hope as bourgeoisie capitalism flourished and the miseries and inequalities of man were seen to not only remain, but to have become even more burdensome and vulgar; then despair, as the thinkers found themselves isolated from the levers of power, both in politics and in commerce, to the degree that, in accepting piece-work for money on which to survive, a sense of betrayal to an eternal truth and purpose sowed its bitter seed; and then the great construction of Marx, an economic system, written by a man who spent his life in libraries, disguised within a philosophy that masqueraded as a science, and which postulated a logical purpose and salvational End for all of the chaotic mayhem that had both passed and was occurring within a material world shorn of God.
With the great ruination of the First World War and the subsequent Revolution in Russia, it seemed the die was cast for the widespread acceptance of the Marxist theory, even though the manner in which the Russian revolution unfolded went against the Prophet's own thesis. Aron then takes this spooled thread and sets it to a loom, spinning out the sidelong rise of a nationalism amongst the European states, and at how the status of countries such as France—now fallen to a second rate power—develops a burning resentment for the United States, a neophyte power with a dominating military, political, even cultural presence over the Western European states, and, while admitting of the imperfections of the Communist Empire, takes both its distance and its universal aspect, one in which the intellectual has power, has influence, commands respect, as something that draws him closer; while the scribes and technicians, although forced to bow to the Party orthodoxy, can believe themselves part of a glorious and necessary historical purpose, working towards the promised emancipation of the human race. Little matter the reality that Soviet Russia, underneath its despotic rigidity and police-state coercion, is merely offering a different Economic system to compete with that of the Free Market; its soteriological revelation and universal, unbending dogma offers a true secular religion, an opiate against disorder and the unknown and the baffling happenstance of the natural world. For the intellectuals it eases national humiliations, it offers a hopeful deliverance, it provides an infallible truth for every query, and it puts the mind to the service of man, in lieu of money. That is enough, in the bloody mid-twentieth century, to command the allegiance of many.
This is a long, perhaps too long, review, and I haven't really done Aron justice for all that he has taken on; for although he originally crafted his first essay with the idea of determining the reason behind the curious bifurcation of the French intellectual's indignation and indulgence, by the third-section the work has taken on a broad-based examination of this trend and its permutations. Throughout it all Aron never assumes any supremacy or native superiority for the Western Capitalist-Democratic purview, and admits of both the appeal of the Left-Socialist means and the benefits they have brought to the injustices and harshness of the Market economy, all the while commiserating with the circumstances, the spiritual conflicts in which the modern thinker finds himself; but he rejects ideology, the hardening of a system of means into an orthodox dogma that serves an End which cares not the number of human bodies that litter the road that leads towards its realization. Aron's mind is sharp, his arguments mostly convincing—if a touch vague and tending to abstract generalization at various points throughout—and his wit is an especially enjoyable thing to behold, a razor blade cutting wicked smileys as he makes his survey of the intellectual's world and all of the absurdities that abound in such. Still, it doesn't make for light reading—I found this text to require a slow and methodical progression, and while Terence Kilmartin has delivered admirably in the translation department—some of Aron's phrasing is just sublime—the reader must take care not to stumble at the various bottlenecks where the prose becomes thick and formidable.
On a final note, the conclusion sees Aron speculating about the End of the Ideological Age, in which a United States—where the ideologies, united around the conforming pressure of the American Consensus argued about the means, not the ends, and several aspects of the Socialist doctrine had been implemented in American fashion—and a Soviet Union, hardening into a cocooned stagnation and having mostly abandoned its ideological goals for the pragmatism of day-to-day management, would allow a world in which skepticism reigned and fanatical beliefs slumbered in cooling coals. Several of Aron's prognostications were remarkably prescient, but in this, in a like manner with other critics like Daniel Bell, foresight failed him. The combination of economic misery in the late seventies, and the collapse of the Soviet Empire in the late eighties, reduced the Left to state of confusion and division, whilst there was a rightwards shift of the political centre—and from this awoke a triumphalist spirit in the Right that throughout the nineties and the early twenty-first century has been hardening into an ideological orthodoxy of its own. Whilst the remaining Left intellectuals ofttimes seem lost in how to challenge this through aught but mockery, the intellects of the infallible Market are crafting their own dogma: revisionist interpretations of history to fit the required truth; stoking the fires of perceived national humiliations; channeling the rivers of common resentment and fear; railing against a welfare state they deem enervating and oppressive; and marketing their own justifications for military intervention. Aron was unafraid to raise a challenge against the regnant intellectual memes of his own day—and in The Opium of the Intellectuals he presented a way of understanding the world of the Intelligentsia that, with a few adjustments, makes as much sense today. (less)
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AC A really knock-out review, Chris! Clive James has a nice appreciation of Aron and argues that, despite his critique, Aron always remained a man of the Left. Sounds about right. Good chance he will outlast Sartre... (less)
May 01, 2011 01:41PM · flag
Szplug Thanks, AC. I sort of had something else in mind when I started typing, and then the logorrheic flow began! :) It's a reflection of the vast amount of material that Aron covers in this excellent, eminently sensible book. Without a doubt a very smart and very witty guy. I'll be reading his two-part history of sociological thought shortly.
What James said agrees with the assessment of Tony Judt. In a review of The Dawn of Universal History, Daniel J. Mahoney labels Aron a conservative liberal because of the way he defended the liberal heritage as conservative as against the radicalism of the totalitarian states. Mahoney wrote a book, The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order , which further examines Aron within this context.
Interestingly enough, Aron and Sartre were exact contemporaries, went to school together, and apparently—notwithstanding some strained periods throughout—maintained a lifelong friendship. (less)
updated May 01, 2011 06:42PM · flag
Stephen Fantastic review, Chris.
May 02, 2011 11:51AM · flag
Szplug Thanks, Stephen.
May 02, 2011 12:15PM · flag
Conrad Yeah, really quite amazing.
May 02, 2011 12:24PM · flag
Szplug Thanks, Conrad.
May 03, 2011 11:38AM · flag
Ian "Marvin" Graye Chris, this period of political ideology and philosophy is something I have studied for 35 years, and your review is one of the most lucid and astute analyses and summaries of the issues I have read by anyone, including the participants. (less)
Nov 08, 2011 03:56PM · flag
Szplug First off, my apologies for a tardy acknowledgement—my comment notifications haven't worked properly on this site since they did the redesign several weeks back, and I only just saw this today.
Secondly, thanks very much. That's high praise, Ian, and I appreciate it. Fortunately I've had the benefit of reading the analyses of several brilliant authors in this area, all of whom have helped me immensely in trying to understand the issues involved. (less)
Nov 12, 2011 01:46PM · flag
Ian "Marvin" Graye Chris wrote: "Fortunately I've had the benefit of reading the analyses of several brilliant authors in this area, all of whom have helped me immensely in trying to understand the issues involved."
Any recommendations? (less)
Nov 12, 2011 04:40PM · flag
Szplug Definitely Milosz's The Captive Mind for a look at the self-justifications and entrapments prepared for the intellectual by the Leninist-Stalinist system.
It's a full-on beast of a book, but Leszek Kołakowski's Main Currents of Marxism cannot be bested as a source of Marxian and Leftist thought.
For a little homegrown promotion, the late Patricia Marchak of UBC penned The Integrated Circus back in 1991, and included a very persuasive and well-structured argument for the means and ends to be employed by the New Right against a Left bifurcated in a Econo-Soviet Old and Socio-Cultural New that abraded each other.
Michael Burleigh's Sacred Causes is tendentious, but still contains some very acute insights.
James Billington's Fire in the Mind's of Men is the book to read for the development of the revolutionary spirit from 1789 to 1920 from its origins as romantic rebellion and then its split into nationalist and internationalist branches.
For a view from the right, try Helmut Schoeck's curious little look at Envy . Very interesting, but its own argument can sometimes rebound against the author's intention.
That's all I've got right now off the top of my head—but don't leave out Solzhenitsyn, Koestler, Judt, Lasch, etc. (less)
updated Nov 14, 2011 03:43PM · flag
Ian "Marvin" Graye Thanks, Chris.
I've read Milosz, Kolakowski and the four in the last paragraph (apart from Judt).
I suppose my interest is in a new form of politics that recognised the inadequacies of Communism (including Euro-Communism, gee, it's a long time since I used that word), that was post-Old Left, post-Fellow Traveller, post-New Left, that embraced or did not embrace capitalism, but wasn't what I call single-issue politics (i.e., primarily concerned with a single issue like the environment), yet also wasn't what we have come to call Tony Blair's Third Way. Something a bit gutsier than small-L Liberal Social Democracy, perhaps a genuine partnership of capital and labour and sensitivity to environmental and social needs. It doesn't have to embrace or utilise rebellion or revolution as a means or a cause.
I mention this, because some of these ideas are bubbling away in Murakami's 1Q84, which is set in 1984, not just because of Orwell's book, but because of its proximity to student and social protests of the sixties and seventies. (less)
updated Nov 14, 2011 11:31AM · flag
Szplug That's something I'm interested in myself, Ian. I think rigid ideologies and non-compromising systems are less useful with each passing year. Our interrelatedness and interconnectedness has accelerated the change in our society and culture, and we need political systems and concomitant economies that can adapt to situations in flux while imparting some manner of long-range parameters for stabilizing the potentiality in dynamism for speed wobble—whether that stability is turned to the environment, financial markets, fuel sustainability, water and food ecosystems, etc.
Something along the lines of what you've mentioned above, perhaps incorporating the CLS point-of-view offered by Mr. Kołakowski. (less)
updated Nov 14, 2011 04:13PM · flag
Ian "Marvin" Graye There is a lot in the CLS concept that is worth thinking about.
I'm going to think about it!
It has some of the paradoxical appeal of Daniel Bell's self-definition:
"a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture."
in response of which I half-seriously wondered whether I could define myself as:
“a conservative in economics, a liberal in politics, and a radical in culture” (less)
Nov 14, 2011 04:13PM · flag
Jul 10, 2019Mahla rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
من از خوندنش لذت بردم.
نه بخاطر اینکه راستگرا هستم؛ بخاطر اینکه کمی ته دلم باور داشتم که اگر مارکسیسم راه نجات نیست، پس راه رهایی بشر چیه؟!
رمون آرون پرسش ها و تعارضات اساسی و مهمی بین آموزه های مارکسیسم و نظام شوروی مطرح کرد. کمک بزرگی کرد تا ایمانِ بیچون و چرا، به شکّی تبدیل بشه که قادر به سوزاندن ریشه تعصب باشه.
استدلالات منطقی و تامل برانگیزِ کتاب، اونهم از زبان کسی که در بطن جامعه روشنفکریِ کمونیسم زده فرانسه قرار داشته و سال های رو به افول شوروی و گرماگرمِ جنگ سرد رو به چشم دیده؛ بینهایت ...more
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Jul 10, 2019Mahla rated it it was amazing · review of another edition I enjoyed reading it. Not because I am honest; Because I believed in my heart that if Marxism is not the way to salvation, then what is the way to human liberation ?! Ramon Aron raised fundamental and important questions and conflicts between the teachings of Marxism and the Soviet system. It helped a great deal to turn unbelievable faith into doubt that could burn the roots of prejudice. The book's logical and thought-provoking arguments come from someone in the heart of French communist communist society who has witnessed the declining Soviet years and the heat of the Cold War; It was extremely attractive and instructive. What upset me a little was Aaron's over-praise of the United States, which to some extent plunged him into the abyss of bigotry. Any sentence dedicated to the humiliation and ridicule of the Soviet Union; It had the equivalent of being praised by the United States. With this book I took a fresh look at Marxism; I took a fresh look at my beliefs; I found a new idea of utopia and I was able to look back a little from inside the pit and have more space in front of my eyes. (less)
Jan 27, 2020César rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: ensayo, politica
4'5
La figura de Aron representa un liberalismo caracterizado por la tolerancia, el escepticismo y la búsqueda de la verdad y la justicia sin servidumbres ideológicas; es decir, un caballero al que no invitarías si lo que pretendes es elevar el share de La Sexta Noche.
Firme partidario de las reformas en contraposición a la fiebre revolucionara, Aron fue uno de los grandes críticos del conglomerado marxismo-comunismo-totalitarismo cuando en su país, Francia, ser marxista era parte casi indisoluble de la condición de intelectual. Eran los tiempos de Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty; de St. Germain des Prés, el existencialismo, la Francia traumatizada y el general de Gaulle. En ese hábitat, Aron representaba a una minoría de pensadores que marcaron explícita distancia con el coqueteo ideológico de moda, apostando por una filosofía política próxima al ideario de Tocqueville y con una concepción de la Historia abierta y multifacética, opuesta a la rígida y profética concepción del marxismo. Se muestra especialmente crítico con la figura del intelectual francés, caracterizado por su tendencia a enjuiciar, severo e inflexible, las negligencias de la democracia parlamentaria y, en cambio, pasar tibiamente por encima de los crímenes perpetrados en pos del advenimiento de la sociedad sin clases.
El libro desmonta una serie de mitos (el de la izquierda, el del proletariado, el de la Historia) y desvela las contradicciones y peligros del comunismo encarnado en el mundo soviético. Se ocupa también de los diferentes tipos de intelectuales y su estatus en función del país en el que operan: Francia, Gran Bretaña, Estados Unidos y la Unión Soviética.
Aunque es un ensayo escrito en plena Guerra Fría (1955), con dos bloques mundiales claramente diferenciados y una atmósfera distinta a la actual, sus reflexiones de fondo y su mensaje continúan teniendo vigencia, sobre todo para aquellos que contemplan la actualidad política con un deje de moderación y duda frente al clima agitador de inquebrantables adhesiones próximas al fanatismo. (less)
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The figure of Aron represents a liberalism characterized by tolerance, skepticism and the search for truth and justice without ideological servitude; that is to say, a gentleman whom you would not invite if what you want is to increase the share of La Sexta Noche. A firm supporter of the reforms as opposed to the revolutionary fever, Aron was one of the great critics of the Marxism-communism-totalitarianism conglomerate when in his country, France, being a Marxist was an almost indissoluble part of the condition of intellectual. Those were the times of Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty; de St. Germain des Prés, existentialism, traumatized France and General de Gaulle. In that habitat, Aron represented a minority of thinkers who marked an explicit distance with the ideological flirtation in fashion, betting on a political philosophy close to the ideology of Tocqueville and with an open and multifaceted conception of History, opposed to the rigid and prophetic conception of Marxism. He is especially critical of the figure of the French intellectual, characterized by his tendency to judge, severe and inflexible, the negligence of parliamentary democracy and, instead, lukewarmly pass over the crimes perpetrated in pursuit of the advent of a classless society . The book dismantles a series of myths (that of the left, that of the proletariat, that of History) and reveals the contradictions and dangers of communism embodied in the Soviet world. He also deals with the different types of intellectuals and their status depending on the country in which they operate: France, Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. Although it is an essay written in the middle of the Cold War (1955), with two clearly differentiated world blocs and an atmosphere different from the current one, its background reflections and its message continue to be valid, especially for those who contemplate political news with a hint of moderation and doubt in the face of the agitating climate of unwavering adherence close to fanaticism.
Jun 15, 2013Alex rated it it was amazing
A clear eyed attack on the moral shortcomings of French Marxist intellectuals in the 40s and early 50s. While this topic may seem exoteric, the book is an extremely important work of political philosophy about the contortions people will often go through in order to make a particular belief system fit with facts that do not support said belief. While this is an attack on Frenchman by a Frenchman, there are numerous cases where similar abuses were committed elsewhere, for example George Bernard Shah's shameful endorsement of Soviet Agricultural Collectivism even after seeing the full affects of the terror famine first hand, etc. Ideology can be overwhelmingly blinding and Aron would not let his peers forget this. (less)
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Feb 19, 2014Philippe Malzieu rated it it was amazing
France gave to liberalism some of these larger theorists (Bastiat in economy…) but liberalism is ever imposed in France. Worse,after second world war, the vast majority of the French intellectuals was Marxists.
There had only one person, a hero, a watchtower to fight against totalitarianism and blindness, it was Raymond Aron. Face to Sartre'delire, his school-fellow at Normal-Sup, it is the alone French intellectual to only keep the cool head.
The title is a paraphrase of Marx. Aron takes a malicious pleasure to dismount the modes theses and to highlight the risk of tyranny. History will agree to him. (less)
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Dec 29, 2019Serhiy added it · review of another edition
Shelves: marxism, sociology, non-fiction, france
Вимушений капітулювати перед українським перекладом, таке зі мною вперше, але читати боляче, припускаю, Григорій Філіпчук не встиг завершити його перед смертю і це якась чернетка, якої якщо і торкалась якась частина тіла редактора, то точно не рука
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Feb 12, 2018The Laughing Man rated it liked it · review of another edition
4 highlights
Quite A Critique
The writer slammed the Western intellectuals for their hypocrisy towards communism. An essential read for those who want to dissect the religion called commnuism.
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Feb 25, 2019Moomen Sallam rated it really liked it · review of another edition
يقدم الكتاب نقد قوي للشعارات والمفاهيم الأساسية للفكر الشيوعي وعلى راسها مصطلحات اليسار والثورة والبلوريتاريا وطبقة المثقفين
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Mar 06, 2019Leonardo marked it as to-keep-reference
Poco había en Les Maîtres penseurs (Los maestros pensadores) de Glucksmann, publicado con un unánime éxito de crítica en marzo de 1977, que Raymond Aron no hubiera dicho mejor en su Opium des intellectuels (El opio de los intelectuales) veintidós años antes.
Postguerra Pág.727 (less)
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Oct 09, 2017Ned rated it it was ok · review of another edition
3 notes & 106 highlights
I'm glad that's over.
A ponderous, pedantic, verbose book that I found unenjoyable and dated. Some books are timeless, this one is time bound. I really had to slog through it and I'm glad to be done. My time would have been better spent on something else. The book is not without merit but it is not worth the effort of separating the wheat from the chaff. (less)
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Feb 06, 2020John rated it really liked it
Basically a rant on how Marxism/Communism is the religion for intellectuals, which I kind of believe. Even if I think some of the tenets are admirable.
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Jan 01, 2013Victor added it
One of the best, one of the most important book in the 20th Century.
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Nov 28, 2020Alexandre rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Below, five remarkable passages from “The Opium of the Intellectuals” (1955), by the philosopher Raymond Aron (1905-1983).
On what leads revolutionary or crypto-revolutionary parties to degenerate into personality cults:
A party which is always right must constantly define the correct line between sectarianism and opportunism. Where is this line situated? At an equal distance between the twin pitfalls of opportunism and sectarianism. But these pitfalls were themselves originally placed in relation to the correct line. The only way out of the vicious circle is a decree by the central authority which defines truth and error alike. And this decree is inevitably arbitrary, since it is made by a man who decides autocratically between individuals and groups; the disparity between the world as it would be if the original doctrine were true, and the world as it is, subordinates the truth to the equivocal and inscrutable decisions of an interpreter whose only qualification is his power.
On the prospects of the socialist economies, in a remarkable foresight, in the mid-1950s, of their structural shortcomings:
The so-called socialist societies rediscover, under modified forms, the necessities inherent in any modern economic system. There, just as under capitalism, the ‘boss class’ lays down the law. (...) Up to now the planners, by reason of penury and of the decision to develop economic power as rapidly as possible, have not concerned themselves either with the productivity of the various investments or with the consumers’ preferences. It will not be long before they experience the perils of slump and deflation and the exigencies of economic arithmetic.
On how revolutionaries define justice:
Constitutional government, the balance of power, legal guarantees, the whole edifice of political civilisation slowly built up over the course of the ages and always incomplete, is calmly pushed aside. They accept an absolute State, allegedly in the service of the Revolution; they are not interested in the plurality of parties and the autonomy of working-class organisations. They do not protest against lawyers bullying their clients and accused persons confessing to imaginary crimes. After all, is not revolutionary justice directed towards the ‘radical solution of the problem of coexistence’, whilst ‘liberal justice’ applies unjust laws?
On the idolatry of history:
The massacres which accompany the struggle of States and of classes will not have been in vain if they clear the way to the classless society. The idolatry of history is born of this unavowed nostalgia for a future which would justify the unjustifiable. (...)
..................................................................
(...) The idolatry of history (...), convinced that it acts with a view to achieving the only future which is worthwhile, sees, and wants to see, the other merely as an enemy to be eliminated, and a contemptible enemy at that since he is incapable of wanting the good or of recognising it.
On the cynicism of the revolutionaries:
Profoundly moralistic in regard to the present, the revolutionary is cynical in action. He protests against police brutality, the inhuman rhythm of industrial production, the severity of bourgeois courts, the execution of prisoners whose guilt has not been proved beyond doubt. Nothing, short of a total ‘humanisation’, can appease his hunger for justice. But as soon as he decides to give his allegiance to a party which is as implacably hostile as he is himself to the established disorder, we find him forgiving, in the name of the Revolution, everything he has hitherto relentlessly denounced. The revolutionary myth bridges the gap between moral intransigence and terrorism.(less)
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Nov 14, 2019Paul Gosselin rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: history, political-science
Ce livre d'Aron, publié en 1955 rapproche le marxisme et le communisme à une religion. Même le titre est une boutade, une référence pas très voilée à l’expression bien connue de Karl Marx “La religion est l’opium du peuple”... D'abord en douceur Raymond fait le lien communisme=religion en larguant, ici et là, l'expression "hommes d'Église et hommes de foi". Mais dans le contexte, on tire immanquablement la conclusion que les "hommes de foi" dont il est question ce sont les communistes... Ouais, pendant un moment, il y a quelques longueurs tandisqu’Aron discute de situations politiques des années 50, mais même au 21e siècle ça vaut le coût de lire…
Il faut dire qu'à l'époque (guerre froide) c'était TRES audacieux de la part d'un intellectuel français d'exprimer à haute voix une telle chose. Staline était mort que depuis 2 ans et le marxisme avait encore beaucoup de prestige en Occident (des profs ouvertement marxistes étaient chose courante même lorsque j'ai commencé mes études universitaires dans les années 70). La publication d'un tel livre en France a dû faire assez scandale merci... Il semble qu'Aron a perdu plusieurs amis...
Mais bon, vers la fin de son livre Aron mets les points sur les is et explique en quoi le communisme peut être une religion. Par exemple, Aron observe au sujet des procès spectacles du régime soviétique (1955/2010: 132) «Les grands procès sont comparables à ceux de l’Inquisition : ils relèvent de l’orthodoxie en mettant en lumière les hérésies. Les procureurs n’ont-ils pas le sentiment d’imposer la confession de la vérité, même s’ils emploient la violence ?»
Mais l'argument d'Aron est surtout allusif et il ne se posant jamais trop la question : Qu’est-ce au juste que la religion ? Si on suppose que la religion est avant tout un système de croyances servant à donner sens au monde, alors le fait qu'un système de croyances fait appel au surnaturel est moins pertinent. On peut donc être confronté à une religion dotée d'une cosmologie matérialiste... C'est une question que j’aborde de manière détaillée dans mon livre Fuite de l’Absolu, volume 1. (less)
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May 26, 2021João Ritto rated it really liked it
The title of this book immediately catches the eye, at least for me it did. The Opium of the Intellectuals is a provocative title that intends to catch the irony that while Marx claimed that "Religion is the opium of the people", during a large part of the 20th century, and particularly in France, Marxism was the opium of the intellectuals. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, all were for a long time apologists for the Stalinist regime and even when forced to finally admit the horrors it produced, they were happy to go along with Mao's attempt in China. Why was that?
I had expected the book to have a clear thesis for this. Often non-fiction books try to explain complex phenomena with a single mechanism, and produce a lot of evidence of how that particular mechanism is (they believe) the most relevant one. The disadvantages of this, in an extremely complex world, where any one factor is unlikely to have the ability to explain singlehandedly a phenomenon are obvious. But this also has advantages - it will make the point of the book very clear, and its idea will stuck with the reader. The variety of explanations can then be perceived by the reader by just approaching different books with competing explanations. It turns out, this book by Raymond Aron takes a very different approach.
Instead of having a very clear thesis, Aron truly goes through a lot of issues: the idolatry of history, the secularization of the west and how marxism appears as a secular religion, the appeal of being critical of one's own society... He discusses the development of these ideas and how they evolved in different countries such as France vs USA, depending on the intellectual culture. In the end, though, a bit of the reading feels dated and the lack of a clear thesis means that a lot of it reads as if you are listening to a knowledgeable smart guy talking about what he feels like talking about, without a clear direction. (less)
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Apr 27, 2020Alberony Martínez rated it liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: 2020, historia, ensayo
Una de las obras icongnitas que muchos siempre han tenido, es de que cómo es posible, que un movimiento como este haya reclutado a tantas personas con un perfil intelectual tan encumbrado. El escritor Stanley Pierson en su libro Los intelectuales marxistas y la mentalidad de la clase obrera en Alemania, 1887-1912 exploro el funcionamiento de los intelectuales alemanes dentro del movimiento, explorando a figuras prominentes como Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburgo y Eduar Bernastein. Muchos de los jóvenes escritores, oradores y políticos se propusieron suplantar las viejas forma de pensar con una compresión marxista de la historia y la sociedad.
Esta obra de Raymond Aron del filosofo, sociólogo y politologo francés, publicada en 1955 El opio de los intelectuales haciendo referencia a la iconica frases de Karl Marx “la religión es el opio del pueblo” donde la religión es usada por las clases dominantes como instrumento para controlar el pueblo, aliviando y dándole sentido a sus padecimiento mediante la idea de un mundo de dicha ilusoria y promesa de una vida eterna. Es un muestra de cómo las ideas mas nobles pueden escurrirse subrepticiamente en la tiranía de la religión secular y acentuar de cómo el pensamiento político tiene la profunda responsabilidad de decir la verdad sobre la realidad social y política, en todos sus imperfecciones mundanas y complejidades trágicas.
Es una obra donde acenta una critica al socialismo y a las técnicas que este movimiento utilizaba para llegar al poder. Cabe destacar, que asi como critica al socialismo, tambien critia la satanizacion la derecha politica.
“Ni el orden público, ni la fuerza del Estado constituyen el objetivo único de la política. El hombre es también un ser moral y la colectividad sólo es humana a condición de ofrecer una partición a todos.” (less)
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The opening section sees Aron unwinding the first trilogy of myths that he has discerned amongst his fellow Gallic thinkers, with a select eye for his contemporaries Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. It is a complicated and detailed explication, with much of relevance to that particular era in postwar French society, when he deemed a dangerous current of anti-Americanism swelling; but as an exegesis of Marxist thought, and what he held to be the erroneous ideas and metaphysics that served as the foundation of that ideology, it has an enduring value. Starting with the Left, Aron traces the development of the Left throughout modern history, with a focus upon the French flavors. He deemed the state of confusion and lack of coherent political objectives amongst the various parties a result of the ideological chaos stemming from the conflicting conceptions of the Right-Left antithesis; as against a belief in a single, unitary Left moving with purposeful History towards the Revolution of the Proletariat, the great eschatological watershed in Marxist philosophy, he posits a French Left that, by its association with the Stalinist regime—and thus with its crimes and perversions of the Leftist Ideal—along with its distaste for parliamentary reform and a growing dissociation between political and social values, had forsaken practical and real gains for the workers it claimed to represent in lieu of a drive for an impossible and unrealistic ideal. Indeed, this drive, and its adherence to the Bolshevist claim to Historical primacy, had channeled the Left into a position where, fervid for the liberty of African colonials but aloof from the same freedom for the East Germans or the Poles, pity was a one-way virtue, a truth the Aron held cancerous for the Left's soul.
He follows this with a deconstruction of the myth of Revolution—one with a particular and obvious connexion with the French—another of the Left's progressive memes, a continuous and evolving movement through time to that great and globally-liberating moment when the Proletariat, aware of itself and its historical destiny, arise in revolution against their capitalist oppressors and bring about the End of (Pre)History. From the opening lines Aron flatly states that the Left has always misunderstood this concept, stemming from an ideologically-tinged reworking of the past. Whereas he states that the minds that had provided much of the direction towards that seminal event of 1789 had quickly realized the appalling catastrophe that the French Revolution had wreaked upon the realm, the Left, in its eternally odd admixture of optimism and pessimism, had managed to forget the Terror, the destruction, the endemic warfare, all of which had lead to the despotism of Napoleon—even to the internecine quarreling that contributed in large part to the unstable nature of French politics in the nineteenth century. The Revolution became instead a symbolic fetish of a break with the past, the making of a new start for a world shrived of the sins of money and wage-labour. With the myth of Revolution and the following look at that of the Proletariat, Aron comes again and again to the question of why a reasonable person, still surrounded by the rubble of the Second World War, would place their belief in the conception that an economic class—a minority in the vast country where the first revolution took its (bloody) hold—would embody a Historically Necessary liberation for the wide and disparate populace of the globe. He compares the economic and political development and reforms of the Western Democracies as against Bolshevik Russia; the intricacies and complexities of a technologically-blossoming world, where productivity was increasing at a consistent rate, and held the latter—with the reforms achieved through governmental fiat and labour unions—had made more in the way of real gains for workers than could be reasonably expected from a Russian-bound Revolution that, thirty-five years after its initial uprising and mired in an economic system that replicated many of the capitalist contradictions, still operated through terror, murder, and relentless coercion on all fronts, and had made the Party supreme over the proletariat that allegedly held the key to mankind's freedom.
How explain such an ideology, espousing tenets so at odds with the observable facts? Aron sees the answer in the Idolatry of History, the cultish turn of a philosophy of history which—claiming a universal truth derived from its logical and irrefutable dogma centered upon a progressive and material historical dialectic—when exposed to the light of clarity stood revealed for what it was: a secular theology. This is a long and difficult section, in which Aron seeks to refute the principal arguments of Merleau-Ponty's Humanism and Terror whilst casting sidelong darts at the Existentialists like Sartre, whose philosophical output he read as buttressing the Left's support for the Stalinist regime's historical necessity. In a brilliant essay on Churchmen and the Faithful Aron digs inside of the Moscow show trials and their doctrinal justification, the infallibility of the Party, combining wit and logic in making Merleau-Ponty's defense out to be fuzzily abstract. At the most basic level, he points out that by assimilating any voice of opposition into that of a traitor, after enough time this state of affairs precludes any opposition—and the Party will rule with an infallibility that eludes refutation and is thus outside of truth. A better guidebook to tyranny could not be written. This is followed by a dense, slow-moving deconstruction of the Leftish conception of a philosophy of History, one that moves forward in a continual motion of progress, ensuring via the dialectic that the societal—that is, economic—structures necessary for the eventual triumph of the Proletariat come into existence at the appointed era. Aron tries this view on for size and declares that it just doesn't fit. Through a long chain of reasoning he endeavors to depict history as a construct of a plurality of values, that can be used through the rigors of understanding and reason to formulate theories of what happened, and these to create predictions about the future's potentiality; but any measure of certainty, or claims to a universal interpretation, tumble into the realm of metaphysics and cannot compete, as it may wish, with the rigor of the sciences.
This middle section on History is replete with the author's sallies into the fields of economics, philosophy, and sociology, comparing and contrasting the claims of Capitalism's inevitable collapse, its crippling contradictions, its being swept along in the powerful current of historical necessity, with the actuality of the Bolshevik achievement, the adaptability of Capitalism under a variety of differing Western democratic governments, and the impossibility of declaring any manner of victory, or assuredness to global dominance, for socialism. Throughout, Aron attempts to elucidate the reason why intellectuals are so attracted to the Revolution; he postulates that change and the unintelligible irritate them; the Communist interpretation never fails. He also returns several times to the peculiar admixture of optimism and pessimism that abound in the intellectuals: the first state is provided by the assuredness of a delivery from vulgar toil and the feudalism of money, of a logical endpoint in which peace will reign over a humanity fully aware of, and reconciled with, itself, laboring out of a willingness to contribute to a global society in which there exists no want or suffering; and then time passes and seemingly mocks their great doctrine; or, in the seizing of power, the mundane needs of everyday life continue to press their relentless claims—and, in lieu of a beautiful peace, a requirement for continual bloodshed and violence in order to compel the sullen collectivities to pursue the rational goal of History; and they become consumed by a pessimism, one that drives them, in an even more committed manner, towards an end that they no longer truly believe in and that seems to fade ever further from view with each day that passes.
Which leads us, then, directly into the third, and most fascinating, of the book's sections: Aron's minute examination, speculation, and rumination on the status of the members of the Intelligentsia—the Scribes, the Experts, and the Men of Letters, who in the twentieth century can be located within the ranks of the bureaucrats, the technicians and professionals, and the writers and artists respectively. This is a far-ranging effort, with a primacy for those thinkers of France, but with sidelong departures into the intellectual ranks of Great Britain, Germany, Japan, India, and, in the most relevant comparison, of the two global giants of allegedly diametrical opposition: the United States and the Soviet Union. This is an exceedingly variegated, rich and, at times, almost muddled intermingling of the themes from the preceding two parts, moving back and forth across time and ideology: the birth of the intellectual within the ranks of the Enlightenment; the budding and building sense of optimism that flourished as this elite class of thinkers—flush with the belief in reason and of man's ability to rationally understand the Nature that had previously always bewildered and terrified him—labored on behalf of liberty against the bonds of feudal state and hierarchical church; the introduction of pessimism into that regnant hope as bourgeoisie capitalism flourished and the miseries and inequalities of man were seen to not only remain, but to have become even more burdensome and vulgar; then despair, as the thinkers found themselves isolated from the levers of power, both in politics and in commerce, to the degree that, in accepting piece-work for money on which to survive, a sense of betrayal to an eternal truth and purpose sowed its bitter seed; and then the great construction of Marx, an economic system, written by a man who spent his life in libraries, disguised within a philosophy that masqueraded as a science, and which postulated a logical purpose and salvational End for all of the chaotic mayhem that had both passed and was occurring within a material world shorn of God.
With the great ruination of the First World War and the subsequent Revolution in Russia, it seemed the die was cast for the widespread acceptance of the Marxist theory, even though the manner in which the Russian revolution unfolded went against the Prophet's own thesis. Aron then takes this spooled thread and sets it to a loom, spinning out the sidelong rise of a nationalism amongst the European states, and at how the status of countries such as France—now fallen to a second rate power—develops a burning resentment for the United States, a neophyte power with a dominating military, political, even cultural presence over the Western European states, and, while admitting of the imperfections of the Communist Empire, takes both its distance and its universal aspect, one in which the intellectual has power, has influence, commands respect, as something that draws him closer; while the scribes and technicians, although forced to bow to the Party orthodoxy, can believe themselves part of a glorious and necessary historical purpose, working towards the promised emancipation of the human race. Little matter the reality that Soviet Russia, underneath its despotic rigidity and police-state coercion, is merely offering a different Economic system to compete with that of the Free Market; its soteriological revelation and universal, unbending dogma offers a true secular religion, an opiate against disorder and the unknown and the baffling happenstance of the natural world. For the intellectuals it eases national humiliations, it offers a hopeful deliverance, it provides an infallible truth for every query, and it puts the mind to the service of man, in lieu of money. That is enough, in the bloody mid-twentieth century, to command the allegiance of many.
This is a long, perhaps too long, review, and I haven't really done Aron justice for all that he has taken on; for although he originally crafted his first essay with the idea of determining the reason behind the curious bifurcation of the French intellectual's indignation and indulgence, by the third-section the work has taken on a broad-based examination of this trend and its permutations. Throughout it all Aron never assumes any supremacy or native superiority for the Western Capitalist-Democratic purview, and admits of both the appeal of the Left-Socialist means and the benefits they have brought to the injustices and harshness of the Market economy, all the while commiserating with the circumstances, the spiritual conflicts in which the modern thinker finds himself; but he rejects ideology, the hardening of a system of means into an orthodox dogma that serves an End which cares not the number of human bodies that litter the road that leads towards its realization. Aron's mind is sharp, his arguments mostly convincing—if a touch vague and tending to abstract generalization at various points throughout—and his wit is an especially enjoyable thing to behold, a razor blade cutting wicked smileys as he makes his survey of the intellectual's world and all of the absurdities that abound in such. Still, it doesn't make for light reading—I found this text to require a slow and methodical progression, and while Terence Kilmartin has delivered admirably in the translation department—some of Aron's phrasing is just sublime—the reader must take care not to stumble at the various bottlenecks where the prose becomes thick and formidable.
On a final note, the conclusion sees Aron speculating about the End of the Ideological Age, in which a United States—where the ideologies, united around the conforming pressure of the American Consensus argued about the means, not the ends, and several aspects of the Socialist doctrine had been implemented in American fashion—and a Soviet Union, hardening into a cocooned stagnation and having mostly abandoned its ideological goals for the pragmatism of day-to-day management, would allow a world in which skepticism reigned and fanatical beliefs slumbered in cooling coals. Several of Aron's prognostications were remarkably prescient, but in this, in a like manner with other critics like Daniel Bell, foresight failed him. The combination of economic misery in the late seventies, and the collapse of the Soviet Empire in the late eighties, reduced the Left to state of confusion and division, whilst there was a rightwards shift of the political centre—and from this awoke a triumphalist spirit in the Right that throughout the nineties and the early twenty-first century has been hardening into an ideological orthodoxy of its own. Whilst the remaining Left intellectuals ofttimes seem lost in how to challenge this through aught but mockery, the intellects of the infallible Market are crafting their own dogma: revisionist interpretations of history to fit the required truth; stoking the fires of perceived national humiliations; channeling the rivers of common resentment and fear; railing against a welfare state they deem enervating and oppressive; and marketing their own justifications for military intervention. Aron was unafraid to raise a challenge against the regnant intellectual memes of his own day—and in The Opium of the Intellectuals he presented a way of understanding the world of the Intelligentsia that, with a few adjustments, makes as much sense today. (less)
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AC A really knock-out review, Chris! Clive James has a nice appreciation of Aron and argues that, despite his critique, Aron always remained a man of the Left. Sounds about right. Good chance he will outlast Sartre... (less)
May 01, 2011 01:41PM · flag
Szplug Thanks, AC. I sort of had something else in mind when I started typing, and then the logorrheic flow began! :) It's a reflection of the vast amount of material that Aron covers in this excellent, eminently sensible book. Without a doubt a very smart and very witty guy. I'll be reading his two-part history of sociological thought shortly.
What James said agrees with the assessment of Tony Judt. In a review of The Dawn of Universal History, Daniel J. Mahoney labels Aron a conservative liberal because of the way he defended the liberal heritage as conservative as against the radicalism of the totalitarian states. Mahoney wrote a book, The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order , which further examines Aron within this context.
Interestingly enough, Aron and Sartre were exact contemporaries, went to school together, and apparently—notwithstanding some strained periods throughout—maintained a lifelong friendship. (less)
updated May 01, 2011 06:42PM · flag
Stephen Fantastic review, Chris.
May 02, 2011 11:51AM · flag
Szplug Thanks, Stephen.
May 02, 2011 12:15PM · flag
Conrad Yeah, really quite amazing.
May 02, 2011 12:24PM · flag
Szplug Thanks, Conrad.
May 03, 2011 11:38AM · flag
Ian "Marvin" Graye Chris, this period of political ideology and philosophy is something I have studied for 35 years, and your review is one of the most lucid and astute analyses and summaries of the issues I have read by anyone, including the participants. (less)
Nov 08, 2011 03:56PM · flag
Szplug First off, my apologies for a tardy acknowledgement—my comment notifications haven't worked properly on this site since they did the redesign several weeks back, and I only just saw this today.
Secondly, thanks very much. That's high praise, Ian, and I appreciate it. Fortunately I've had the benefit of reading the analyses of several brilliant authors in this area, all of whom have helped me immensely in trying to understand the issues involved. (less)
Nov 12, 2011 01:46PM · flag
Ian "Marvin" Graye Chris wrote: "Fortunately I've had the benefit of reading the analyses of several brilliant authors in this area, all of whom have helped me immensely in trying to understand the issues involved."
Any recommendations? (less)
Nov 12, 2011 04:40PM · flag
Szplug Definitely Milosz's The Captive Mind for a look at the self-justifications and entrapments prepared for the intellectual by the Leninist-Stalinist system.
It's a full-on beast of a book, but Leszek Kołakowski's Main Currents of Marxism cannot be bested as a source of Marxian and Leftist thought.
For a little homegrown promotion, the late Patricia Marchak of UBC penned The Integrated Circus back in 1991, and included a very persuasive and well-structured argument for the means and ends to be employed by the New Right against a Left bifurcated in a Econo-Soviet Old and Socio-Cultural New that abraded each other.
Michael Burleigh's Sacred Causes is tendentious, but still contains some very acute insights.
James Billington's Fire in the Mind's of Men is the book to read for the development of the revolutionary spirit from 1789 to 1920 from its origins as romantic rebellion and then its split into nationalist and internationalist branches.
For a view from the right, try Helmut Schoeck's curious little look at Envy . Very interesting, but its own argument can sometimes rebound against the author's intention.
That's all I've got right now off the top of my head—but don't leave out Solzhenitsyn, Koestler, Judt, Lasch, etc. (less)
updated Nov 14, 2011 03:43PM · flag
Ian "Marvin" Graye Thanks, Chris.
I've read Milosz, Kolakowski and the four in the last paragraph (apart from Judt).
I suppose my interest is in a new form of politics that recognised the inadequacies of Communism (including Euro-Communism, gee, it's a long time since I used that word), that was post-Old Left, post-Fellow Traveller, post-New Left, that embraced or did not embrace capitalism, but wasn't what I call single-issue politics (i.e., primarily concerned with a single issue like the environment), yet also wasn't what we have come to call Tony Blair's Third Way. Something a bit gutsier than small-L Liberal Social Democracy, perhaps a genuine partnership of capital and labour and sensitivity to environmental and social needs. It doesn't have to embrace or utilise rebellion or revolution as a means or a cause.
I mention this, because some of these ideas are bubbling away in Murakami's 1Q84, which is set in 1984, not just because of Orwell's book, but because of its proximity to student and social protests of the sixties and seventies. (less)
updated Nov 14, 2011 11:31AM · flag
Szplug That's something I'm interested in myself, Ian. I think rigid ideologies and non-compromising systems are less useful with each passing year. Our interrelatedness and interconnectedness has accelerated the change in our society and culture, and we need political systems and concomitant economies that can adapt to situations in flux while imparting some manner of long-range parameters for stabilizing the potentiality in dynamism for speed wobble—whether that stability is turned to the environment, financial markets, fuel sustainability, water and food ecosystems, etc.
Something along the lines of what you've mentioned above, perhaps incorporating the CLS point-of-view offered by Mr. Kołakowski. (less)
updated Nov 14, 2011 04:13PM · flag
Ian "Marvin" Graye There is a lot in the CLS concept that is worth thinking about.
I'm going to think about it!
It has some of the paradoxical appeal of Daniel Bell's self-definition:
"a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture."
in response of which I half-seriously wondered whether I could define myself as:
“a conservative in economics, a liberal in politics, and a radical in culture” (less)
Nov 14, 2011 04:13PM · flag
Jul 10, 2019Mahla rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
من از خوندنش لذت بردم.
نه بخاطر اینکه راستگرا هستم؛ بخاطر اینکه کمی ته دلم باور داشتم که اگر مارکسیسم راه نجات نیست، پس راه رهایی بشر چیه؟!
رمون آرون پرسش ها و تعارضات اساسی و مهمی بین آموزه های مارکسیسم و نظام شوروی مطرح کرد. کمک بزرگی کرد تا ایمانِ بیچون و چرا، به شکّی تبدیل بشه که قادر به سوزاندن ریشه تعصب باشه.
استدلالات منطقی و تامل برانگیزِ کتاب، اونهم از زبان کسی که در بطن جامعه روشنفکریِ کمونیسم زده فرانسه قرار داشته و سال های رو به افول شوروی و گرماگرمِ جنگ سرد رو به چشم دیده؛ بینهایت ...more
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Jul 10, 2019Mahla rated it it was amazing · review of another edition I enjoyed reading it. Not because I am honest; Because I believed in my heart that if Marxism is not the way to salvation, then what is the way to human liberation ?! Ramon Aron raised fundamental and important questions and conflicts between the teachings of Marxism and the Soviet system. It helped a great deal to turn unbelievable faith into doubt that could burn the roots of prejudice. The book's logical and thought-provoking arguments come from someone in the heart of French communist communist society who has witnessed the declining Soviet years and the heat of the Cold War; It was extremely attractive and instructive. What upset me a little was Aaron's over-praise of the United States, which to some extent plunged him into the abyss of bigotry. Any sentence dedicated to the humiliation and ridicule of the Soviet Union; It had the equivalent of being praised by the United States. With this book I took a fresh look at Marxism; I took a fresh look at my beliefs; I found a new idea of utopia and I was able to look back a little from inside the pit and have more space in front of my eyes. (less)
Jan 27, 2020César rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: ensayo, politica
4'5
La figura de Aron representa un liberalismo caracterizado por la tolerancia, el escepticismo y la búsqueda de la verdad y la justicia sin servidumbres ideológicas; es decir, un caballero al que no invitarías si lo que pretendes es elevar el share de La Sexta Noche.
Firme partidario de las reformas en contraposición a la fiebre revolucionara, Aron fue uno de los grandes críticos del conglomerado marxismo-comunismo-totalitarismo cuando en su país, Francia, ser marxista era parte casi indisoluble de la condición de intelectual. Eran los tiempos de Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty; de St. Germain des Prés, el existencialismo, la Francia traumatizada y el general de Gaulle. En ese hábitat, Aron representaba a una minoría de pensadores que marcaron explícita distancia con el coqueteo ideológico de moda, apostando por una filosofía política próxima al ideario de Tocqueville y con una concepción de la Historia abierta y multifacética, opuesta a la rígida y profética concepción del marxismo. Se muestra especialmente crítico con la figura del intelectual francés, caracterizado por su tendencia a enjuiciar, severo e inflexible, las negligencias de la democracia parlamentaria y, en cambio, pasar tibiamente por encima de los crímenes perpetrados en pos del advenimiento de la sociedad sin clases.
El libro desmonta una serie de mitos (el de la izquierda, el del proletariado, el de la Historia) y desvela las contradicciones y peligros del comunismo encarnado en el mundo soviético. Se ocupa también de los diferentes tipos de intelectuales y su estatus en función del país en el que operan: Francia, Gran Bretaña, Estados Unidos y la Unión Soviética.
Aunque es un ensayo escrito en plena Guerra Fría (1955), con dos bloques mundiales claramente diferenciados y una atmósfera distinta a la actual, sus reflexiones de fondo y su mensaje continúan teniendo vigencia, sobre todo para aquellos que contemplan la actualidad política con un deje de moderación y duda frente al clima agitador de inquebrantables adhesiones próximas al fanatismo. (less)
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The figure of Aron represents a liberalism characterized by tolerance, skepticism and the search for truth and justice without ideological servitude; that is to say, a gentleman whom you would not invite if what you want is to increase the share of La Sexta Noche. A firm supporter of the reforms as opposed to the revolutionary fever, Aron was one of the great critics of the Marxism-communism-totalitarianism conglomerate when in his country, France, being a Marxist was an almost indissoluble part of the condition of intellectual. Those were the times of Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty; de St. Germain des Prés, existentialism, traumatized France and General de Gaulle. In that habitat, Aron represented a minority of thinkers who marked an explicit distance with the ideological flirtation in fashion, betting on a political philosophy close to the ideology of Tocqueville and with an open and multifaceted conception of History, opposed to the rigid and prophetic conception of Marxism. He is especially critical of the figure of the French intellectual, characterized by his tendency to judge, severe and inflexible, the negligence of parliamentary democracy and, instead, lukewarmly pass over the crimes perpetrated in pursuit of the advent of a classless society . The book dismantles a series of myths (that of the left, that of the proletariat, that of History) and reveals the contradictions and dangers of communism embodied in the Soviet world. He also deals with the different types of intellectuals and their status depending on the country in which they operate: France, Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. Although it is an essay written in the middle of the Cold War (1955), with two clearly differentiated world blocs and an atmosphere different from the current one, its background reflections and its message continue to be valid, especially for those who contemplate political news with a hint of moderation and doubt in the face of the agitating climate of unwavering adherence close to fanaticism.
Jun 15, 2013Alex rated it it was amazing
A clear eyed attack on the moral shortcomings of French Marxist intellectuals in the 40s and early 50s. While this topic may seem exoteric, the book is an extremely important work of political philosophy about the contortions people will often go through in order to make a particular belief system fit with facts that do not support said belief. While this is an attack on Frenchman by a Frenchman, there are numerous cases where similar abuses were committed elsewhere, for example George Bernard Shah's shameful endorsement of Soviet Agricultural Collectivism even after seeing the full affects of the terror famine first hand, etc. Ideology can be overwhelmingly blinding and Aron would not let his peers forget this. (less)
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Feb 19, 2014Philippe Malzieu rated it it was amazing
France gave to liberalism some of these larger theorists (Bastiat in economy…) but liberalism is ever imposed in France. Worse,after second world war, the vast majority of the French intellectuals was Marxists.
There had only one person, a hero, a watchtower to fight against totalitarianism and blindness, it was Raymond Aron. Face to Sartre'delire, his school-fellow at Normal-Sup, it is the alone French intellectual to only keep the cool head.
The title is a paraphrase of Marx. Aron takes a malicious pleasure to dismount the modes theses and to highlight the risk of tyranny. History will agree to him. (less)
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Dec 29, 2019Serhiy added it · review of another edition
Shelves: marxism, sociology, non-fiction, france
Вимушений капітулювати перед українським перекладом, таке зі мною вперше, але читати боляче, припускаю, Григорій Філіпчук не встиг завершити його перед смертю і це якась чернетка, якої якщо і торкалась якась частина тіла редактора, то точно не рука
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Feb 12, 2018The Laughing Man rated it liked it · review of another edition
4 highlights
Quite A Critique
The writer slammed the Western intellectuals for their hypocrisy towards communism. An essential read for those who want to dissect the religion called commnuism.
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Feb 25, 2019Moomen Sallam rated it really liked it · review of another edition
يقدم الكتاب نقد قوي للشعارات والمفاهيم الأساسية للفكر الشيوعي وعلى راسها مصطلحات اليسار والثورة والبلوريتاريا وطبقة المثقفين
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Mar 06, 2019Leonardo marked it as to-keep-reference
Poco había en Les Maîtres penseurs (Los maestros pensadores) de Glucksmann, publicado con un unánime éxito de crítica en marzo de 1977, que Raymond Aron no hubiera dicho mejor en su Opium des intellectuels (El opio de los intelectuales) veintidós años antes.
Postguerra Pág.727 (less)
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Oct 09, 2017Ned rated it it was ok · review of another edition
3 notes & 106 highlights
I'm glad that's over.
A ponderous, pedantic, verbose book that I found unenjoyable and dated. Some books are timeless, this one is time bound. I really had to slog through it and I'm glad to be done. My time would have been better spent on something else. The book is not without merit but it is not worth the effort of separating the wheat from the chaff. (less)
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Feb 06, 2020John rated it really liked it
Basically a rant on how Marxism/Communism is the religion for intellectuals, which I kind of believe. Even if I think some of the tenets are admirable.
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Jan 01, 2013Victor added it
One of the best, one of the most important book in the 20th Century.
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Nov 28, 2020Alexandre rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Below, five remarkable passages from “The Opium of the Intellectuals” (1955), by the philosopher Raymond Aron (1905-1983).
On what leads revolutionary or crypto-revolutionary parties to degenerate into personality cults:
A party which is always right must constantly define the correct line between sectarianism and opportunism. Where is this line situated? At an equal distance between the twin pitfalls of opportunism and sectarianism. But these pitfalls were themselves originally placed in relation to the correct line. The only way out of the vicious circle is a decree by the central authority which defines truth and error alike. And this decree is inevitably arbitrary, since it is made by a man who decides autocratically between individuals and groups; the disparity between the world as it would be if the original doctrine were true, and the world as it is, subordinates the truth to the equivocal and inscrutable decisions of an interpreter whose only qualification is his power.
On the prospects of the socialist economies, in a remarkable foresight, in the mid-1950s, of their structural shortcomings:
The so-called socialist societies rediscover, under modified forms, the necessities inherent in any modern economic system. There, just as under capitalism, the ‘boss class’ lays down the law. (...) Up to now the planners, by reason of penury and of the decision to develop economic power as rapidly as possible, have not concerned themselves either with the productivity of the various investments or with the consumers’ preferences. It will not be long before they experience the perils of slump and deflation and the exigencies of economic arithmetic.
On how revolutionaries define justice:
Constitutional government, the balance of power, legal guarantees, the whole edifice of political civilisation slowly built up over the course of the ages and always incomplete, is calmly pushed aside. They accept an absolute State, allegedly in the service of the Revolution; they are not interested in the plurality of parties and the autonomy of working-class organisations. They do not protest against lawyers bullying their clients and accused persons confessing to imaginary crimes. After all, is not revolutionary justice directed towards the ‘radical solution of the problem of coexistence’, whilst ‘liberal justice’ applies unjust laws?
On the idolatry of history:
The massacres which accompany the struggle of States and of classes will not have been in vain if they clear the way to the classless society. The idolatry of history is born of this unavowed nostalgia for a future which would justify the unjustifiable. (...)
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(...) The idolatry of history (...), convinced that it acts with a view to achieving the only future which is worthwhile, sees, and wants to see, the other merely as an enemy to be eliminated, and a contemptible enemy at that since he is incapable of wanting the good or of recognising it.
On the cynicism of the revolutionaries:
Profoundly moralistic in regard to the present, the revolutionary is cynical in action. He protests against police brutality, the inhuman rhythm of industrial production, the severity of bourgeois courts, the execution of prisoners whose guilt has not been proved beyond doubt. Nothing, short of a total ‘humanisation’, can appease his hunger for justice. But as soon as he decides to give his allegiance to a party which is as implacably hostile as he is himself to the established disorder, we find him forgiving, in the name of the Revolution, everything he has hitherto relentlessly denounced. The revolutionary myth bridges the gap between moral intransigence and terrorism.(less)
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Nov 14, 2019Paul Gosselin rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: history, political-science
Ce livre d'Aron, publié en 1955 rapproche le marxisme et le communisme à une religion. Même le titre est une boutade, une référence pas très voilée à l’expression bien connue de Karl Marx “La religion est l’opium du peuple”... D'abord en douceur Raymond fait le lien communisme=religion en larguant, ici et là, l'expression "hommes d'Église et hommes de foi". Mais dans le contexte, on tire immanquablement la conclusion que les "hommes de foi" dont il est question ce sont les communistes... Ouais, pendant un moment, il y a quelques longueurs tandisqu’Aron discute de situations politiques des années 50, mais même au 21e siècle ça vaut le coût de lire…
Il faut dire qu'à l'époque (guerre froide) c'était TRES audacieux de la part d'un intellectuel français d'exprimer à haute voix une telle chose. Staline était mort que depuis 2 ans et le marxisme avait encore beaucoup de prestige en Occident (des profs ouvertement marxistes étaient chose courante même lorsque j'ai commencé mes études universitaires dans les années 70). La publication d'un tel livre en France a dû faire assez scandale merci... Il semble qu'Aron a perdu plusieurs amis...
Mais bon, vers la fin de son livre Aron mets les points sur les is et explique en quoi le communisme peut être une religion. Par exemple, Aron observe au sujet des procès spectacles du régime soviétique (1955/2010: 132) «Les grands procès sont comparables à ceux de l’Inquisition : ils relèvent de l’orthodoxie en mettant en lumière les hérésies. Les procureurs n’ont-ils pas le sentiment d’imposer la confession de la vérité, même s’ils emploient la violence ?»
Mais l'argument d'Aron est surtout allusif et il ne se posant jamais trop la question : Qu’est-ce au juste que la religion ? Si on suppose que la religion est avant tout un système de croyances servant à donner sens au monde, alors le fait qu'un système de croyances fait appel au surnaturel est moins pertinent. On peut donc être confronté à une religion dotée d'une cosmologie matérialiste... C'est une question que j’aborde de manière détaillée dans mon livre Fuite de l’Absolu, volume 1. (less)
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May 26, 2021João Ritto rated it really liked it
The title of this book immediately catches the eye, at least for me it did. The Opium of the Intellectuals is a provocative title that intends to catch the irony that while Marx claimed that "Religion is the opium of the people", during a large part of the 20th century, and particularly in France, Marxism was the opium of the intellectuals. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, all were for a long time apologists for the Stalinist regime and even when forced to finally admit the horrors it produced, they were happy to go along with Mao's attempt in China. Why was that?
I had expected the book to have a clear thesis for this. Often non-fiction books try to explain complex phenomena with a single mechanism, and produce a lot of evidence of how that particular mechanism is (they believe) the most relevant one. The disadvantages of this, in an extremely complex world, where any one factor is unlikely to have the ability to explain singlehandedly a phenomenon are obvious. But this also has advantages - it will make the point of the book very clear, and its idea will stuck with the reader. The variety of explanations can then be perceived by the reader by just approaching different books with competing explanations. It turns out, this book by Raymond Aron takes a very different approach.
Instead of having a very clear thesis, Aron truly goes through a lot of issues: the idolatry of history, the secularization of the west and how marxism appears as a secular religion, the appeal of being critical of one's own society... He discusses the development of these ideas and how they evolved in different countries such as France vs USA, depending on the intellectual culture. In the end, though, a bit of the reading feels dated and the lack of a clear thesis means that a lot of it reads as if you are listening to a knowledgeable smart guy talking about what he feels like talking about, without a clear direction. (less)
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Apr 27, 2020Alberony Martínez rated it liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: 2020, historia, ensayo
Una de las obras icongnitas que muchos siempre han tenido, es de que cómo es posible, que un movimiento como este haya reclutado a tantas personas con un perfil intelectual tan encumbrado. El escritor Stanley Pierson en su libro Los intelectuales marxistas y la mentalidad de la clase obrera en Alemania, 1887-1912 exploro el funcionamiento de los intelectuales alemanes dentro del movimiento, explorando a figuras prominentes como Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburgo y Eduar Bernastein. Muchos de los jóvenes escritores, oradores y políticos se propusieron suplantar las viejas forma de pensar con una compresión marxista de la historia y la sociedad.
Esta obra de Raymond Aron del filosofo, sociólogo y politologo francés, publicada en 1955 El opio de los intelectuales haciendo referencia a la iconica frases de Karl Marx “la religión es el opio del pueblo” donde la religión es usada por las clases dominantes como instrumento para controlar el pueblo, aliviando y dándole sentido a sus padecimiento mediante la idea de un mundo de dicha ilusoria y promesa de una vida eterna. Es un muestra de cómo las ideas mas nobles pueden escurrirse subrepticiamente en la tiranía de la religión secular y acentuar de cómo el pensamiento político tiene la profunda responsabilidad de decir la verdad sobre la realidad social y política, en todos sus imperfecciones mundanas y complejidades trágicas.
Es una obra donde acenta una critica al socialismo y a las técnicas que este movimiento utilizaba para llegar al poder. Cabe destacar, que asi como critica al socialismo, tambien critia la satanizacion la derecha politica.
“Ni el orden público, ni la fuerza del Estado constituyen el objetivo único de la política. El hombre es también un ser moral y la colectividad sólo es humana a condición de ofrecer una partición a todos.” (less)
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