Raymond Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals is a work of political criticism and intellectual history, written in France in the mid-1950s at the height of the Cold War. Its chapters examine the vocabulary of French political debate—the words Left, Revolution, Proletariat, History—and ask what those words had come to mean in the mouths of the Parisian intelligentsia. Aron writes as a liberal sceptic addressing his own milieu: the philosophers, journalists and writers who, he argues, had exchanged the search for truth for a secular faith.
“Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word.”
The book’s central claim is that Marxism functioned for Western intellectuals as a religion functions for believers. The epigraphs set the terms: Marx’s line about religion as the opium of the people, and Simone Weil’s remark that Marxism is itself “a religion, in the lowest sense of the word,” an opiate for the people. Aron’s title inverts the famous phrase. The intellectuals who congratulated themselves on seeing through the old faiths had constructed a new one, and they guarded it with the same intolerance.
The Quarrel with the Communists
The Transaction edition opens with a new introduction by Harvey C. Mansfield and a foreword by Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson, framed by epigraphs from Marx, who called religion the opium of the people, and Simone Weil, who called Marxism a religion in the lowest sense of the word—an opiate for the people. Mahoney and Anderson note that the book, Aron’s most famous, has long been better known than read, and that critics wrongly reduce it to a skeptical assault on political rationalism or a defense of the end of ideology. Its skepticism, they insist, is aimed at nihilism and ideological fanaticism, not at truth; Aron dissects the idolatry of history in order to restore political judgment. The edition adds his 1956 reply to critics, “Fanaticism, Prudence, and Faith,” written against Sartre and those French intellectuals who fused Marxist historicism with existentialist commitment, and clarifies that his conservative-minded liberalism rests on suspicion of schemes, models and Utopias rather than on any shortage of principle. Mansfield links Aron’s critique of the Marx–Nietzsche fusion to later postmodernist thought.
Mansfield on the War of Words
Mansfield sets the book in 1955, in the Cold War, as a leading document in a war of words fought chiefly inside the West and centered on Paris: whether the West would keep its will or surrender to the self-doubt of its intellectuals. Aron’s targets were Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and he weighed their arguments carefully before exposing the myths of the Left, of revolution, and of the proletariat through evidence and reasoning. Branded anti-intellectual, he actually defined the true intellectual as one who enters politics and commits to a party yet never forgets the adversary’s arguments, the uncertainty of the future, or the faults of his own side. Modern intellectuals, heirs of Bacon and Descartes, became an international movement in the Enlightenment and sought a single rational regime that would end the need for further revolution; their visionary optimism mixed with pessimism about reality breeds impatience with human complexity. All rivals to their rule have vanished, and Stalin himself counts as an intellectual because his authority rests on a universal doctrine—communism transposing the other world to earth, making him its incarnation, and so exposing totalitarianism’s weakness: it cannot sustain revolutionary faith. Mansfield traces Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s path from exaggerated faith in reason to unreason, anticipating the New Left and postmodernism while consistently hating prudence and moderation.
Aron’s Two Prefaces
Aron explains that he gathered his articles against the communisants, the non-party Soviet sympathizers, as Polémiques, and that the introduction grew into this book, which examines the sacred words Left, Revolution, Proletariat, the cult of history, and the intelligentsia, asking why Marxism revived in France despite belied predictions. In the 1957 preface he answers French critics in their own philosophical language, rebuts John Bowie’s dismissal of French opinion as fundamentally silly by pointing to the hundreds of millions educated in Marxism-Leninism, and argues that Parisian “clerks” radiate influence out of proportion to France’s position because they translate British institutions into ideas—the classless society, the recognition of man by man—that attach themselves to humanity’s dreams. He targets historical optimism and rationalism more than historical materialism, denying that Right and Left divide into camps of good and evil, future and past. The book appeared before the Twentieth Congress, Stalin’s denunciation, and the Polish and Hungarian revolts; Khrushchev authenticated Western accusations, and Stalin had hundreds of thousands of Communists executed through terror and forced confessions.
The Myth of the Left
The opening chapter turns to the French Revolution, invoking Ferrero’s distinction between constructive and destructive revolutions: the collapse of one principle of legitimacy without a replacement plunged France into the Terror, and it took nearly a century to find an acceptable régime. By the early nineteenth century the Revolution’s social consequences seemed irrevocable, though the choice between republic and monarchy stayed open, and no serious writer recognized a single united Left—the “party of progress” is an oppositionist myth. Once the Republic was assured, Clemenceau decreed that the Revolution is a bloc, reconciling democracy with parliamentarianism; but as the Third Republic consolidated, a new schism appeared, the anti-capitalist Left succeeding the anti-monarchist one, with Marxism supplying the formula of continuity and break—the Fourth Estate succeeding the Third, the proletariat replacing the bourgeoisie. Aron calls the unity of the Left a distortion of French political reality, scarred by June 1848 and the Commune, and warns against applying Western political vocabulary to other civilizations, asking where Left and Right lie when reformist officers dissolve parliaments manipulated by Pashas, or before Peron’s dictatorship supported by the descamisados.
The Proletariat as Idea and as Fact
Aron turns to whether reasoning about the proletariat now applies only to Western countries caught between the Soviet régime and democratic liberties. The subtle arguments in Les Temps Modernes and Esprit echo left-wing theorists in Russia and Germany half a century earlier—settled from above in Russia, dried up in Germany for want of contestants. Between the Communist-converted countries and the West, where production has turned outcasts into moderate trade unionists, stands more than half of humanity, envying the latter’s standard of living while turning hopefully to the former.
On defining class, Aron declines an inconclusive discussion: no single predefined reality can be christened “class.” Everyone knows proletarians are wage-earners working with their hands in factories; defining the working class seems hard only because no definition traces precise limits. At what stage does the skilled worker cease to be proletarian? Is the State-employed manual worker one? Do commercial wage-earners belong with industrial ones? Criteria differ—nature of work, remuneration, style of life—and the garage mechanic differs from the assembly-line worker. There is no quintessence of the proletariat, only a category with a clear centre and vague periphery.
The controversy arises because Marxist doctrine ascribed the proletariat a unique mission—to change history, to achieve humanity. How can dispersed millions be such instruments? Common material and psychological traits exist, but the community is only partial: French proletarians differ from English ones and resemble their compatriots; village workers resemble non-proletarian neighbours more than big-town workers. Hence the inevitable disparity between the proletariat the sociologist studies and the proletariat with a mission. Apologists fall back on the Marxian formula: the proletariat must be revolutionary or not exist at all. Francis Jeanson says the worker becomes a proletarian by revolting against his alienation; Sartre locates its unity in its relationship with other classes, its struggle against society. Defined as a general will, the proletariat acquires subjective unity, and the militant minority legitimately embodies the whole.
Toynbee adds ambiguities: the industrial worker is one example of those alienated from existing culture and susceptible to the prophet—ancient slaves listening to the Apostles, the non-integrated peripheral peoples; today’s deportees, camp inmates and national minorities may be more authentically proletarian than industrial workers.
The Claim to a Universal Mission
Sartre’s definition raises the essential question: why a unique mission? The young Marx’s formula—a class with radical chains, a sphere of society with a universal character because its sufferings are universal—holds that dehumanisation makes proletarians men pure and simple, hence universal. Merleau-Ponty repeats it: the proletariat is privileged because, through the logic of its condition, it alone can realise humanity; cut off from all particularity in reality, not by abstraction, it alone is the universality it thinks.
Aron finds contempt for commerce and industry contemptible; that those who look down on engineers profess to see universal man in the worker seems endearing but surprising. Neither division of labour nor rising living standards universalises. Marx’s observed proletarians—twelve-hour days, no unions, the iron law of wages—might appear departicularised by misfortune; not so the worker of Detroit, Coventry, Stockholm, Billancourt, the Ruhr, or even Moscow, who resembles a citizen of one nation or member of one party. Philosophers may hope for non-integration but cannot represent the industrial worker’s universality as fact; in what sense is the French proletariat, split among rival organisations, “the only authentic intersubjectivity”?
The next stage—why the proletariat must be revolutionary—is no more convincing. Loosely interpreted, workers of Manchester in 1850 and Calcutta today react by revolt against unjust organisation; but not all feel exploited—poverty or resignation deadens it, rising standards assuage it. There is no conclusive evidence the proletariat as such is spontaneously revolutionary; Lenin saw the workers’ indifference to their vocation and desire for immediate reforms, and the vanguard-Party theory was born of the need to lead masses averse to apocalyptic visions.
In young Marx the vocation derives from the dialectic: the proletarian is the slave who overthrows his master for everyone. Orthodox Communism postulates the vocation through its global interpretation of history, transferring emphasis to the Party, whose existence and will are beyond doubt; the aspiring Communist joins because the Party represents the elected class, then may lose interest in the class since comrades come from all classes. Contemporary French philosophers—revolutionaries refusing Party membership yet insisting one cannot fight the working class without becoming the enemy of mankind—differ.
The End of History and the Reign of Plenty
On the level of mores, diversity is simply a fact of experience, and no single “privileged state” of the family can be defined. The many historical forms of family life do not refute natural law; they push it onto so abstract a plane that observed variety looks normal. The end of history, then, would not deliver a concrete new definition of the family but a diversity that no longer contradicts the rules inseparable from man’s essential humanity. The same logic applies to beliefs about plants, animals and gods, which bear on the forces and relations of production as much as family and State do. A “privileged state” that ended the economic adventure would have to be stripped of every cultural trait and particular-collectivity tie—just as a universally true faith must express itself in some historical language mixed with accidental elements.
What revives the theological notion of the end of history in a rational context is technological progress. Not every philosopher follows Trotsky in evoking the coming reign of plenty, but all must reckon that science and the means of production will change an essential datum: collective wealth may permit giving to one without taking from another, so that the poverty of the many is no longer the condition of the luxury of the few. Plenty is not unthinkable. Progress is measured by rising productivity—fastest in industry, slowest in transport, commerce and services, and slowing after a point in agriculture, where diminishing returns set in. It requires limiting population size; assuming a stationary population and adequate farm output, total prosperity still demands satisfying every demand for manufactured goods, which many will call illimitable by nature. If saturation in secondary needs is reachable, illimitability would be reserved for the tertiary sector, including the desire for leisure. Whatever the hypotheses, the curse of work would not be abolished: essential work must be divided, incomes shared equitably though still unequal as regards luxury articles.
To return to earth: satisfaction of primary needs and much of secondary needs has never been achieved in any historically known society, though it is possible in the United States, which has more cultivable area per head than any other country. Short of revolutionary inventions or atomic disasters, technological progress promises decent conditions for all and participation in cultural life; synthetic food and raw materials and electronic machines replacing labour are advances that must be paid for. Progress has created proportionally more clerks than workers, and a society of employees is not necessarily reconciled with itself. The static society evoked by sociologists such as Jean Fourastié corresponds roughly to the ultimate end of economic progress imaginable from present experience, yet it would not modify the essence of the economic problem: taking a fraction of the product from workers for investment, distributing jobs that are not equally interesting or remunerative, maintaining discipline and respect for the techno-bureaucratic hierarchy. Push Utopia further and manual labour might cease to fall on a minority alone, everyone spending part of his day or life in a factory—transcending the historical horizon without transcending human possibilities. Even then some exigencies would be relaxed but none eliminated. Incomes would still be distributed in cash, with no freedom to help oneself to collective output; pay would relate to needs though production bonuses remain necessary to a degree; technico-intellectual training would be refused to no one, but inequality between individuals according to abilities and employment would continue.
The static society would not radically solve the political problem either—the reconciliation between the equality of men as men and the inequality of their functions—so the essential task remains persuading men to acknowledge the superiority of others without constraint or surrender of dignity. Attenuation of rivalry over national income would remove some bitterness, but experience counsels caution: the claims of the semi-rich are often the most ardent, and people fight for luxuries, power or ideas as passionately as for money. Interests may be reconciled; philosophies cannot. Supposing subsistence assured, collectivities would no longer appear as spheres of exploitation threatened by rivals, and inequalities of living standards between nations—the decisive fact of the twentieth century—would be eliminated. But would frontier posts be pulled down and peoples regard one another as brothers? That needs a second hypothesis: humanity no longer divided into sovereign nations but into groups living peacefully together, thanks to the death of States or a universal empire—which does not necessarily follow from plenty. Quarrels of tribes, nations or empires have been linked in many ways with class quarrels and were not mere manifestations of class struggle; race hatreds will survive class distinctions; collectivities will clash even when indifferent to booty, since the desire for power is no less basic than the desire for wealth.
One can conceive the radical solution of the political problem and a political equivalent of the distinction between “static society” and “absolute plenty.” In the political static society all would play their part in the body politic, rulers ruling without force, the ruled obeying without humiliation; between collectivities peace would annihilate frontiers and guarantee individual rights.
Anti-Liberal Conformism in America
Aron turns to the American intellectual scene and finds a paradox: a country without a McCarthyist reign of terror nonetheless governed by an anti-McCarthy conformism. Everyone opposes the Senator—James Burnham being the notable exception, removed from the Partisan Review board for refusing to condemn him outright—yet the intellectuals feel themselves a minority, guilty over past flirtations with Communism and fearful of a public that conflates reds, pinks, and pale pinks. A professor who declined to join the anti-McCarthy chorus would be condemned by colleagues though his career remained safe; still, professors hesitate to speak publicly on Chinese Communism. This anti-McCarthy conformism sits oddly beside an anti-Communist one: people denounce the Senator’s methods while insisting they detest Communism quite as much as he does. Behind it lurks a fraction of the population, mistrustful of experts, foreigners, and ideas, that feels betrayed by yesterday’s leaders and blames professors and writers for Eastern Europe, for Chiang’s defeat, for the socialisation of negroes—who themselves want to be one hundred per cent American, seeking redress of American reality through the American ideal rather than revolution. Disturbed by this anti-intellectualism, the intellectuals are nonetheless reconciled with the United States: old-world prestige has faded, American crudeness is nothing beside Nazi or Soviet camps, and American prosperity delivers the European Left’s old objectives. Some remain anti-conformist, attacking digests, trusts, McCarthyism, and capitalism at once, but this merely resurrects yesterday’s militant liberalism; today’s intellectuals seek enemies—fighting Communism, McCarthyism, both, or denouncing anti-anti-Communism—all crusaders in pursuit of infidels. Great Britain, by contrast, does not take its intellectuals so seriously, avoiding both American militancy and French uncritical admiration of writers’ political opinions; its left-wing intellectual rules part of the weekly press yet has not broken with his country, reserving the Popular Front for foreigners and admitting that Communism’s strength varies inversely with a régime’s merits. The Frenchman dreams of converting all non-Frenchmen to France; the Englishman suspects no one outside his island is worthy to play cricket or the parliamentary game.
The Intellectuals and Their Ideologies
Opening his chapter on ideology, Aron defines political ideologies as mixtures of factual propositions and value judgments, expressing a world outlook and a future will, neither literally true nor false and changing with history. The post-war Western climate was conservative; without the Soviet Union, revolutionary China, and the atomic bomb, the West would be celebrating peace. In autumn 1954 the cannons fell silent for the first time since 1939—but not the sub-machine-guns. The capitalism-socialism quarrel loses emotional force once the Soviet Union is identified with socialism; so-called socialist societies rediscover modern economic necessities, with Soviet managers keeping the equivalent of capitalist profits and planners ignoring consumers’ preferences. Representative institutions, Europe’s pre-1914 masterpiece, failed between the wars in most of Europe; the Soviet Union proved plural parties and government by discussion unnecessary for backward societies. The choice between political liberties and economic progress is a false alternative in the West but can appear ineluctable elsewhere.
Japan, India, and the Borrowed West
Japanese and French intellectuals share “progressive” thought, but France’s modern institutions are indigenous whereas a century ago nothing in Japan suggested parliamentary government or the principles of 1789. Cultures develop by borrowing: Japan took a religion from India via China, its writing system, its early art, then from the Meiji reformers the West’s military secrets—legislation, universities, science—while restoring the Emperor cult, an unstable combination undone by defeat. The American occupation weakened old traditions; the military lost face, the Emperor behaved as a constitutional sovereign, and intellectuals are divided between inherited and borrowed culture. Communism would meet little spiritual resistance, for it would find no profound religious feeling to eliminate and no clerical power to break. India knows the West only through British culture; French influence breeds revolutionaries, American influence spreads optimism and denigrates the past, while British education creates habits instead of doctrines—”the pupils of the British model themselves on the reality, the pupils of the French on the ideology, of the West.”
Communism as a Secular Religion
Worker-priests insist they remain Catholics, yet their language suggests profane events have taken on sacred significance. They have passed two of the three stages from ideology to religion: the vocation of the proletariat incarnate in the Party, and interpretation of history according to dogma. The final stage—a classless society solving the riddle of History—is inconceivable for a Catholic, for the secular religion teaches that man’s destiny is fulfilled on earth. Neither members nor fellow-travellers let one trace the line between them; no single version of the dogma exists within the Party, and militants know what to say about the Kremlin doctors but not why.
Two Societies That Silenced Debate
Aron turns to the two great powers and finds a shared result reached by opposite roads. In the United States the proletariat does not think of itself as a proletariat; unions win the reforms Europe associates with socialism, leaders are content under the existing order, and the masses aspire to no different society. Unanimity about free enterprise no more proves that American reality matches the slogan than official Marxist-Leninist teaching makes Soviet society conform to its doctrine. Spontaneously in one case, with police help in the other, both societies have suppressed the conditions of ideological debate, integrated their workers, and imposed unanimous adherence to the régime’s principles. The debate stays hot only in second-rank countries—too proud to accept dependence, too arrogant to admit that internal dissidence reflects national failure rather than a decree of history, fascinated by the power that spreads terror, prisoners of a geography that permits criticism but forbids escape.
The Illusion of a Universal Ideology
The spread of one technological civilisation, Aron observes, gives each nation’s problems a special character, and political consciousness is falsified when that is ignored. Liberal, socialist, conservative and Marxist ideologies are the legacy of a century when Europe knew civilisations were plural yet never doubted the universality of its message. Eastern intellectuals, captive to orthodoxy, cannot admit that industrial civilisation takes many forms between which neither history nor reason imposes a radical choice; Western intellectuals flinch from saying that without freedom of enquiry and the initiative of traders and industrialists this civilisation might never have arisen—though it is unclear whether the same virtues are needed to sustain it. India cannot copy the Europe of 1810 or of today: it borrows techniques rather than inventing them, and population growth will not harmonise with development in twentieth-century Asia as it did in nineteenth-century Europe. Parliaments spread like motor-cars, but that does not make the ideologies glorifying them universally valid. The free world would err fatally if it believed it possessed a unique ideology comparable to Marxist-Leninism.
The Stalinist Technique and the French Predicament
Where a Party has seized the State through the army, the Stalinist technique still works: a false doctrine inspiring effective action through half a century of tactical experience. Its falseness shows in the aversion it provokes—outside Russia, Communist régimes could not install themselves without the Red Army. Government by discussion may be an ideal, but transplanting elections and parliaments without weighing circumstances guarantees failure, and the failure of democratic practice leads inevitably to despotism. No intelligentsia suffers as much as the French from the loss of universality, none clings so obstinately to illusions. France belongs to the non-Communist world and could not switch sides without provoking the catastrophe she fears—which forbids neither nationalisation nor reform in North Africa. Her intellectuals recommend the impossible and offer the Communist Party a collaboration it rejects or accepts with contempt. They wait upon events: after Tito’s excommunication Saint-Germain-des-Prés turned Titoist, until his military alliances sank his prestige to zero; then Mao’s China succeeded Yugoslavia in their esteem, vaster and more mysterious, its language unreadable and its visitors few. The Communist victory in China is probably the century’s most significant fact, but what model can Mao’s régime offer France? Tasks worthy of her energies lie closer: a genuine community with the Moslems of North Africa, a united Western Europe less dependent on America, the cure of technological backwardness. By accepting France’s exact place in the planetary system, intellectuals could reach the only political universality available in our time—yet they seem indifferent, still aspiring to recapture in history the glamour of metaphysical certainties.
Against Doctrinairism and Skepticism
In a closing response to critics, Aron takes up the existentialists’ “doctrinairism,” which he finds revealing because it caricatures the errors that paralyse political thought: an almost nihilistic denial of all human constancy ending in dogmatic affirmation of a single truth where truth cannot be single. The critique of dogmatism, he insists, is simultaneously a critique of nihilism—though readers chose to see only skepticism. To those who called the book negative, he answers that his last sentence, praying for the advent of the skeptics if they alone can abolish fanaticism, expressed a fear rather than a hope; the man who no longer expects miracles from revolution is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable, and analyses that delimit the possible are what form political judgment. He is tempted to take “negative” as a compliment.
Marxism Confronted with Its Own History
Before 1917 no Marxist thought revolution possible in a country with three million workers.
Sacred Words and Secular Faith
The three myths Aron dismantles—Left, Revolution, Proletariat—share a structure. Each began as a genuine instrument of political judgment and hardened into a dogma that judged everything in advance. The Left once meant a party of opposition to monarchy and privilege; by the 1950s it had become a label that could be attached to any movement, however authoritarian, provided it claimed the right ancestors. Revolution once meant a means, one method among others for changing a society; it became an end in itself, so that the reformer who achieved the same result without bloodshed was somehow less worthy. The proletariat, a real if loosely bounded social category, was transfigured into a mystical agent with a universal mission—the class that would redeem humanity. Aron notes the oddity that this cult flourished most vigorously in France, where the industrial working class was comparatively small, and among philosophers who had never set foot in a factory.
What holds these myths together is the idolatry of History. If history has a direction, and if the Party or the class that knows that direction can speak in its name, then the future becomes a tribunal that overrules the present. Acts are judged not by their motives or their circumstances but by where they lead. Aron returns repeatedly to this point: the man who chose the armistice in 1940 may have been wrong, but he was not thereby a traitor; only a doctrine that reads conduct backwards from a known outcome can collapse error into treason. Against this he sets the plain requirement of honesty—to judge at the moment of decision, when the future was unknown and the alternatives genuinely uncertain.
The Intellectual’s Betrayal and the Party’s Authority
Aron’s portrait of the “faithful” is the book’s most unsettling passage. The convinced Communist, he observes, is not usually a cynic. He may know about the camps, the purges, the erased names; he accepts them as the cost of an undertaking larger than any individual, an undertaking for which the Party assumes responsibility. Between the naive militant and the sophisticated apologist there are infinite gradations, but all share the same act of faith: that the Party is the instrument of a historical mission. Aron traces how this faith survives disappointment. The revolutionary idealist, once his side holds power, faces the return of ordinary life, bureaucracy and privilege; he can either insist that the regime is still progressing toward its goal, or denounce the gap between the prophecy and the state that was actually built. French intellectuals, Aron notes dryly, tended to choose the second option while still refusing to break with the cause.
The book’s critique of the esoteric use of language belongs here. Words like peace, socialism and democracy, Aron shows, carried one meaning in the Party’s internal doctrine and another in its propaganda. A socialist country is peaceable by definition, because imperialism is an effect of capitalism; therefore any victory of the Communist Party counts as a victory for peace. Once this distinction is installed, plain facts lose their authority. Strengthened police do not suggest a state withering away; the regimentation of trade unions does not suggest the approach of socialism. Whoever describes what is actually there is already on the path of heresy.
What the Book Leaves Behind
The Opium of the Intellectuals appeared before the Twentieth Congress, before Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, before the Polish and Hungarian revolts of 1956. Aron added a preface the following year noting that events had authenticated accusations the Western press had been making for years. The timing matters for how the book has been read. Its critics dismissed it as an attack on political reason itself, or as a manifesto for the “end of ideology.” Aron’s defenders reply that his scepticism was aimed at fanaticism and nihilism, not at truth—that he wanted to restore political judgment, not abolish it. His own definition of the intellectual, offered in the course of the argument, is exacting: a man who enters politics, commits to a party, and yet never forgets the adversary’s arguments, the uncertainty of the future, or the faults of his own side.
The book’s afterlife has been long. Its dissection of historicist reasoning—the habit of justifying present suffering by an imagined future—has been applied far beyond the French debates that occasioned it. Aron’s insistence that economic and political power be kept in separate hands, that liberty depends on that division, reads as a quiet warning to every later generation tempted by the promise of a single rational administration of things. The opium he named has changed its packaging more than once since 1955; the argument about what intellectuals owe to evidence, and what they owe to their own side, has not aged.
