The Opium of the Intellectuals

by Raymond Aron

To which Francis Jeanson’s reply was at once clear and somewhat tortuous: “It is not a subjective contradiction which prevents me from expressing myself categorically on the subject of Stalinism, but a factual difficulty which it seems to me possible to formulate thus: the Stalinist movement throughout the world does not seem to us to be authentically revolutionary, but it is the only movement which claims to be revolutionary and it commands the allegiance, in this country in particular, of the vast majority of the proletariat; we are therefore at the same time against it inasmuch as we criticise its methods, and for it inasmuch as we do not know whether the true revolution may not be a pure figment, whether it may not in fact be necessary for the revolutionary enterprise to go through such phases before it is able to introduce a more humane social order, and whether the imperfections of this enterprise may not, in the present context, be preferable, all things considered, to its extermination pure and simple.”