The Opium of the Intellectuals

by Raymond Aron

Poets, novelists, painters, sculptors and philosophers form j the inner circle: they live by and for the exercise of the intellect. If the value of the activity is taken as the criterion, one would gradually descend the ladder from Balzac to Eugene Sue, from Proust to the authors of ‘human interest’ • stories in the daily papers. Artists who go on producing with- j out developing new ideas or new forms, professors in their chairs, research workers in their laboratories, form the bulk of the community of knowledge and culture. Below them are the journalists of the press and the radio, who disseminate the ideas of others and are the communicating link between the big public and the elect. In this context, the nucleus of the category would be the creators, and its frontier would be the ill-defined zone where the popularisers cease to interpret and begin to mislead, where, bent only on success or money, slaves of the supposed tastes of their public, they become indifferent to the values they profess to serve. The disadvantage of such an analysis is that it neglects two important considerations—on the one hand the social situation and source of income, and on the other the objective, theoretical or practical, of the professional activity. It is permissible, after the event, to call Pascal or Descartes—the one a member of a ‘parliamentary’ bourgeois family, the other a knight-intellectuals. One would not have dreamed of putting them into that category in the seventeenth century,...