Free Cultural Amnesia by Clive James

work that has been
     translated into English, The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955) can still be regarded as the best introduction to his thought, and indeed to modern
     intellectual history in its entirety. For readers of French, he can be met more briefly, but almost as effectively, in Le Spectateur engagé (1981), a long interview of the type that French publishers do so well.

. . . the liberal believes in the permanence of humanity’s
     imperfection, he resigns himself to a regime in which the good will be the result of numberless actions, and never the object of a conscious choice. Finally, he suscribes to the pessimism
     that sees, in politics, the art of creating the conditions in which the vices of men will contribute to the good of the state.
    —RAYMOND ARON, L’Opium des intellectuels , P. 292
    S UCH WAS THE central
    belief that put Aron on a collision course with all the radical thinkers in Paris after World War II. He couldn’t have put it more clearly; and if he couldn’t, nobody could. Essayists
    who stake everything on writing the kind of spangled style that glitters in the limelight near the top of the tent must sometimes wish, as they sweat to keep a sentence alive, that the tightrope
    could be laid outalong the ground. There are essayists who write plainly and yet are duller still because of it. But the most enviable essayists are those who can write
    plainly and generate an extra thrill from doing so, demonstrating a capacity to clarify an intricate line of thought in their heads before laying it out sequentially on the page. Always matching
    a decorum of procedure to their weight of argument, they can make the more spectacular practitioner look meretricious. Foremost among these cool masters of expository prose must be ranked Raymond
    Aron.
    Most of Aron’s vast output remains untranslated in the original French, but enough of his books
    have been brought into English to give some idea of his importance, and some of those books are indispensable—most prominently The Opium of the
    Intellectuals , which remains to this day, after all the years since it first appeared in 1955, the best debunking of Marxism as a theology, and the most piercing analysis of why that
    theology, during the twentieth century, should have had so pervasive and baleful an influence in the free nations. Even now, every first-year university student in the world should read that
    book, if only because the poised force of Aron’s prose style gives such a precise idea of the strength and passion of the consensus he was trying to rebut.
    It should be said straight away that his clarity of view was not attained from a right-wing viewpoint. Though many a
    prominent figure of international anti-communism paid tribute to him after his death—Henry Kissinger, McGeorge-Bundy, Norman Podhoretz and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. were among the Americans
    who acknowledged his example—Aron himself began on the left and stayed there until the end. But he was always disgusted by the thirst of putatively humanitarian intellectuals for the lethal
    certitudes of Marxist dogma. As early as the 1950s he was proclaiming the need for a new party, de la gauche non conformiste . A sizeable party of the
    nonconformist left never really arrived, but the massed ranks of the conformist left were not fond of the idea that somebody so prominent had called for one. Many of his fellow French
    intellectuals never forgave him for his heresy. (Sartre, who respected Aron’s credentials—Aron, unlike Sartre, had always been the kind of star student who actually read the
    books—took particular care to discredit his opinions: a potent endorsement.) A few of them were grateful, and they were among the best. Jean-François Revel, François Furet,
    Alain Finkielkraut and the small handful ofother French writers on politics who have managed to defend their independence of thought while surrounded by a tenaciously
    lingering pseudo-progressive consensus have all had