ABSTRACT
Aron is commonly understood to be a conservative-minded liberal in the tradition of Montesquieu and Tocqueville. With the publication of Le Marxisme de Marx people are in a better position to appreciate the central role of this engagement with Marx and Marxism in Aron's larger intellectual trajectory. By the time Aron delivered his 1976-1977 set of lectures on the "Marxism of Marx" he had concluded that for Marx the overcoming of alienation necessarily entailed not only the abolition of private property but the very elimination of the market and the division of labor. In his Memoirs published only weeks before his death in 1983, Aron went so far to speak of Marx as a "cursed sophist", a "putative ancestor of Marxist-Leninism" who was partly responsible for "the horrors of the 20th century". At the end of his life, then, Aron did not hesitate to say terrible if truthful things about his lifelong interlocutor.
