ABSTRACT
Everyone knows the importance that Raymond Aron gave to the thought of Alexis de Tocqueville. One finds only one reference to Tocqueville in The Opium of the Intellectuals, even though the critical analysis of the French intelligentsia in which he engaged in 1954-55 strongly recalls a famous chapter in The Old Regime and the Revolution. This chapter seeks to clarify the nature and the limits of this kinship by first studying the convergences, and then the differences, between these two works. One could also compare these two men's attitudes on political action. Aron was often tempted, but he remained outside of politics temperamentally, and yet he all the while blamed himself for sticking too close to reality in his work. Tocqueville was anxious to play a role at least as much as to have an intellectual influence: a parliamentarian easily exasperated by his colleagues and by his own incapacity to prevail.
