ABSTRACT
Raymond Aron was and remains a special author. In The Opium of the Intellectuals, initially published in French in 1955, Aron explained at the outset that the book emerged from his attempt to explain the attitude of the intellectuals who were 'merciless towards the failings of the democracies but ready to tolerate the worst crimes as long as they are committed in the name of the proper doctrines'. The mythological character of 'the sacred words Left, Revolution, Proletariat' was due to the fact that they were invested of a meaning that could not be refuted by the facts, to use an expression of Karl Popper. A similar sacred character was attributed to the concept of Revolution. The empirical realities of communist regimes that had been produced by communist revolutions were of no interest to the intellectuals of the Left. Raymond Aron's scepticism was in fact a via media between dogmatic rationalism and dogmatic relativism.
