Raymond Aron’s Cure for Political Intoxication

Paris, May 1968. The Latin Quarter smelled of tear gas and printing ink. Students had overturned cars to build makeshift barricades; professors declaimed revolution between clouds of Gauloises smoke; the Sorbonne trembled with manifestos and poetry. “Sous les pavés, la plage,” the walls proclaimed — beneath the cobblestones, the beach: the promise that freedom lay just below the crust of authority, that paradise waited if one could only tear up the old order. For a few electric weeks, the city seemed suspended between delirium and dawn.

Across the river, in the calm rue Saint-Guillaume, Raymond Aron entered his lecture hall at Sciences Po, gray suit immaculate, voice low and even. He spoke not of utopia but of responsibility, not of liberation but of limits. His students, many restless with moral ecstasy, listened in polite disbelief. To many, he seemed the last man of the old world, a cold spectator in an age of passion. To a few, he was the only adult left in the room.

To many, he seemed the last man of the old world, a cold spectator in an age of passion. To a few, he was the only adult left in the room.

The contrast could not have been sharper. Where his friend and rival Jean-Paul Sartre climbed the barricades, exalting “imagination to power,” Aron warned that intoxication was not freedom but its prelude to ruin. He would later call the movement “psychodrama” — a nation acting out its dreams, confusing rebellion with renewal. France read Sartre for inspiration; it read Aron for sobriety. The former promised transcendence through revolt; the latter offered only the slow, unromantic labor of lucidity. That difference made Aron unfashionable then — and indispensable now.

France read Sartre for inspiration; it read Aron for sobriety. The former promised transcendence through revolt; the latter offered only the slow, unromantic labor of lucidity. That difference made Aron unfashionable then — and indispensable now.

He was, as one journalist wrote, “the right man in the wrong century”: a liberal in an age allergic to moderation, a skeptic who still believed in duty. His métier was disenchantment — not bitterness, but the disciplined refusal to mistake desire for destiny. In Le Spectateur engagé (1981), his interviewers distilled his entire philosophy into one unsparing sentence: politics “is not the struggle between good and evil, but the choice between the preferable and the detestable.” The phrase could have been his own epitaph.

Here lies the moral temperament that defined him: a belief that politics is not a crusade for purity but a daily apprenticeship in imperfection. In Peace and War (1962), he argued that unconditional faith is the greatest of political dangers in a world where the preferable cannot be certain and the objective cannot be perfect. Freedom, for Aron, began not in passion but in proportion.

That insight—so alien to his century—has become vital to ours. Where the street once demanded utopia, the screen now demands outrage (and still a bit of utopia). Ideological tribes enforce orthodoxy; algorithms reward certainty more than any media from the old world could. To doubt is to defect. Yet democracy, Aron reminds us, survives only by compromise—by accepting that every good exacts a cost and every settlement is provisional. His ethics of lucidity, forged amid barricades and smoke, is not merely historical but diagnostic. It offers a cure for polarization more radical than any slogan: the courage to remain sober in a world that exalts intoxication.

His ethics of lucidity, forged amid barricades and smoke, is not merely historical but diagnostic. It offers a cure for polarization more radical than any slogan: the courage to remain sober in a world that exalts intoxication.

Aron’s first great exorcism, The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955), was not an attack on intellect but on intoxication. Paris then was drunk on Marxism, treating it as a secular gospel promising redemption through revolution. Sartre and his disciples turned dialectic into catechism; to doubt the revolution was to betray history itself. Aron replied with diagnosis. Ideology, he argued, functions as a civic narcotic: it replaces the hard work of judgment with the easy comfort of belonging. "The myth of the Revolution," he wrote, "serves as a refuge for the man who is dissatisfied with the present."

Aron replied with diagnosis. Ideology, he argued, functions as a civic narcotic: it replaces the hard work of judgment with the easy comfort of belonging.

His counsel was blunt—replace incantation with reality-testing. Mid-century France preferred credo to doubt, slogans to complexity. But Aron understood that delusion is not only moral; it is cognitive. It begins when words cease to describe and start to command, when language stops naming reality and starts worshipping it.

That warning has not aged. Online life still demands ritual assent to slogans everyone privately doubts. To question them is to risk social exile. Aron called this acquiescence to absurdity the essence of ideological conformity. Then it was dialectical materialism; now it is the algorithmic catechism of digital tribes. The doctrines change — hashtags, moral scripts, identity orthodoxies — but the mechanism endures: belonging purchased through mimicry, dissent punished as heresy.

Then it was dialectical materialism; now it is the algorithmic catechism of digital tribes.

The opium he described remains literal. The modern feed—like the party line—sedates through repetition. It soothes anxiety with slogans, replacing uncertainty with a narcotic certainty. Against that comfort, Aron prescribed an ethic of lucidity: the courage to live with ambiguity, to think without applause, and to prefer truth to belonging.

If The Opium of the Intellectuals dispelled the illusions of ideology, Democracy and Totalitarianism (1965) taught the craft that must follow: how to govern in the absence of revelation. Writing in the shadow of the Fourth Republic — a regime paralyzed by coalitions and scandal — Aron sought a middle path between chaos and command. His formula was austere but sufficient: democracy rests on two sentiments, respect for legality and a sense of compromise.

The first anchors citizens to law; the second binds them to one another. Compromise, he insisted, is not capitulation but a civic discipline — the readiness to treat opponents as interlocutors rather than enemies, to accept arrangements as provisional, and to understand that politics is the art of permanent negotiation. Aron had watched the postwar parliament sink into what he called “the sterility of compromise,” proof that bargaining can decay into drift. Yet he knew the greater danger lay in its opposite: purity. Without the habit of compromise, pluralism hardens into sectarianism, and the republic loses the virtue that sustains it — the capacity to live with difference.

Drawing on Max Weber, Aron distinguished between two moral orientations - the ethic of conviction (Gesinnungsethik) and the ethic of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik) - concepts first articulated in Weber’s 1919 lecture “Politik als Beruf” (Politics as a Vocation). The first judges by motive, the second by consequence. The Gesinnungsethik comforts the soul; the Verantwortungsethik preserves the state. The former would say: “Let justice be done, though the world perish”; the latter asks whether the world can survive such justice. In public life, conviction asks whether one’s principles are pure; responsibility asks whether one’s actions will work.

Aron saw that democracies decay when conviction forgets consequence—when citizens prize moral self-expression over the slow work of governance. Today that tension animates nearly every debate: climate activists who condemn compromise as betrayal; populists who equate restraint with weakness; social media movements that measure sincerity by outrage rather than outcome. In each case, righteousness eclipses prudence, and the language of conscience replaces the grammar of law.

To live democratically, then, is to govern by responsibility rather than by performance—to prefer imperfect coexistence to moral annihilation. “The sense of compromise,” Aron wrote, “is the virtue of mature peoples” (Democracy and Totalitarianism, 1965). Our own immaturity shows in how easily we mistake intransigence for integrity.

Aron’s liberalism was a liberalism of limits. “I am a liberal,” he confessed, “because I prefer liberty to equality—and because equality can be achieved only by the restriction of liberty; sometimes a justifiable restriction, but a restriction nonetheless.”

It was unfashionable candor, but it expressed the soul of constitutional life: liberty and equality are both goods, yet they are never perfectly reconcilable. They must be managed, revised, and ranked by institutions capable of peaceful adjustment. “War is improbable,” he once wrote, “peace is impossible.” The line, from Peace and War, was not despair but vigilance—the humility of a historian who knew that equilibrium is always provisional (same for Freedom is Fragile as we often say at Concordia Discors Magazine). Translated into civic life: polarization can be managed, but reconciliation is not a policy.

Because he understood politics as the management of conflict, Aron rejected myths that pretend to abolish it. Chief among them was the idée fixe of Left and Right — a typology flattering to partisans but blinding to complexity. Labels substitute identity for argument, affiliation for inquiry. “To speak of Left and Right,” he warned, “is to perpetuate illusions that disguise reality.” The contemporary version is affective polarization: the hatred of the other side more than the love of one’s own. Aron foresaw it half a century early.

Because he understood politics as the management of conflict, Aron rejected myths that pretend to abolish it.

What united ideologues of every stripe, Aron believed, was the superstition of inevitability — the “idolatry of History” that baptizes power as progress. Marxists invoked dialectic, technocrats invoked modernization, but both replaced responsibility with necessity. Aron’s realism rebelled against that cult of the inevitable. He called it “the secular theology of our time,” a theology that excuses every cruelty in the name of tomorrow’s harmony.

What united ideologues of every stripe, Aron believed, was the superstition of inevitability — the “idolatry of History” that baptizes power as progress. Marxists invoked dialectic, technocrats invoked modernization, but both replaced responsibility with necessity.

In Peace and War, he wrote that “unconditional faith” is the perennial temptation of politics — the belief that purity of ends can redeem impurity of means. That faith was responsible, in his eyes, for both revolutionary and imperial delusions: the Jacobin, the Bolshevik, the colonial missionary. What they shared was the refusal to accept the tragic structure of human action. Politics, for Aron, is a sphere where every good exacts a cost, and where progress, if it occurs, comes not by revelation but by repair.

What they shared was the refusal to accept the tragic structure of human action. Politics, for Aron, is a sphere where every good exacts a cost, and where progress, if it occurs, comes not by revelation but by repair.

In the digital age, Aron’s realism acquires new urgency. Ideology has migrated from the party cell to the social feed, but the pattern endures. The new creed is algorithmic, not doctrinal; its ritual is outrage, its sacrament exposure, its congregation tribal. The feed has replaced the pamphlet and the party meeting as the stage where conviction is performed and belonging affirmed. It does not demand belief—it manufactures it. By curating what we see, rewarding what provokes, and burying what complicates, it builds invisible orthodoxies. Its tyranny is quiet but efficient: outrage becomes currency, moderation a vice, and truth whatever travels fastest.

Lucidity, once a philosopher’s habit, has become a civic survival skill. To stay free in the age of amplification, citizens must recover the virtue that made Aron solitary: the courage to dismantle myths—beginning with their own.

To stay free in the age of amplification, citizens must recover the virtue that made Aron solitary: the courage to dismantle myths—beginning with their own.

From Aron, several imperatives follow.

Anchor debate in fact, not metaphysical pledges. Defend legality and compromise, without which democracy perishes. Prefer responsibility to conviction, knowing that slogans absolve while consequences endure. Moderate expectations: conflict will not disappear; the task is to channel it. Retire intoxicating labels, and recover liberalism as the politics of limits—where freedom and equality clash and must be continually rebalanced.

This is not moral relativism; it is moral adulthood. The courageous art of living with contradiction. The spirit of moderation, which the 20th century derided as cowardice, may yet prove the only antidote to 21st-century zeal.

Aron died in 1983, collapsing on the courthouse steps. His final act was a testament to his entire life: testifying in defense of a fellow intellectual, Bertrand de Jouvenel, against accusations of youthful fascism. He was, to the last, the citizen who refused modern temptations: the fanaticism that demands purity, the indifference that abandons care, and the nihilism that denies meaning. What the spectateur engagé taught, in life and in death, was not withdrawal but measure—an ethic of repair over perfection, of argument over absolutes, of judgment over intoxication.

If May ’68 celebrated the romance of rupture, Aron honored the craft of maintenance.

If May ’68 celebrated the romance of rupture, Aron honored the craft of maintenance. That is why the lasting image of his work is not the barricade but Gustave Courbet’s The Wheat Sifters—three women bent patiently over their labor, separating grain from chaff. Courbet painted the dignity of work without illusion; Aron practiced the same craft with ideas - he spent his life sifting through ideological propaganda to find the hard kernels of truth.

Freedom not as a momentary ecstasy but a durable habit: the steady refusal to let passion eclipse proportion. ◳