The Opium of the Intellectuals

Aron’s 1955 attack on the French intelligentsia’s attachment to Marxism, written while most of his Parisian peers were still excusing Stalin. He takes apart the three myths he says hold the commitment together — the Left as a single continuous cause, the Revolution as a redemptive event, and the Proletariat as a collective subject with a historical mission — and argues that they function as secular religion, giving intellectuals meaning at the price of judgement. The title inverts Marx’s own line about religion being the opium of the people. Its lasting charge is that the clerisy applies a harsh standard to the societies it lives in and none at all to the ones it admires. First published in French in 1955; the standard English translation followed in 1957.

Why it’s on the list: It opens McCord’s Marxism and Collective Psychology section, ahead of Hayek’s “The Intellectuals and Socialism” — the pair that frame the section’s real question, which is less what Marxism claims than why clever people believed it.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the Political Philosophy and the History of Ideas part, section Marxism and Collective Psychology — a structured curriculum shared on X on March 9, 2026 and saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Books To Read”. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Marked with a ☑️ on the source page. The page gives no legend for that mark, so it is recorded here literally and not interpreted.

Connections

• Karl Marx — the thinker whose line the title inverts and whose system Aron dissects.
• Socialism — the commitment under examination.
• Collectivism — the political form Aron argues the myths underwrite.
• Witness (Chambers) — a first-person account of the same commitment, later in the same section of McCord’s list.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.