Raymond Aron

Before his time or not, Raymond Aron was right in his time and continues to be right today. His work is at the forefront of denouncing all forms of totalitarianism. Philosopher, sociologist, journalist, professor, and political scientist, Aron was born in 1905 in Paris into a family of Jewish origin, becoming known for his skepticism towards the French left. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure, where he met Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom he became friends and later a strong intellectual opponent. He was a columnist for Le Figaro and L’Express, and taught at institutions such as the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, having had figures such as Pierre Bourdieu, André Glucksmann, and Henry Kissinger as students. He published several influential books that consolidated his position as an intellectual authority among French conservatives. A thinker of uncommon insight, he is one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century, and author of a vast body of work, most notably The Opium of the Intellectuals (1957), a well-known attack against Sartre, Marxism, and the French intelligentsia, detoxifying the one-sided thinking of the left and the denial of Marxist intellectuals in the face of the brutal repression of communism. In 1977, suffering from an embolism, he rethought his life and decided to write his memoirs. He died in 1983.