The Myth of Revolution

THE OPIUM OF THE INTELLECTUALS (324 pp.)--Raymond Aron--Doubleday ($4.50).

French intellectuals are never happier than when planting the horns of a dilemma on another Frenchman's head. Raymond Aron, brilliant political commentator and Sorbonne professor of philosophy, contends that this intellectual thingumbobbery makes French thinkers and their followers so outrageous and opinionated, so unable to get along with one another, that it is a wonder France exists at all.

In the dry, derisive manner of the best French writing, Aron indicts the French intelligentsia for committing treason against the West, and he does much to elucidate a mystery that bedevils the friends of France: Why, in the name of (and despite) their own traditions of freedom, are France's most vocal philosophers artists and scientists declared Soviet partisans or, at least, neutralists?

Of Tradition & Progress. The French are philosophically unlike the Americans, whose revolution, as Aron sees it, did not involve so much a change of mind as a change in title to power. They are unlike the British, whose revolution came on the installment plan, and was hardly noticed until it was all over. The French Revolution was different: it created a deep fission in the French mind between traditional and supposedly progressive values, and left all questions unresolved. The revolution tended to be a permanent thing--an ideal, a matter for the future rather than a historical event. Its romance became a myth which grew to include other revolutions, notably the Russian, until at times the French cult of revolution seems "indistinguishable from the Fascist cult of violence." Enemies of the church, French intellectuals have hankered for a substitute religion and found it in a kind of futurism." Revolution. Aron says, serves as a refuge from reality for Utopian intellectuals; Communism is their opium.

Aron's cold hatred of Communism and his meticulous destruction of its myth, its mythologists and its common gulls make this a book that should be read in the U.S. Aron is writing mostly of French intellectuals, but much of what he says applies to many intellectuals elsewhere--their futurism, their dogmatic opposition to religion, their slavish conformity to the stale attitudes of "nonconformity," their long willingness to excuse Soviet crimes in the name of a higher aim (scathingly, Aron asks why so many had to wait for the Hungarian massacres to become indignant when the purge trials, the slave labor camps, the Katyn massacre, the mass deportations should have been enough). Says Aron: "Both American liberals and the Left in France and Britain share the same illusion: the illusion of the orientation of history in a constant direction . . . Marxism is only one version, a simultaneously cataclysmic and determinist version, of an optimism to which rationalists are professionally inclined."

Of Doubt & Faith. Aron concludes with a kind of conservative manifesto in which he denies the claim of the hot-eyed progressives to be the monopolists of hope. "The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings, participates in living communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism," i.e., Communism.

In a rather wistful addendum, Aron says: "If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and Utopias." Logician Aron should know that doubt in one thing issues from faith in another. In any case, his is an unpractical enterprise in the present state of the French mind--like sending Coke to Cognac. He leaves France with nothing more nourishing than a paradox: "Let us pray for the advent of the sceptics."

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