The French political philosopher Raymond Aron, who died, at the age of seventy-eight, in October 1983, is perhaps best known to American readers as the author of a crushing indictment of Western Marxism and philo-Communism, The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955), and of a skeptical, questioning, yet sympathetic view of America’s world role, The Imperial Republic (1973).¹ In fact, though Aron made many other significant contributions—in sociology, in strategy and international relations, in the history of ideas, in judgments on public policy, and in philosophy—to the culture and the spirit of democracy in the twentieth century, these two books well illustrate the range of his interests, sympathies, and learning.

Aron wrote The Opium of the Intellectuals from 1951 to 1954 as a refuge from personal tragedies, and in order to come to grips with and attack the belief, held by most French intellectuals of the time, that the Soviet Union, for all its possible faults, truly represented “the party of humanity,” that political consciousness had to be progressive, and that to be progressive was to support the Soviet Union and to criticize or oppose the United States. In writing it, he drew on his philosophical learning, his political knowledge, and his experiences as a journalist and commentator in postwar France. He wrote the other work, The Imperial Republic, some twenty years later in an effort to explain the character and methods of American foreign policy and international behavior to an audience that, in France, was at