Raymond Aron

Political scientist, sociologist, journalist, and philosopher Raymond Aron was born into a secular Jewish family in Paris. From 1930 to 1933, he lived in Germany, lecturing at the University of Cologne and studying in Berlin. He left Germany with a deep distaste for totalitarianism, which would later shape his response to Stalinism. During World War II, he served with the French air force, and followed the Free French forces to London, where he edited La France libre. Although he was a socialist in his youth, his best-known work, The Opium of the Intellectuals, criticized the French Left for overlooking totalitarianism in communist regimes. At the time, Aron’s ideas were unpopular, but as the atrocities committed by Stalin came to light, his work came to be considered prophetic.