The prolific combat: Aron against Marx and leftism

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to show that the debate between Raymond Aron and the French leftist like Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty was not just an expression of the cold war nor a doctrinaire liberal diatribe against socialism, but an intellectual battle about the ways of reading Marx. In this sense, it is shown that, against some perspectives of the mid-twentieth century that sought to show a Hegelian, Sansimonian or economicist Marx, Aron argued that the "Marxism of Marx" should be interpreted considering the political economy of the Trier thinker under the light of his philosophy of history. Based on this reading – which contained an unorthodox look at some key concepts of Marxism such as alienation and the declining trend of the rate of profit – Aron rehearsed a severe critique of leftist thinkers, who posited as independent intellectuals of the Communist Party but they condoned the positions of the Soviet Union in the name of a humanist liberation that, from the Aronian perspective, was based on a frivolous or erroneous reading of the Marxian texts.