Reading Marx to legitimize capitalism4 reading minutes

«It could be argued that Marx himself is partly responsible for the capacity of capitalist regimes to reform,» asks Raymond Aron, not without some amusement, in his famous lecture on Marxism by Marx, delivered at the Sorbonne in the early 1960s, then at the Collège de France a decade later, and published in 2002 by Jean-Claude Casanova (Editions de Fallois). Is Aron indulging in his customary irony? Or are we to wonder whether, behind the provocative aphorism, lies not only the profound admiration that the great French liberal has always shown for the founding father of «scientific socialism», but also a warning to those who profess to analyze... or practice this same capitalism?

In his lecture, Aron is unsparing in his criticism of Marx, the prophet who indulges in assertions that are rarely demonstrable, the econo