Julien Benda: Our age is the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds

By Dilip -
With a hitherto unknown consciousness (prodigiously fanned by authors) every nation now hugs itself and sets itself up against all other nations as superior in language, art, literature, philosophy, civilization, “culture.” Patriotism today is the assertion of one form of mind against other forms of mind…. it may be said that to-day capitalism, anti-semitism and the party of authority have all received new strength from their union with nationalism… 

Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds. It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity… To-day political passions show a degree of universality, of coherence, of homogeneousness, of precision, of continuity, of preponderance, in relation to other passions, unknown until our times. They have become conscious of themselves to an extent never seen before. 

Some of them, hitherto scarcely avowed, have awakened to consciousness and have joined the old passions. Others have become more purely passionate than ever, possess men’s hearts in moral regions they never before reached, and have acquired a mystic character which had disappeared for centuries. 

All are furnished with an apparatus of ideology whereby, in the name of science, they proclaim the supreme value of their action and its historical necessity. On the surface and in the depths, in spatial values and in inner strength, political passions have to-day reached a point of perfection never before known in history. The present age is essentially the age of politics...

Julien Benda; The Treason of the Intellectuals; (1928); pp 10-16

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The Sophists taught, rather publicly, that the summit of happiness is to combine the appearance of justice with actual injustice: G. A. McBrayer; On the origin of the Idea of Natural Right; in Brill's Companion to Leo Strauss, 2005; p 44

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"that as you ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head, or the head without the body, so neither ought you to attempt to cure the body without the soul.... for the part can never be well unless the whole is well." For all good and evil, whether in the body or in human nature, originates, as he declared, in the soul, and overflows from thence, as if from the head into the eyes. And therefore if the head and body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul; that is the first thing. Socrates, in Plato, Charmides, Sec 156(b)

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The criterion which makes the difference between a great man and a popular one consists in the great man's searching for what is nobly human in the masses, to raise them by its means, whereas a merely popular man looks for what is low and brutal so as to raise himself: Rabbi J.S. Bloch on Karl Lueger: My Reminiscences, 
(1923); cited in Zeev Sternhell; The Intellectual Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, 1875-1945; p 84

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STANISLAV MARKELOV - Patriotism as a diagnosis


Beginnings and Endings


Vijay Tankha: On Socrates' birthday, what can be said about the philosopher whom nobody has read?


Socrates: If the whole is ailing the part cannot be well / Ajit Prakash Shah: Darkness at noon, felled by the judiciary


Science, society and related matters: an exchange


Two lectures on time and ideology: January 23 and 24


A moment of moral and political nihilism: Theologian Adam Kotsko on our current crisis


Jon Henley: Rise of far right puts Dreyfus affair into spotlight in French election race


A pre-history of post-truth, East and West. By MARCI SHORE


Michiko Kakutani - The death of truth: how we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump


Farewell to reality - WHY WE’RE POST-FACT by Peter Pomerantsev


Why can’t we agree on what’s true anymore? By William Davies


Alexander Klein: The politics of logic


Walter Benjamin: Capitalism as Religion (1921)


ALEX ROSS - Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and the critique of pop culture.


Saladdin Said Ahmed: Mass Mentality, Culture Industry, Fascism


Theodor Adorno - Education After Auschwitz (1966)


Milan Kundera's use of Kitsch


Colloquium: The Disappearing Present: Reflections on Ideology - October 16, 2020


Alexander Stern: What the Frankfurt School has to stay about bureaucratic progressivism


Andrew Calcutt: The surprising origins of ‘post-truth’ – and how it was spawned by the liberal left


Helen Pluckrose: Postmodernism and its impact, explained


The search for new time - Ahimsa in an age of permanent war


Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism



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