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

By Dilip - Tuesday, March 15, 2022

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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