Treason of the Intellectuals

Julien Benda's classic book on the toxic mix of intellectuals and power is its own paradox   

Treason of the Intellectuals by Julien Benda

Reviewed by Gustav Jönsson

The title of Julien Benda’s La Trahison des clercs - The Treason of the Intellectuals - has become a synecdoche for a tradition that upholds truth in the face of moral corruption and castigates those intellectuals who succumb to the allures of political tyranny. Published in 1927, when street battles between fascists and communists were weekly affairs, Treason is a book that speaks to each generation’s own crisis. For Benda, the traitors were Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, the Action Française, and other reactionary nationalists. The betrayal in question was that of the intellectual vocation itself. Intellectuals - who should have devoted their lives to truth and justice - had, in Benda’s felicitous phrase, preached the abandonment of the toga for the sword. Instead of challenging power, they had become its servants and ideologues....

Benda introduced Treason with a story about Leo Tolstoy. When Tolstoy witnessed a fellow officer beat a man who fell out of marching ranks, he asked the officer if he had never heard of the gospels. The officer, in reply, asked if Tolstoy had never heard of the army regulations. For Benda, it was reasonable that the officer replied as he did, but it was nonetheless crucial that there be men like Tolstoy to protest. These men were the clercs - loosely translated, “scribes” with the hint of ecclesiastical status. “It is thanks to these scribes … that humanity did evil for two thousand years but nonetheless paid tribute to the good,” Benda wrote. “This contradiction was an honour to the human race, opening up the crack whereby civilisation could occasionally slip through.”....

https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/treason-of-the-intellectuals/


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