Treason of the Intellectuals

By Dilip -

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/


STANISLAV MARKELOV - Patriotism as a diagnosis


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


Beginnings and Endings


José Vergara’s “All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature”


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 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



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