Treason of the Intellectuals

by Julien Benda, David S. Broder (Translator), Mark Lilla (Foreword by)

Overview

Julien Benda's classic study of 1920s Europe resonates today. The "treason of the intellectuals" is a phrase that evokes much but is inherently ambiguous. The book bearing this title is well known but little understood. This edition is introduced by Roger Kimball.

From the time of the pre-Socratics, intellectuals were a breed apart. They were non-materialistic knowledge-seekers who believed in a universal humanism and represented a cornerstone of civilized society. According to Benda, this all began to change in the early twentieth century. In Europe in the 1920s, intellectuals began abandoning their attachment to traditional philosophical and scholarly ideals, and instead glorified particularisms and moral relativism.

The "treason" of which Benda writes is the betrayal by the intellectuals of their unique vocation. He criticizes European intellectuals for allowing political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation, ushering the world into "the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds." From the savage flowering of ethnic and religious hatreds in the Middle East and throughout Europe today to the mendacious demand for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses everywhere in the West, the treason of the intellectuals continues to play out its unedifying drama.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781912475506
Publisher:	ERIS
Publication date:	12/01/2021
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	212
Sales rank:	231,150
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Julien Benda (1867–1956) was a novelist and critic. His polemical writings ranged from Dialogues in Byzantium (on the Dreyfus affair) to an appraisal of the philosophy of Henri Bergson; in later life he was a fierce critic of the Vichy Republic. Among his other books are The Yoke of Pity, Uriel’s Report, and Exercises of a Man Buried Alive.

David Broder is a widely published translator and the author of First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy. He is currently Europe Editor at Jacobin.

Mark Lilla is Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and a prizewinning essayist for The New York Review of Books and other publications worldwide. His books include The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction; The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West; The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics; and The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Transaction Edition

Translator’s Note

Author’s Foreword

1 The Modern Perfecting of Political Passions

2 Significance of this Movement—Nature of Political Passions

3 The “Clerks”—The Great Betrayal

4 Summary—Predictions

Notes

Editorial Reviews

Sometimes a text reaches out from the past and grabs the present by the throat. Julien Benda has much to say to our time of anger and division, a time when it is easy to imagine the end of everything but nearly impossible to imagine how things might change let alone improve. Treason of the Intellectuals remains inspiring and invigorating, a call for independence and the creation of an alternative to our wholly suffocating and mind-deadening political culture. Let this book become a companion to you and a tonic for the turmoil.

Jessa Crispin

Benda's book is the great twentieth-century defense of intellectual integrity. It has become extraordinarily timely again at a moment when social criticism often routes itself through the particular loyalties of racial, religious, and national identity.

David Bromwich

-It is rich, quirky, erudite, digressive, and polemical. . . . Partisan in its claims for disinterestedness, it is ruthless in its defense of intellectual high-mindedness. . . . [G]iven the horrific events that unfolded in the decades following its publication, Benda's unremitting attack on the politicization of the intellect and ethnic separatism cannot but strike us as prescient. And given the continuing echo in our own time of the problems he anatomized, the relevance of his observations to our situation can hardly be doubted.-

--Roger Kimball, The New Criterion

"It is rich, quirky, erudite, digressive, and polemical. . . . Partisan in its claims for disinterestedness, it is ruthless in its defense of intellectual high-mindedness. . . . [G]iven the horrific events that unfolded in the decades following its publication, Benda's unremitting attack on the politicization of the intellect and ethnic separatism cannot but strike us as prescient. And given the continuing echo in our own time of the problems he anatomized, the relevance of his observations to our situation can hardly be doubted."

--Roger Kimball, The New Criterion

"It is rich, quirky, erudite, digressive, and polemical. . . . Partisan in its claims for disinterestedness, it is ruthless in its defense of intellectual high-mindedness. . . . [G]iven the horrific events that unfolded in the decades following its publication, Benda's unremitting attack on the politicization of the intellect and ethnic separatism cannot but strike us as prescient. And given the continuing echo in our own time of the problems he anatomized, the relevance of his observations to our situation can hardly be doubted."

--Roger Kimball, The New Criterion

From the Publisher