Julien Benda
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Ce prestige [moral] est lui-même chose nouvelle dans l’histoire, du moins au point où nous le voyons. Des effets comme celui que produisit en France, lors de l’affaire Dreyfus, l’intervention des « intellectuels », ou encore, en 1914, non seulement dans leur pays mais dans le monde entier, le manifeste dit des intellectuels allemands, sont des choses dont je ne vois pas l’équivalent dans le passé. On n’imagine pas la République romaine se sentant soutenue dans son agression contre Carthage par l’assentiment de Térence ou de Varron, ni le gouvernement de Louis XIV trouvant un surplus de force dans sa guerre contre la Hollande par l’approbation de Racine ou de Fermat." --The Betrayal of the Intellectuals |
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Julien Benda (December 26, 1867 Paris – June 7, 1956) was a French philosopher and novelist. He remains famous for his essay The Betrayal of the Intellectuals.
Life
Born into a Jewish family, Benda became a master of French belles-lettres. Yet he believed that science was superior to literature as a method of inquiry. He disagreed with Henri Bergson, the leading light of French philosophy of his day.
Benda is now mostly remembered for his short 1927 book La Trahison des Clercs, a work of some notoriety in its day. The title of the English translation was The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, although "The Treason of the Learned" would have been more accurate. This polemical essay argued that French and German intellectuals in the 19th and 20th century had often lost the ability to reason dispassionately about political and military matters, instead becoming apologists for crass nationalism, warmongering and racism. Benda reserved his harshest criticisms for his fellow Frenchmen Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès. Benda defended the measured and dispassionate outlook of classical civilization, and the internationalism of traditional Christianity, which he understood well.
Other works by Benda include Belphégor (1918), Uriel's Report (1926), and Exercises of a Man Buried Alive (1947), an attack on the contemporary French celebrities of his time. Most of the titles in the bibliography below were published during the last three decades of Benda's long life; he is emphatically a 20th century author. Moreover, Benda survived the German occupation of France, 1940–44, and the Vichy regime despite being a Jew and having called the Germans "one of the plagues of the world". Nevertheless, Benda appears little read by English speakers -- The Betrayal of the Intellectuals is his only work translated into English currently in print. That Roger Kimball wrote the introduction to a 2006 edition of this translation suggests that Benda commands some respect among present-day Anglophone conservative thinkers. But his influence can also be felt in the works of Noam Chomsky. However the phrase 'Betrayal of the Intellectuals' or (more commonly) the 'Treason of the Intellectuals' has become a commonly used phrase to describe what happens when the intelligentsia compromise their intellectual honesty for political reasons: this may of course apply as much to intellectuals of the Right as of the Left.
Bibliography
- Les amorandes – 1922
- Appositions – 1930
- Belphégor : essai sur l'esthétique de la présente société française – 1919
- Les cahiers d'un clerc, 1936-1949 – 1949
- Cléanthis ou du Beau et de l'actuel – 1928
- Un Régulier dans le siècle (Paris, Gallimard) 1938
- La crise du rationalisme – 1949
- La croix de roses ; précédé d'un dialogue d'Eleuthère avec l'auteur – 1923
- Discours à la nation européenne – 1933
- Du poétique. Selon l'humanité, non selon les poètes – 1946
- Du style d'idées : réflexions sur la pensée, sa nature, ses réalisations, sa valeur morale – 1948
- Esquisse d'une histoire des Français dans leur volonté d'être une nation – 1932
- Exercice d'un enterré vif, juin 1940-août 1944 – 1945
- La France Byzantine, ou, Le triomphe de la littérature pure : Mallarmé, Gide, Proust, Valéry, Alain Giraudoux, Suarès, les Surréalistes : essai d'une psychologie originelle du littérateur – 1945
- La grande épreuve des démocraties : essai sur les principes démocratiques : leur nature, leur histoire, leur valeur philosophique. – 1942
- La jeunesse d'un clerc – 1936
- Lettres à Mélisande – 1926
- Non possumus. À propos d'une certaine poésie moderne – 1946
- L'ordination – 1926
- Précision (1930–1937) – 1937
- Properce, ou, Les amants de Tibur – 1928
- Le rapport d'Uriel – 1946
- Un régulier dans le siècle – 1937
- Les sentiments de Critias – 1917
- Tradition de l'existentialisme, ou, Les philosophies de la vie – 1947
- La trahison des clercs – 1927
- English translation,The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, by Richard Aldington:
- 1955 (1928). Beacon Press. Introduction by Herbert Read.
- The Treason of the Intellectuals
- 2006. Transaction Publishers. Introduction by Roger Kimball.
- English translation,The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, by Richard Aldington:
- Trois idoles romantiques : le dynamisme, l'existentialisme, la dialectique matérialiste – 1948
