Julien Benda - Life

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 considerable influence. 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.