Julien Benda

Julien Benda (26 December 1867 – 7 June 1956) was a French philosopher and novelist. He remains famous for his short book, La Trahison des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals or The Betrayal of the Intellectuals).

Born into a Jewish family in Paris, 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 best remembered for his short 1927 book La Trahison des Clercs, a work of considerable influence. It was translated into English in 1928 by Richard Aldington; the U.S. edition had the title The Treason of the Intellectuals, while the British edition had the title The Great Betrayal. It was republished in 2006 as The Treason of the Intellectuals with a new introduction by Roger Kimball. This polemical essay argued that European 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.

Closing this work, Benda darkly predicts that the augmentation of the "realistic" impulse to domination of the material world justified by intellectuals into an "integral realism" risked producing an all-encompassing species-civilization which completely ceased "to situate the good outside the real world". Human aspirations, specifically after power, would become the sole end of society. In closing, bitterly, he concludes: "And History will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died."

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