The Treason of the Intellectuals

by Julien Benda, Roger Kimball

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138539174
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	10/27/2017
Pages:	202
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

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