The Treason of the Intellectuals

Julien Benda, Roger Kimball

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351298582
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1

The Modern Perfecting of Political Passions

We are to consider those passions termed political, owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions, class passions and national passions. Those persons who are most determined to believe in the inevitable progress of the human species, especially in its indispensable movement towards more peace and love, cannot deny that during the past century these passions have attained—and day by day increasingly so—in several most important directions, a degree of perfection hitherto unknown in history.

In the first place they affect a large number of men they never before affected. When, for example, we study the civil wars which convulsed France in the sixteenth century, and even those at the end of the eighteenth century, we are struck by the small number of persons whose minds were really disturbed by these events. While history, up to the nineteenth century, is filled with long European wars which left the great majority of people completely indifferent, apart from the material losses they themselves suffered,¹ it may be said that to-day there is scarcely a mind in Europe which is not affected—or thinks itself affected—by a racial or class or national passion, and most often by all three. The same progress seems to have taken place in the New World, while immense bodies of men in the Far East, who seemed to be free from these impulses, are awakening to social hatred, the party system, and the national spirit insofar as it implies the will to humiliate other men. To-day political passions have attained a universality never before known.

They have also attained coherence. Thanks to the progress of communication and, still more, to the group spirit, it is clear that the holders of the same political hatred now form a compact impassioned mass, every individual of which feels himself in touch with the infinite numbers of others, whereas a century ago such people were comparatively out of touch with each other and hated in a “scattered” way. This is singularly striking with respect to the working classes who, even in the middle of the nineteenth century, felt only a scattered hostility for the opposing class, attempted only dispersed efforts at war (such as striking in one town, or one union), whereas to-day they form a closely-woven fabric of hatred from one end of Europe to the other. It may be asserted that these coherences will tend to develop still further, for the will to group is one of the most profound characteristics of the modern world, which even in the most unexpected domains (for instance, the domain of thought) is more and more becoming the world of leagues, of “unions” and of “groups.” Is it necessary to say that the passion of the individual is strengthened by feeling itself in proximity to these thousands of similar passions? Let me add that the individual bestows a mystic personality on the association of which he feels himself a member, and gives it a religious adoration, which is simply the deification of his own passion, and no small stimulus to its intensity.

The coherence just described might be called a surface coherence, but there is added to it a coherence of essence. For the very reason that the holders of the same political passion form a more compact, impassioned group, they also form a more homogeneous, impassioned group, in which individual ways of feeling disappear and the zeal of each member more and more takes on the color of the others. In France, for instance, one cannot but be struck by the fact that the enemies of the democratic system (I am speaking of the mass, not the highest points) display a passion which has little variety, shows very slight differences in different persons. How little this mass of hatred is weakened by personal and original manners of hating—one might almost say that this passion itself is obedient to “democratic leveling down”! How much more uniformity is shown now than a hundred years ago by the emotions known as anti-semitism, anti-Clericalism and Socialism, in spite of the immense number of varieties in the last-named! And do not those who are subject to these emotions now all tend to say the same thing? Political passions, as passions, seem to have attained the habit of discipline; they seem to obey a word of command even in the manner they are felt. It is easy to see what increase of strength they acquire thereby.

With some of these passions the increase in homogeneousness is accompanied by an increased precision. For instance, we all know that a hundred years ago Socialism was a strong but vague passion with the great mass of its supporters. But to-day Socialism has more closely defined the object it wishes to attain, has determined the exact point where it means to strike its adversary and the movement it intends to create in order to succeed. The same progress may be observed in the anti-democratic movement. And we all know that hatred becomes stronger by becoming more precise.

There is another sort of perfecting of political passions. Throughout history until our own days I see these passions acting intermittently, blazing up and then subsiding. I see that the undoubtedly terrible and numerous explosions of class and race hatred were followed by long periods of calm, or at least of somnolence. Wars between nations lasted for years, but not hatred—even if we may say that it existed. To-day we have only to look every morning at any daily paper and we shall see that political hatreds do not cease for a single day. At best some of them are silent a moment for the benefit of one among them which suddenly claims all the subject’s strength. This is the period of “national unions,” which do not in the very least herald in the reign of love, but merely of a general hatred which for the moment dominates partial hatreds. To-day political passions have acquired continuity, which is so rare a quality in all feelings.

Let us consider a moment the impulse which causes partial hatreds to abdicate in favor of another, more general hatred, which derives a new religion of itself and hence a new strength, from the feeling of its generality. Perhaps it has not been sufficiently observed that this sort of impulse is one of the essential characteristics of the nineteenth century. Twice during the nineteenth century, in Germany and in Italy, the age-old hatreds of petty States disappeared in favor of a great national passion. In the same period (more precisely, at the end of the eighteenth century) in France, the mutual hatred of the Court nobles and the country nobles was extinguished in the greater hatred of both parties for all who were not nobles; the hatred between the military and legal nobles disappeared in the same Impulse; the hatred between the upper and lower ranks of the clergy vanished in their common hatred of laicality; the hatred between clergy and nobility expired to the profit of their mutual hatred for the commons. And in our times the hatred between the three orders has melted into one hatred, that of the possessing classes for the working class. The condensation of political passions into a small number of very simple hatreds, springing from the deepest roots of the human heart, is a conquest of modern times.²

I also believe that I see a great progress in political passions to-day in their relation to other passions in the same person. Political passions undoubtedly occupied more of the attention of a bourgeois of ancient France than is usually supposed, but less than the love of money and pleasure, family feeling and the calls of vanity; while the least we can say of his modern equivalent is that when political passions take possession of him, they do so to the same extent as the other passions. Compare, for instance, the tiny place occupied by political passions in the French bourgeois as he appears in the Fabliaux, in medieval drama, the novels of Scarron, Furetière and Charles Sorel,³ with the same bourgeois as drawn by Balzac, Stendhal, Anatole France, Abel Hermant and Paul Bourget, (Of course, I am not speaking of times of crisis, like the Ligue and the Fronde, when political passions occupied the whole individual as soon as they touched him at all.) The truth is that to-day political passions are invading most of the other passions in the bourgeoisie, and weakening the latter to their own profit. Every one knows that in our own days family rivalries, commercial enmities, ambitions and the competition for public honors are all tainted with political passion. An apostle of the modern mind clamors for “politics first.” He might have observed that nowadays it is politics everywhere, politics always and nothing but politics.⁴ We have only to open our eyes to see when an increase of power is acquired by political passion when combined with other passions, so numerous, so constant and so strong themselves. Coming to the man of the people, we can measure the increase of his political passions in relation to his other passions in modern times by considering, as Stendhal puts it, how long his whole passion was limited to wishing (a) Not to be killed, (b) For a good warm coat.

And then we may recollect that when a little less misery permitted him a few general ideas, how long it was before his vague desire for social changes was transformed into a passion, i.e. showing the two essential characteristics of passion: The fixed idea, and the need to put it into action.⁵ I think it may be said that political passions in all classes to-day have attained a degree of preponderance over all other passions in those affected such as hitherto had been unknown.

The reader will already have perceived an all-important factor in the impulses I have been describing. Political passions rendered universal, coherent, homogeneous, permanent, preponderant—every one can recognize there to a great extent the work of the cheap daily political newspaper. One cannot help reflecting and wondering whether it may not be that inter-human wars are only just beginning, when one thinks of this instrument for developing their own passions which men have just invented, or at least brought to a degree of power never seen before, to which they abandon themselves with all the expansion of their hearts every morning as soon as they are awake.

I have now showed what might be called the perfecting of political passions on the surface, in their more or less exterior aspects. But they have also become strangely perfected in depth and inner strength.

In the first place they have made an immense advance in consciousness of themselves. Here again, largely owing to the influence of the newspaper, it is clear that the mind affected by political hatred to-day becomes conscious of its own passion, formulates it, sees it, with an accuracy unknown to the same sort of mind fifty years ago. There is no need to say how much the passion is intensified by this. And while I am on this subject I should like to point to two passions, which have certainly not come to birth In our times but have attained consciousness of themselves, self-assertion, a pride in themselves.

The first is what I shall call a certain Jewish nationalism. In the past, when the Jews were accused in various countries of forming an inferior race, or at any rate a peculiar people not to be assimilated, they replied by denying their peculiarity, by trying to get rid of all appearance of peculiarity, and by refusing to admit the reality of race. But in the last few years we see some of them laboring to assert this peculiarity, to define its characteristics—or what they think such—taking a pride in it, and condemning every effort at assimilation with their opponents (see the works of Israel Zangwill, of André Spire, and the Revue Juive). Here I am not trying to discover whether the impulse of these Jews is or is not nobler than the efforts of so many others to have their origin pardoned them; I am simply pointing out to those interested in the progress of peace in the world that our age has added one more arrogance to those which set men against each other, at least to the extent that it is conscious and proud of itself.⁶

The other impulse I am thinking of is “bourgeoisism” by which I mean the passion of the bourgeois class in asserting itself against the class by which it is threatened. It may be said that until our own times, “class hatred,” as a conscious hatred proud of itself, was chiefly the hatred of the laborer for the bourgeois. The reciprocal hatred was much less clearly confessed. Ashamed of an egotism they thought peculiar to their own caste, the bourgeois temporized with this egotism, would not admit even to themselves that it existed, tried to convince themselves and others that It was a form of interest In the common good.⁷ The bourgeois replied to the dogma of the class war by denying that there really are any classes, thereby showing that while they felt an inalterable opposition to the adverse party, they were unwilling to admit that they felt it. Today we have only to think of Italian “Fascism,” of a certain “Eloge du Bourgeois Français,” and numerous other manifestations of the same kind,⁸ and we shall see that the bourgeoisie are becoming fully conscious of their specific egotisms, are proclaiming and venerating them as such and as though these egotisms were bound up with the supreme interests of the human race, that they are proud of this veneration and of setting up these egotisms against those which are trying to destroy the bourgeoisie. In our time there has been created the “mysticism” of bourgeois passion in its opposition to the passions of the other class.⁹ Here again our age enters in the balance-sheet of humanity the arrival of yet one more passion at full possession of itself.

The progress of political passions in depth during the past century seems to me most remarkable in the case of national passions.

First of all, owing to the fact that they are experienced to-day by large masses of men, these passions have become far more purely passionate. When the national feeling was practically confined to Kings or their Ministers, it consisted chiefly in attachment to some interest (desire for territorial expansion, search for commercial advantages and profitable alliances), whereas to-day when this national feeling is continually experienced by common minds, it consists chiefly in the exercise of pride. Every one will agree that nationalist passion in the modern citizen is far less founded on a comprehensive knowledge of the national interests (he has an imperfect perception of these interests, he lacks the information necessary and does not try to acquire it, for he is indifferent to questions of foreign policy) than on the pride he feels in his nation, on his will to feel himself one with the nation, to react to the honors and insults he thinks are bestowed on it. No doubt he wants his nation to acquire territories, to be prosperous and to have powerful allies; but he wants all this far less on account of the material results which will accrue to the nation (how much is he conscious of these results?) than on account of the glory, the prestige which the nation will acquire. By becoming popular, national feeling has become national pride, national susceptibility.¹⁰ To measure how much more purely passionate it has become, how much more perfectly irrational (and therefore stronger) one has only to think of Jingoism, the form of patriotism specially invented by democracies. If, in accordance with current opinion, you think that pride is a weaker passion than self-interest, you may be convinced to the contrary by observing how commonly men let themselves be killed on account of a wound to their pride, and how infrequently for some infraction of their interests.

The susceptibility developed by national sentiment as it has become popular makes the possibility of wars far greater to-day than in the past. Obviously, with the peoples and with the aptitude of these new “sovereigns” to rise up in a rage as soon as they think they are insulted, peace runs an additional danger which did not exist when it depended only upon Kings and their Ministers, who were far more purely practical persons, fully self-controlled, and quite willing to put up with insults when they did not think themselves the stronger party.¹¹ And, in fact, how many times during the last hundred years has the world almost flamed up in war solely because some nation thought its honor had been wounded?¹² To this must be added the fact that this national susceptibility provides the leaders of nations with a new and most effective method of starting the wars they need, whether it is employed at home or abroad. They have not failed to see this, which is amply proved by the example of Bismarck and the means by which he provoked war with Austria and with France. From this point of view it seems to me quite correct to say with the French monarchists that “democracy is war,” provided that by democracy is meant the attainment of national susceptibility by the masses, and provided that it is recognized that no change in the system of govern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• 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