BENDA (Julien).
The Great Betrayal. (La Trahison des Clercs).
The first English translation of what was “undoubtedly one of the major events in political thought between the two wars. The ‘Clerc’ is what Benda conceived the intellectual to be, someone disengaged from the mere contingencies of existence and fighting for ideals which went beyond the demands of a given moment in space and time. In violent and brilliant invective, he attacked the intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for having fallen short of this ideal by becoming the devoted advocates not of ideals, but of groups of existences, material and transient, such as a nation of a social class. The title of Benda’s manifesto became a kind of catch phrase which, by a curious irony of fate, inverted its original sense, and came sometimes to be used as a term of reproach for the intellectuals who shut themselves off from the march of events in an ivory tower. The Trahison des Clercs achieved a world-wide popularity and was translated and reprinted over and over again. [It] continues to be read; and its invigorating attack on over-involvement deserves not to be forgotten” (PMM).
Printing and the Mind of Man, 419.
