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nicktomjoe's review against another edition
4.0
I am not generous with my five stars, so this gets relegated to my broad 2:1 category. I'm not sure this kind of crude system really works for a book of such amazing prescience, but for anyone who thought - as I did - that Benda was going to explore intellectual failures, the decapitation of learning, I have to say "This Is Not That Book" - or at any rate, not the book you might have expected.
I first met the phrase "Trahison des Clercs" in C S Lewis, and apart from the eye-opening similarities between Brenda's views on the rise of "realist" nationalist movements and today, there is also some insight to be gained from seeing Brenda's views echoed in Lewis' adult science fiction.
Julien Benda is writing after WWI, making a plea for an anti-nationalist stance I the face of Christian apologists whose post-war national interest seemed to him to open the way for a crude and unjust morality. In doing so, Benda can see the rise of Fascism very clearly, and, despite the writerly conceit of discussing Europe in terms of "clerk" and "layman," is able to lay bare notions of "expert" and "populist," and the betrayal of thinkers in the face of demagoguery in ways that immediately made me think of Trump, Gove, our rediscovery of brutalist politics.
This is a book with much to say, especially in its first sections, to our current generation - but has to be read with an eye to its early C20th French context.
I first met the phrase "Trahison des Clercs" in C S Lewis, and apart from the eye-opening similarities between Brenda's views on the rise of "realist" nationalist movements and today, there is also some insight to be gained from seeing Brenda's views echoed in Lewis' adult science fiction.
Julien Benda is writing after WWI, making a plea for an anti-nationalist stance I the face of Christian apologists whose post-war national interest seemed to him to open the way for a crude and unjust morality. In doing so, Benda can see the rise of Fascism very clearly, and, despite the writerly conceit of discussing Europe in terms of "clerk" and "layman," is able to lay bare notions of "expert" and "populist," and the betrayal of thinkers in the face of demagoguery in ways that immediately made me think of Trump, Gove, our rediscovery of brutalist politics.
This is a book with much to say, especially in its first sections, to our current generation - but has to be read with an eye to its early C20th French context.
alexander0's review
3.0
Truthfully, this book does not say very much. What has been said here, if it were not a work of history, could have been argued in all of 20 pages. This is not to say that what is has said is not relevant or important. However, there is a slight oddity in that the very thesis of the book seems to fail at its own goal. If this book is reported as a work of a 'clerc', then it is a failure. Thus, I choose to not see it as such, but rather an interested (as opposed to disinterested, as the book would argue) warning to the intellectual.
The warning is as follows: 'The society of intellectuals ("clercs") should never stoop to the goals of nationalism, fascism, or hatred towards those of property. As soon as the society (or individuals of that society) does so, it gives up any plausible attention to transcendental truths.' Here I agree.
However, the way in which the author organizes this argument has difficulty. For example, the author claims that it is not necessarily the goal of a clerc that makes one fail, but rather how this work is used that makes it sufficiently treasonous. However, if a clerc intends to be used by political "realists" or for practical policy, it is necessarily a failure. The problem here is that it is claimed reasonable to place blame on the intellectual for their social interpretation regardless of their goal. If this were the case, then Spinoza, a clerc which the author to be a shining example, would be a failure under interpretation of post-modern religion. Spinoza's ethics is often proposed as a method of establishing a social anarchy of post-modern experience. This is not disinterested!
I wondered if the author would clarify more in detail how to address these interpretations, but he never does. Instead he resorts to rants about interested others. I feel this book leaves its arguments vaguely unfinished, and instead rests its case on historical failures and predictions, such as grand wars, which could have been explained away by other means, and often were.
Still, there is something respectable about pointing this out, and it would seem to me that in a modern world, this is the kind of argument that is often offered in opposition to scientifically and ethically relativist postmodernist propositions. It raises questions about how one presents their work as an academic and whether or not it is truly a theoretical gain, or if it is rather solely interested in political power under the banner of popular ethical quips. It oddly enough, seems to offer the beginnings of an explanation for why the alt-right and antifa might be considered equally nationalistic, fascistic, and ethically relativistic in the modern political world. Unfortunately, it does not do so an an sufficiently metaphysically useful way. So one cannot use this work as a clerc, one can only use the questions it raises.
The warning is as follows: 'The society of intellectuals ("clercs") should never stoop to the goals of nationalism, fascism, or hatred towards those of property. As soon as the society (or individuals of that society) does so, it gives up any plausible attention to transcendental truths.' Here I agree.
However, the way in which the author organizes this argument has difficulty. For example, the author claims that it is not necessarily the goal of a clerc that makes one fail, but rather how this work is used that makes it sufficiently treasonous. However, if a clerc intends to be used by political "realists" or for practical policy, it is necessarily a failure. The problem here is that it is claimed reasonable to place blame on the intellectual for their social interpretation regardless of their goal. If this were the case, then Spinoza, a clerc which the author to be a shining example, would be a failure under interpretation of post-modern religion. Spinoza's ethics is often proposed as a method of establishing a social anarchy of post-modern experience. This is not disinterested!
I wondered if the author would clarify more in detail how to address these interpretations, but he never does. Instead he resorts to rants about interested others. I feel this book leaves its arguments vaguely unfinished, and instead rests its case on historical failures and predictions, such as grand wars, which could have been explained away by other means, and often were.
Still, there is something respectable about pointing this out, and it would seem to me that in a modern world, this is the kind of argument that is often offered in opposition to scientifically and ethically relativist postmodernist propositions. It raises questions about how one presents their work as an academic and whether or not it is truly a theoretical gain, or if it is rather solely interested in political power under the banner of popular ethical quips. It oddly enough, seems to offer the beginnings of an explanation for why the alt-right and antifa might be considered equally nationalistic, fascistic, and ethically relativistic in the modern political world. Unfortunately, it does not do so an an sufficiently metaphysically useful way. So one cannot use this work as a clerc, one can only use the questions it raises.
blackoxford's review against another edition
4.0
A Century of Further Decline
Several days ago I posted a review of my re-reading of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. Re-entering that magical sphere, I recalled this piece by Julien Benda. Written two decades before The Glass Bead Game, Treason of The Intellectuals covers similar ground and makes the same point as Hesse: something has gone seriously awry with education and the uses of intellectual power. One can only observe that, if anything, the situation has become worse since Hesse and Benda wrote. So it seems sensible to revisit Treason to at least become more aware of the problem.
“Our age,” Benda says, referring to that generation of almost a century ago, “is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” Little did he comprehend how far that hatred might expand in depth and scope. From the nationalistic terrorism of the Middle East, to the nativist terrorism of the European and North American Right, every faction has its sociological and political experts, their intellectual privateers, as Hesse called them, from universities and ‘think tanks’. They all pretend to provide factual arguments for some point of view. Of course their main products are tendentious statements of half-truths and ‘alternative facts.’
The intellectuals who peddle this material are far more successful in worldly terms than those who merely engage in scholarly thought and reflection. The pedlars have a constituency, from this they enjoy celebrity, and from celebrity they derive wealth with which to peddle more intellectual junk. Bill O’Reilly and his former cohort at Fox News is a sterling example of the pseudo-intellectual pundit who has little interest in either truth or his fellowman.
Not that the political Right, or even politics generally, have a monopoly on intellectual hypocrisy. The business guru is arguably top of the heap when it comes to academic rubbish. Typically with a degree or two from one or another leading Business School and having written a carefully structured article, employing unverifiable ‘facts’ from six proprietary case studies, placed through contacts in the Harvard Business Review, the business intellectual is guaranteed a following, and more importantly, clients for his bold experiments in corporate organisation. He might expect $20,000 for an after dinner speech and countless numbers of highly paid consulting contracts.
Academia itself has created an ideology of ‘relevance’ that feeds the beast. At one point early in my career I was a member of an academic institute at the University of Pennsylvania. The institute was run by a brilliant man who had an explicit and compelling credo: ‘We are not here to address academic puzzles but to solve real social problems.’ What he meant by that in practice was that we would only do work if it was for someone else who was willing to pay us. This made sense to me at the time. Only as I matured did I realise that what we were doing was letting someone else - particularly if they had deep pockets - define what constituted a significant social problem. Commercialisation of our talents in research and analysis did not make us any more relevant, just richer.
That the lives of thousands of corporate employees might be thrown into turmoil, their livelihoods risked or lost, their human autonomy eliminated, hardly crosses the mind of the commercial academic or business ‘thought-leader’. His self-image and rationalisation is one of advancing knowledge and making the world an economically more efficient place. I know this because I had this self-image and made this rationalisation for a large part of my adult life and was considered normal by my colleagues. According to Benda I should receive no mercy: “Those who lead men to the conquest of material things have no need of justice and charity.” I can’t disagree.
The problem is not one of practice and professional error but one of ideals. Human beings have always been self-centred, careerist and often nasty. But they knew when they acted badly because of the professional standards of public intellectuals. “It may be said that, thanks to the ‘clerks’, humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honoured good.” In today’s world intellectual vices have become virtues. Ambition is the essential mark of character for the university graduate. Winning is the only measure of success no matter how banal, or destructive, or painful to others the competition might be. “The cult if success [by which] I mean the teaching which says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value.” is now accepted as the norm.
The real damage done by a man like Trump is that he incites all around him to forget entirely that there are such things as ideals. He stimulates the passions of his supporters with the help of palace ‘clerks’ who know that he lies, misleads, and misdirects intentionally, not necessarily to hide or conceal, but because he wants it known that he can do those things with impunity. It appears that we have reached the level of ultimate intellectual treason. Could there possibly be anywhere deeper to go?
Several days ago I posted a review of my re-reading of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. Re-entering that magical sphere, I recalled this piece by Julien Benda. Written two decades before The Glass Bead Game, Treason of The Intellectuals covers similar ground and makes the same point as Hesse: something has gone seriously awry with education and the uses of intellectual power. One can only observe that, if anything, the situation has become worse since Hesse and Benda wrote. So it seems sensible to revisit Treason to at least become more aware of the problem.
“Our age,” Benda says, referring to that generation of almost a century ago, “is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” Little did he comprehend how far that hatred might expand in depth and scope. From the nationalistic terrorism of the Middle East, to the nativist terrorism of the European and North American Right, every faction has its sociological and political experts, their intellectual privateers, as Hesse called them, from universities and ‘think tanks’. They all pretend to provide factual arguments for some point of view. Of course their main products are tendentious statements of half-truths and ‘alternative facts.’
The intellectuals who peddle this material are far more successful in worldly terms than those who merely engage in scholarly thought and reflection. The pedlars have a constituency, from this they enjoy celebrity, and from celebrity they derive wealth with which to peddle more intellectual junk. Bill O’Reilly and his former cohort at Fox News is a sterling example of the pseudo-intellectual pundit who has little interest in either truth or his fellowman.
Not that the political Right, or even politics generally, have a monopoly on intellectual hypocrisy. The business guru is arguably top of the heap when it comes to academic rubbish. Typically with a degree or two from one or another leading Business School and having written a carefully structured article, employing unverifiable ‘facts’ from six proprietary case studies, placed through contacts in the Harvard Business Review, the business intellectual is guaranteed a following, and more importantly, clients for his bold experiments in corporate organisation. He might expect $20,000 for an after dinner speech and countless numbers of highly paid consulting contracts.
Academia itself has created an ideology of ‘relevance’ that feeds the beast. At one point early in my career I was a member of an academic institute at the University of Pennsylvania. The institute was run by a brilliant man who had an explicit and compelling credo: ‘We are not here to address academic puzzles but to solve real social problems.’ What he meant by that in practice was that we would only do work if it was for someone else who was willing to pay us. This made sense to me at the time. Only as I matured did I realise that what we were doing was letting someone else - particularly if they had deep pockets - define what constituted a significant social problem. Commercialisation of our talents in research and analysis did not make us any more relevant, just richer.
That the lives of thousands of corporate employees might be thrown into turmoil, their livelihoods risked or lost, their human autonomy eliminated, hardly crosses the mind of the commercial academic or business ‘thought-leader’. His self-image and rationalisation is one of advancing knowledge and making the world an economically more efficient place. I know this because I had this self-image and made this rationalisation for a large part of my adult life and was considered normal by my colleagues. According to Benda I should receive no mercy: “Those who lead men to the conquest of material things have no need of justice and charity.” I can’t disagree.
The problem is not one of practice and professional error but one of ideals. Human beings have always been self-centred, careerist and often nasty. But they knew when they acted badly because of the professional standards of public intellectuals. “It may be said that, thanks to the ‘clerks’, humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honoured good.” In today’s world intellectual vices have become virtues. Ambition is the essential mark of character for the university graduate. Winning is the only measure of success no matter how banal, or destructive, or painful to others the competition might be. “The cult if success [by which] I mean the teaching which says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value.” is now accepted as the norm.
The real damage done by a man like Trump is that he incites all around him to forget entirely that there are such things as ideals. He stimulates the passions of his supporters with the help of palace ‘clerks’ who know that he lies, misleads, and misdirects intentionally, not necessarily to hide or conceal, but because he wants it known that he can do those things with impunity. It appears that we have reached the level of ultimate intellectual treason. Could there possibly be anywhere deeper to go?
suddenflamingword's review against another edition
2.0
2.5? Probably not?
I'm sympathetic to the sensitivity Benda had to the cultural shift happening in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, and respect the precision he had in partially diagnosing what we would later come to know as fascism. There's even something admirably sad about the scornful indignation that is Benda recounting how the "clercs" - "Intellectuals" - this once noble class of universalist, anti-worldly people have succumbed to the nationalist fervor and "pragmatic" "realism" (favored words for spitting acidly) of the "laymen." I, too, like the idea of Spinoza.
It's unfortunate, then, that Benda seems to be calling for the return of feudalism and patronage systems. Perhaps not literally. He occasionally uses the word democracy, and even decries "the Union of capitalism, anti-semiteism, anti-democracy with nationalism." But it's hard to take these claims seriously from a man who, mourning that "Civilization as I understand it here—moral supremacy conferred on the cult of the spiritual and on the feeling of the universal—appears to me as a lucky accident in man’s development," states that "I observe large portions of the species (the Asiatic world in antiquity, the Germanic world in modern times) who showed themselves incapable of it and quite likely to remain so." I doubt he sees democracy as might be assumed by us. It's also unlikely given that his framework requires an uncrossable divide between these anointed "intellectuals" whose role it is to keep the "laymen's" "practical" passions in check and the "laymen" who's baser urges drive them towards "practical" concerns.
It is prettier language for the eternal conservative ideal: there will always be poor, and they are wrong to wish for more. Unsurprising coming from a man who's rich father left him independently wealthy.
In a remarkable bit of irony he even partly blames the "fall" of the "clerk" class on the end of patronage, claiming that the proclaimed prior dynamic of intellectual guiding the laymen was reversed because the modern intellectuals are driven by careerism. This is an almost complete observation, blocked by a deep hatred of nation states. His headcanon is such that "the true appearance of the 'clerk' coincides with the fall of the Roman Empire" and "the age of the great lovers of spiritual things, the age of Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Galilei, Erasmus, was the age when most of Europe was in a state of chaos and the nations were unknown" (notice the blatant Eurocentrism).
An interesting way of looking at this book is rather as a historical document reflecting how national identity formed alongside nation-states, and the various ways in which this clashed against colonial and imperialist interests. Benda seemed to thoroughly hate the Germans, blaming them for the ideas that contributed to the "fall" of the "clercs" - drawing a line from Hegel/Nietzsche to Sorel/Proudhon (with weirdly little mention of Marx). Was antagonism towards the Germans (and Italians, to a lesser extent) a common sentiment among the French? Was Benda's view typical among the economic elite? Was a feeling that "this attitude [of the "clerks"] also seems to me to result from the decline of the study of classical literature in the formation of their minds" common among the educated elite?
In short - while The Treason of the Intellectuals might be an astute contemporary artifact of the rise of fascism, it is also, fittingly, like many of the documents handed down to us from the Medieval period and prior. It's from someone in a social strata whose artifacts get to be preserved, and so should be understood as aggressively biased towards that way of life. It's not obvious that it offers anything beyond that to someone trying to reflect on the parallels between that time period and ours.
I'm sympathetic to the sensitivity Benda had to the cultural shift happening in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, and respect the precision he had in partially diagnosing what we would later come to know as fascism. There's even something admirably sad about the scornful indignation that is Benda recounting how the "clercs" - "Intellectuals" - this once noble class of universalist, anti-worldly people have succumbed to the nationalist fervor and "pragmatic" "realism" (favored words for spitting acidly) of the "laymen." I, too, like the idea of Spinoza.
It's unfortunate, then, that Benda seems to be calling for the return of feudalism and patronage systems. Perhaps not literally. He occasionally uses the word democracy, and even decries "the Union of capitalism, anti-semiteism, anti-democracy with nationalism." But it's hard to take these claims seriously from a man who, mourning that "Civilization as I understand it here—moral supremacy conferred on the cult of the spiritual and on the feeling of the universal—appears to me as a lucky accident in man’s development," states that "I observe large portions of the species (the Asiatic world in antiquity, the Germanic world in modern times) who showed themselves incapable of it and quite likely to remain so." I doubt he sees democracy as might be assumed by us. It's also unlikely given that his framework requires an uncrossable divide between these anointed "intellectuals" whose role it is to keep the "laymen's" "practical" passions in check and the "laymen" who's baser urges drive them towards "practical" concerns.
It is prettier language for the eternal conservative ideal: there will always be poor, and they are wrong to wish for more. Unsurprising coming from a man who's rich father left him independently wealthy.
In a remarkable bit of irony he even partly blames the "fall" of the "clerk" class on the end of patronage, claiming that the proclaimed prior dynamic of intellectual guiding the laymen was reversed because the modern intellectuals are driven by careerism. This is an almost complete observation, blocked by a deep hatred of nation states. His headcanon is such that "the true appearance of the 'clerk' coincides with the fall of the Roman Empire" and "the age of the great lovers of spiritual things, the age of Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Galilei, Erasmus, was the age when most of Europe was in a state of chaos and the nations were unknown" (notice the blatant Eurocentrism).
An interesting way of looking at this book is rather as a historical document reflecting how national identity formed alongside nation-states, and the various ways in which this clashed against colonial and imperialist interests. Benda seemed to thoroughly hate the Germans, blaming them for the ideas that contributed to the "fall" of the "clercs" - drawing a line from Hegel/Nietzsche to Sorel/Proudhon (with weirdly little mention of Marx). Was antagonism towards the Germans (and Italians, to a lesser extent) a common sentiment among the French? Was Benda's view typical among the economic elite? Was a feeling that "this attitude [of the "clerks"] also seems to me to result from the decline of the study of classical literature in the formation of their minds" common among the educated elite?
In short - while The Treason of the Intellectuals might be an astute contemporary artifact of the rise of fascism, it is also, fittingly, like many of the documents handed down to us from the Medieval period and prior. It's from someone in a social strata whose artifacts get to be preserved, and so should be understood as aggressively biased towards that way of life. It's not obvious that it offers anything beyond that to someone trying to reflect on the parallels between that time period and ours.
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