INTELLECTUAL DISHONESTY – THE TREASON OF THE INTELLECTUALS
By Gareth van Onselen
Introduction
Julien Benda (1867 – 1956) was a prolific French writer; and yet ironically, although he wrote some 50 books during his lifetime, by most accounts he is remembered for the title of just one of them: La trahison des clercs (1927).
The precise English translation of that title is disputed in some circles, but most people agree that The treason of intellectuals best captures the phrase.
Benda was many things: a writer, a philosopher, a political commentator and a critic; above all of those though, he was a rationalist who dedicated his life, like all rationalists, to the pursuit and discovery of a single universal truth.
La trahison des clercs argued that the ‘clercs’ in France (by which he meant intellectuals) had abandoned the principles and values that had once defined intellectual thought and, instead, embraced political passions and practical ends. In short, ideals had been replaced by politics and the search for the truth limited by political paradigms.
There are a number of parallels that can be drawn between Benda’s criticism of French intellectuals of the 1920s and 30s and the way in which South Africa’s contemporary intellectuals have substituted the ANC’s political programme of transformation for the values and ideals which define South Africa’s Constitution.
La trahison des clercs
The editor of the New Republic describes La trahison des clercs as “a deeply prescient document on political passion, with its insistence that Western writers were failing to protect the ideals of liberalism.”
(An excerpt from La trahison des clercs can be found here. The Criterion Collection review of the book can be found here and T.S Eliot’s critical but accepting 1928 review, here.)
Benda defined ‘clercs’ as those “whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, [but] all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or science or metaphysical speculation”.
He considered great rationalists like Baruch Spinoza and the French writer and critic Charles Baudelaire as classic examples of true ‘clercs’, who pursued and investigated ideals, untainted by practical constraints and not influenced by political pressure to conform to any one particular way of thinking.
At the time La trahison des clercs first appeared, in 1927, nationalism and various different ethnic movements were gaining strength in France. The book made a significant impact - disproportionately big, in fact, when compared to its legacy, which seems to revolve almost entirely around the phrase the treason of the intellectuals and which still enjoys a certain currency today.
Benda never argued that intellectuals should play no part in practical politics. His primary concern was that the politics of the day (French nationalism) had permeated intellectual thought – Benda wrote that politics “mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers” - so that intellectual thought was no longer a process that guided political and practical decisions, but instead was increasingly grounded in a particular political paradigm and no longer able to distinguish ideals and principles from political ends.
“Our age has seen priests of the mind teaching that gregarious is the praiseworthy form of thought, and that independent thought is con
| Posted on 7/6/2007
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