Born into a Jewish family, Benda became a master of French belles-lettres. Yet he believed that science was superior to literature as a method of inquiry. He disagreed with Henri Bergson, the leading light of French philosophy of his day.
Benda is now mostly remembered for his short 1927 book La Trahison des Clercs, a work of some notoriety in its day. The title of the English translation was The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, although "The Treason of the Learned" would have been more accurate. This polemical essay argued that French and German intellectuals in the 19th and 20th century had often lost the ability to reason dispassionately about political and military matters, instead becoming apologists for crass nationalism, warmongering and racism. Benda reserved his harshest criticisms for his fellow Frenchmen Charles Maurras and Maurice Barres. Benda defended the measured and dispassionate outlook of classical civilization, and the internationalism of traditional Christianity, which Benda understood well.
Other works by Benda include Belphegor (1918), Uriel's Report (1926), and Exercises of a Man Buried Alive (1947), an attack on the contemporary French celebrities of his time. Most of the titles in the bibliography below were published during the last three decades of Benda's long life; he is emphatically a 20th century author. Moreover, Benda survived the German occupation of France, 1940–44, and the Vichy regime despite being a Jew and having called the Germans "one of the plagues of the world". Nevertheless, Benda appears little read nowadays. The Betrayal of the Intellectuals is his only work translated into English. That Roger Kimball wrote the introduction to a 2006 edition of this translation suggests that Benda commands some respect among present-day Anglophone conservative thinkers.
Bibliography
Les amorandes – 1922
Appositions – 1930
Belphégor : essai sur l'esthétique de la présente société française – 1919
Les cahiers d'un clerc, 1936-1949 – 1949
Cléanthis ou du Beau et de l'actuel – 1928
Un Régulier dans me siècle (Paris, Gallimard) 1938
La crise du rationalisme – 1949
La croix de roses ; précédé d'un dialogue d'Eleuthère avec l'auteur – 1923
Discours à la nation européenne – 1933
Du poétique. Selon l'humanité, non selon les poètes – 1946
Du style d'idées : réflexions sur la pensée, sa nature, ses réalisations, sa valeur morale – 1948
Esquisse d'une histoire des Français dans leur volonté d'être une nation – 1932
Exercice d'un enterré vif, juin 1940-août 1944 – 1945
La France Byzantine, ou, Le triomphe de la littérature pure : Mallarmé, Gide, Proust, Valéry, Alain Giraudoux, Suarès, les Surréalistes : essai d'une psychologie originelle du littérateur – 1945
La grande épreuve des démocraties : essai sur les principes démocratiques : leur nature, leur histoire, leur valeur philosophique. – 1942
La jeunesse d'un clerc – 1936
Lettres à Mélisande – 1926
Non possumus. À propos d'une certaine poésie moderne – 1946
L'ordination – 1926
Précision (1930–1937) – 1937
Properce, ou, Les amants de Tibur – 1928
Le rapport d'Uriel – 1946
Un régulier dans le siècle – 1937
Les sentiments de Critias – 1917
Tradition de l'existentialisme, ou, Les philosophies de la vie – 1947
La trahison des clercs – 1927
English translation,The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, by Richard Aldington:
1955 (1928). Beacon Press. Introduction by Herbert Read.
2006. Transaction Publishers. Introduction by Roger Kimball.
Trois idoles romantiques : le dynamisme, l'existentialisme, la dialectique matérialiste – 1948
Criticism
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