The Treason of the Intellectuals by Julien Benda
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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?


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