author
Julien Benda
1867–1956
A sharp French essayist and cultural critic, remembered above all for The Treason of the Intellectuals, challenged writers and thinkers to defend reason over political passion. His work still speaks to debates about nationalism, morality, and the public role of ideas.
1 Audiobook
The great betrayal (La trahison des clercs)
by Julien Benda
About the author
Born in Paris on December 26, 1867, Julien Benda became one of the most distinctive French intellectual voices of the early 20th century. He studied mathematics and history, wrote novels as well as essays, and built a reputation as a determined defender of reason, clarity, and universal values.
Benda is best known for La Trahison des clercs (1927), published in English as The Treason of the Intellectuals. In it, he argued that intellectuals had betrayed their calling when they abandoned truth and justice in favor of nationalism, political passion, and group loyalties. He also stood out as a critic of irrationalism and of fashionable ideas that, in his view, put emotion above thought.
He died near Paris on June 7, 1956. Though written in the conflicts of his own era, his books continue to be read for their fierce defense of independent thinking and for the uncomfortable question they ask of every generation: what do writers and thinkers owe to the truth?