The great betrayal (La trahison des clercs)Benda, Julien
Philosophy
The great betrayal (La trahison des clercs)
Benda, Julien
Intellectuals; Nationalism; Philosophy, Modern
nationalist passions.
I shall now point out a last important perfecting of all political
passions to-day, whether of race, class, party or nation. When I
observe these passions in the past, I see them consisting in purely
passionate impulses, natural explosions of instinct, devoid of all
extension of themselves in ideas and systems--at least among the
majority. The revolt of the workers in the fifteenth century against
the possessing classes was apparently not accompanied by any sort
of teaching about the origin of property or the nature of capital.
Those who massacred the Ghettos seem to have had no views on the
philosophical values of their action. And when the troops of Charles V
attacked the defenders of Mezières, it does not appear that the assault
was enlivened by a theory about the predestination of the Germanic race
and the moral baseness of the Latin world. To-day I notice that every
political passion is furnished with a whole network of strongly woven
doctrines, the sole object of which is to show the supreme value of
its action from every point of view, while the result is a redoubling
of its strength as a passion. We must look at the system of ideology
of German nationalism known as ‘Pangermanism’ and at the similar
ideology of the French Monarchists, if we wish to realize the point
of perfection to which our age has carried these systems, with what
tenacity each passion has built up in every direction the theories apt
to satisfy it, with what precision these theories have been adapted to
this satisfaction, with what opulence of research, what labour, what
profound investigation they have been carried on in all directions. Our
age is indeed the age of the _intellectual organization of political
hatreds_. It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral
history of humanity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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