Julien Benda

 The essay blames intellectuals for leaving the world of unselfish thought and abstract, timeless values to engage in political battle—a plea against the adoption by the “clerics” of “political passions » race, nation, class or party i.e. anti-Semitism, xenophobia, nationalism, militarism, "bourgeoisism", Marxism and so on, right and left. Benda y fustige "the tendency for action, the thirst for immediate result, the sole concern for the goal, the contempt of argument, the excess, the hatred, the fixed idea", in short, everything that makes the political passion of action men (the "secular") and all that who must stay stranger to the scholar and the moralist, that is, the clerk. However, it does not condemn the commitment of the intellectual, but demands that the intellectual does not go down to the public square and intervene in the secular debate only to make the cleric's abstract and selfless ideals triumph: the truth, the justice science, reason, intellectual and social freedom. Thus he does not deny anything, for example, of his dreyfusard commitment, since it was to fight for truth and justice, clerical values, in disregard of order and political contingencies, secular values.

Julien Benda, born December 26, 1867 in Paris and died June 7, 1956 in Fontenay-aux-Roses, is a French critic, philosopher and writer, mainly known for his 1927 book, La Trahison des clercs. Nominated for the Goncourt Prize and four times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he is in the 1930s one of the most respected figures of anti-fascist intellectuals.

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