The Twilight of the Clerks

Julien Benda published his most famous study Les Trahision des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals) in 1927. His use of the derogatory French term clerc (a medieval scribe) to denote a mediocre intellectual careerist and bureaucratic functionary was perhaps Benda’s most memorable contribution to modern thought. Yet most have forgotten the prophetic content of the book itself, and its prediction that Europe was “heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world.” Benda’s was an acerbic riposte to the intelligentsia of the early 20^th century who had gotten behind the pro-war revanchist cause in France leading up to the Great War. One of them was Édouard Berth, disciple of the arch-herald of political violence Georges Sorel, who in 1914 published Les Méfaits des Intellectuels — a choleric diatribe exhorting intellectuals to abandon their weakness and timidity and embrace the cause of nationalism and war. The bloody consequences of such invectives were borne mostly by France’s youth: 1.3 million of its young men were killed in the trenches. A shocking and little acknowledged statistic from the present internecine war in Ukraine, raging since 2022, is that it has reportedly led to almost as many casualties on both sides. This has also been a conflict partly fomented by the disingenuous and bellicose rhetoric of a similarly dubious array of self-serving clerks — “Atlanticist” liberals and neo-con functionaries. Bureaucrats of various persuasions, clearly motivated by obscure resentments and petty ambition, no longer securely ensconced in universities and dedicated to a “life of the mind,” they roam freely and effetely around Davos, beating the drums of war once again, making themselves agreeable and compliant to the powerful instead of questioning them.