Treason of the Intellectuals E-Book

Julien Benda

• Herausgeber: ERIS
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 320

Beschreibung

Certain books never live up to their memorable titles. Others do, but not in the way their authors might have anticipated. Julien Benda's Treason of the Intellectuals, an essential intervention in twentieth-century debates about intellectual responsibility, is the second sort of book. Cast into the agitated waters of European politics between the two world wars, it still floats ashore every decade or so, attracting readers with its stirring call to the independent life of the mind, free from the lures of power and authority. It is essential reading. Ever since the book's publication in 1927 its argument has been taken up by writers of very different political stripes in very different historical circumstances. In the 1930s, communist intellectuals denounced their fascist counterparts as traitors to the truth; liberals levied the same charge against communists and fellow travelers during the Cold War, only to find themselves then put in the dock by progressives and neoconservatives and now populists. Treason is one of those books that serve both as a lens for discerning the present and a mirror reflecting the image of those who appeal to it. This welcome new edition of the work offers an opportunity to look without and within with fresher eyes. —Mark Lilla, from the book's IntroductionIn an era when intellectual and artistic life is increasingly being distorted by political dogmatism, Julien Benda's Treason of the Intellectuals is a classic that speaks with a new and extraordinary urgency. Benda's essay, published by ERIS in a new translation by David Broder, offers an incisive account of interwar Europe that ranges from the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Sorel to the activities of Charles Maurras and Benito Mussolini. It also serves, however, as a remarkably timely warning against the seduction of modern intellectuals by tribal loyalties and antipathies. Rather than detaching themselves from communal ties as their forebears had done, Benda argues that twentieth-century European intellectuals willingly subordinated the disinterested pursuit of truth to the servicing of group interests (particularly the interests of their own nations and social classes). Partisan agendas had a corrosive effect not only on moral and political philosophy, but also on the writing of history and fiction. With its penetrating analyses of nationalism and of the tensions between group identity and intellectual freedom, Treason of the Intellectuals is as necessary a book in the twenty-first century as it was in the twentieth."Benda's book is the great twentieth-century defense of intellectual integrity. It has become extraordinarily timely again at a moment when social criticism often routes itself through the particular loyalties of racial, religious, and national identity." —David Bromwich, author of How Words Make Things Happen"Sometimes a text reaches out from the past and grabs the present by the throat. Julien Benda has much to say to our time of anger and division, a time when it is easy to imagine the end of everything but nearly impossible to imagine how things might change let alone improve. Treason of the Intellectuals remains inspiring and invigorating, a call for independence and the creation of an alternative to our wholly suffocating and mind-deadening political culture. Let this book become a companion to you and a tonic for the turmoil." —Jessa Crispin, author of Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto

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ERIS

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Copyright © 2021 by ERIS

English translation © 2021 by David Broder

Foreword © 2021 by Mark Lilla

Originally published in France in 1927 by B. Grasset as

La Trahison des clercs

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

Printed and bound in Great Britain

ISBN 978-1-912475-31-5

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Urtext Ltd.

Contents

The Scribe and the Prophet

Epigraph

Foreword to the First Edition

1 The Sharpening of Political Passions in the Modern Era

2 The Meaning of This Shift: the Nature of Political Passions

3 The Intellectuals and Their Treason

4 An Overall Perspective—and a Prognosis

Notes

About the Author

The Scribe and the Prophet

Mark Lilla

Certain books never live up to their memorable titles. Others do, but not in the way their authors might have anticipated. Julien Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals, an essential intervention in twentieth- century debates about intellectual responsibility, is the second sort of book. Cast into the agitated waters of European politics between the two world wars, it still floats ashore every decade or so, attracting readers with its stirring call to the independent life of the mind, free from the lures of power and authority. It is essential reading. Ever since the book’s publication in 1927, its argument has been taken up by writers of very different political stripes in very different historical circumstances. In the 1930s, communist intellectuals denounced their fascist counterparts as traitors to the truth; liberals levied the same charge against communists and fellow travelers during the Cold War, only to find themselves then put in the dock by progressives and neoconservatives and now populists. Treason is one of those books that serve both as a lens for discerning the present and a mirror reflecting the image of those who appeal to it. This welcome new edition of the work offers an opportunity to look without and within with fresher eyes.

__________

Our century will properly be called the century of the intellectual organisation of political hatred: with this one sentence we recognise Julien Benda as our contemporary. The hatreds he had in mind—racial, national, class-based—are once again our own. When Treason was written, street violence stoked by a hyper-partisan press was common between rival radical factions united only by their contempt for liberalism and parliamentary democracy. In France the most potent political force on the scene was the anti-semitic Action française, the monarchist social movement whose daily newspaper was widely read in elite circles and served as a microphone for the silver-tongued racism of its founder Charles Maurras and nationalist writers like Maurice Barrès. The diminutive Maurras was anything but a street fighter. Instead he invented what might be called the counter-intellectual screed, which can be defined as a ruthless attack on the intellectual class for faults to which one is oneself miraculously immune. In 1905, Maurras published a pamphlet titled The Future of the Intelligentsia (L’Avenir de l’intelligence), which portrayed France’s intellectuals as a déclassé caste that had lost its influence in the age of capitalism and mass democracy, and was now exacting revenge by turning against the fatherland and becoming the puppet of Jewish and German interests. By declaring writers and journalists to be political and racial traitors, Maurras was not too subtly putting targets on their backs.

Two decades later, Julien Benda, a man of the left, published his brilliant riposte to Maurras that turned the accusation of betrayal around. The core of the book, as in Maurras’s own pamphlet, is a highly idealised portrayal of European intellectual life from the Middle Ages until the French Revolution. Benda imagined an honourable class of politically detached thinkers who for centuries had kept their eyes fixed solely on the eternal ideals of truth, justice, and beauty. He called them les clercs, an old French word for scribe that has a whiff of the ecclesiastical about it. Some of les clercs were saints (Thomas Aquinas), some were poets (Goethe), some were philosophers (Descartes), some were artists (Da Vinci), some were scientists (Galileo). What they shared was the sense of a transcendent calling and a commitment to guard it against the encroachment of power and necessity. They were not naive; they recognised that power and necessity have claims on us, and that at times we must bow to them. But theynever confused necessity with truth and justice. Even Machiavelli, Benda reminds us, who taught his Prince the strategic use of evil to secure his rule, never called evil good, just necessary.

On Benda’s telling, this class of intellectuals was transformed in the nineteenth century under the influence of Romanticism and historicism, which lured them into thinking that their task was to shape the world, not simply understand it. In the wake of the French Revolution the strict rule of reason came to seem a paltry thing next to energy and feeling and the march of history and the evolution of the species. If existence is only a blur of pure becoming, the temptation is to enter its flow and participate in the process, bending it if one can. The value of an idea in such a process then becomes its effectiveness, not its timeless truth. And power, whether that of the creative genius, the leader, the race, the nation, a class, or a movement, becomes an idol. In abandoning their critical distance from the mundane world, modern intellectuals of left and right became moralists of realism, Benda charged, the spiritual militia of the temporal, herding the masses toward the next historical end. The scribe’s defeat begins right from the point where he claims to be practical. As soon as he asserts that he does take into account the interests of the nation or the established classes, he is already—inevitably—beaten. The arrow launched against Maurras here reaches its target, and the call to serve truth, justice, and beauty can once again be heard.

__________

It is a captivating and inspiring story. So captivating that the reader almost forgets that Treason of the Intellectuals is itself a powerful polemic meant to have a practical effect. This book is stranger than it first appears. After all, had Benda only been concerned with living the clerical life, he could simply have gotten on with it—or, at most, he could have issued a call to join him in the land of the lotus eaters. Instead, he makes a practical case against practicality, an engaged case against political engagements.

The mystery deepens when one considers the arc of Benda’s own intellectual and political engagements over the years. His life spanned a dreadful period in European history, from just before the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to the failed Hungarian uprising against Soviet occupation in 1956. He was spared none of the stations of the cross. At the turn of the century he had gained prominence for his passionate writings in defence of the Dreyfusard cause, then became just as passionately anti-German during the First World War. After the publication of Treason, where he argued for disengagement from politics, he did an about face during the Spanish Civil War, arguing that intellectuals were obliged to take the Republicans’ side and turn a blind eye to whatever atrocities they might have committed. He then moved further left, becoming a prominent anti-fascist with communist sympathies (though he considered Marxism a sham).

When Paris fell to the Germans in 1940, Benda was hunted by the Nazis, hid out in Vichy with help from the French Resistance, and barely escaped arrest and almost certain death in 1944. After the war, his was among the loudest voices calling for the execution of collaborators with the Nazis, including certain writers and intellectuals. His hatred of them became legendary. As the Soviet Union tightened its grip on Eastern Europe, Benda prevaricated. Most shamefully, he justified the show trial and execution of Hungarian foreign minister László Rajk in 1949 on trumped up espionage charges and a forced confession—all the while professing his unwavering adherence to the high principles of Treason.

Hypocrisy is too universal to be interesting. Besides, a book loses none of its value if the author betrays its message; if anything, the message is reinforced. In Benda’s case, though, there is more coherence between the life and work than might first appear. The more closely one reads Treason, the clearer it becomes that Benda’s ideal scribe is not a mere guardian of the temple of truth. He is, by virtue of his very detachment from political life, its only legitimate judge. Benda wants to convince us that a clear, disinterested view of moral and political reality can only be had from on high, not in the thick of things. He then quietly asserts—this is the decisive step—that les clercs who achieve this view have a responsibility to reveal the truth and defend it in public. There is a subtle shift in Treason from the image of the intellectual as truth’s servant, to one of the intellectual as truth’s representative—which is a prophetic, not a clerical, calling.

The political prophet’s kingdom is still not of this world. He has no practical plan for what must be done, he only has a keen eye for falsehood, for moral abominations, for what absolutely must not be done. Wherever lies are told and cruelty is practised, wherever rights are violated, the responsible intellectual must, as we glibly say, speak truth to power. Then his job is over. As for defeating the liars in battle, crafting laws to punish the cruel, and building institutions to protect rights—well, there are people for that. And if they fall short, they too shall be judged.

From this perspective, Treason of the Intellectuals is the quintessential act of a responsible scribe. Benda has simply taken his whip and cleared the money changers and whores out of the Temple so that the true prophets can be heard. The real heroes of Treason, it turns out, are not the monkish types in their cells with their manuscripts and compasses and telescopes. They are not St Thomas, Da Vinci, Galileo, or Descartes. They are rather those who at a critical historical juncture delivered The Protest, the resounding NO! that still lives in our memories. What Benda most admires in Montaigne, for example, is not his scepticism or his style, it is his denunciation of witch burning and exposure of colonialism’s absurdity; in Montesquieu, it is the condemnation of slavery; in Voltaire, the campaign to exonerate Protestant Jean Calas of his son’s murder; in Zola, the j’accuse that would eventually free Captain Dreyfus. These were all courageous acts of intellectual protest and they eventually had real effects. Witches are no longer burned, slavery is no longer legal, and Dreyfus was eventually freed. In an earlier work, Benda wrote that reason is revolutionary in its essence precisely because it is universal, while the social order is always self-interested, partial. These examples show why truth is a friend of justice. One does not speak truth to power simply to clear one’s conscience or keep the relevant ministries informed. One does it in a counter-exercise of power, however feeble and doomed it might be. And sometimes it has revolutionary effects.

But all power, even the power of truth, comes with temporal responsibilities, in particular the responsibility to take into account the potential consequences of acting on that truth. There are cases in which ending a moral abomination incurs negligible moral costs. Those are rare. The normal moral case in political life is more like the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, a nightmare of clashing interests and reciprocal abominations. On the subject of prophetic responsibility in such situations, Benda has nothing to say.

Once we have spoken truth to power, once it is exposed and thwarted, power does not wither and die. There is a struggle over recapturing it, after which new victors have power over the newly vanquished, and new abuses become possible. What then is Benda’s morally clairvoyant scribe to do? To be consistent, he must commit himself to shouting the same NO! at the same volume every time a violation occurs, without acting himself. That is an absurd position to be in (though one can imagine a good Bergman film on such a Swedish parson). Instead, what most often happens is that at a certain historical moment—and to some minds, it is always that moment—the injustices on one side will seem so great that fighting to vanquish them will seem to the prophet the only imperative, no matter what may follow. This is psychologically understandable: a moral crime in the hand will always seem weightier than two in the bush. But it is one thing to bow to necessity and accept that a certain abuse of power may be necessary to prevent a larger one. It is quite another to then convince oneself, as so many intellectuals in modern history have, that the monstrousness of the status quo transubstantiates any lie against it into a truth, and any crime against it into a moral act. It implies that, seen from the right perspective, those who tell such lies and perpetrate such crimes have the cleanest hands of all. At this point the definition of speaking truth to power becomes exoneration.

This way of thinking is, of course, a moral and political trap, and Julien Benda fell into it in the 1930s, never to emerge. Ten years after his tribute in Treason to dispassionate intellectual devotion to the true, the good, and the beautiful, he could write this about the atrocities committed by communists during the Spanish Civil War:

I say that the scribe must now take sides. He must choose the side which, if it threatens liberty, at least threatens it in order to give bread to all men, and not for the benefit of wealthy exploiters. He will choose the side which, if it must kill, will kill the oppressors and not the oppressed. The clerc must take sides with this group of violent men, since he has only the choice between their triumph or that of the others. He will give them [the communists] his signature. Perhaps his life. But he will retain the right to judge them. He will keep his critical spirit.

Benda never fully recovered his.

__________

Treason of the Intellectuals remains an inspiring, almost religious, call to the independent life of the mind, a book of enduring value. But it also offers unintended lessons in how easy it is to slip from that life into one of prophetic engagement with forces one does not understand, let alone master. The book’s very failings show why speaking truth to power is more fraught and complex than those with the megaphones seem to think.

Take these two passages from Edward Said’s otherwise thoughtful book, Images of the Intellectual:

It is a spirit in opposition, rather than in accommodation, that grips me because the romance, the interest, the challenge of intellectual life is to be found in dissent against the status quo.

The intellectual always has a choice either to side with the weaker, the less well represented, the forgotten or ignored, or to side with the more powerful.

The image that comes to mind is that of an enormous, windowless castle surrounded by a moat, with angry peasants outside with burning torches, fighting to get in. It’s a picture tinged with the romance Said mentions and seems to tell a simple story: an inherently unjust Power is exploiting the Powerless, who have truth and justice on their side. History is full of examples of this basic drama. But it is also full of examples like the storming of the US Capitol in January 2021, when hundreds of the forgotten or ignored, in dissent against the status quo, tried to overturn a legal election. In this case the Power was legitimate and the Powerless were spreading lies about imaginary injustices. There is nothing a priori just or reasonable about the wretched of the earth.

But there is a deeper problem with this image of politics, which is basically medieval. It conveys an understanding of power as something monolithic, closed off, uncommunicative, always defensive—and the peasants as having no voice in its operation except through resistance. This was never the case even in the Middle Ages, and it is certainly not the case in modern democracies. There is no single ‘power elite’ that commands the castle. Economic, political, and cultural power are different, are held by different people and groups and institutions at different times, and their interests are never fully aligned. Workers, voters, and consumers all have voices and must to some extent be catered to. Today they may feel they have less power than in the past, but that is not because Power is united against them; it is because power has become so dispersed and decentralised through globalisation that it is ever harder to mobilise it to any clear collective end. When the state of affairs that results is unjust, a morally admirable urge to protest, to sound the NO!, surges within. One never wants to lose the capacity to utter that word. But what next? Fight the Power! Fine, but first we need its address. One of the many ironies of the New York Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of 2011 was that Wall Street doesn’t live on Wall Street any more. It lives on servers in air-conditioned bunkers around the globe, hiding as best it can from responsibility. And no one yet knows how to tame it.

Said idealises the independent prophetic intellectuals, whom he contrasts with those he believes have been ‘coopted’ by institutions like business, the military, even political parties—seemingly unaware that he is just inverting the old right-wing myth, cultivated by figures like Maurras, that those institutions have instead been coopted by corrupt modern intellectuals. It is striking how large a role co-optation plays in both his and Benda’s books, and how absent are notions of reciprocal engagement and honest differences of opinion. Democratic life is relatively open and necessarily dialogical. Prophets don’t take meetings, democrats do. We speak, someone else speaks, reasons are given, evidence is examined, sometimes consensus forms. As John Stuart Mill argued so powerfully in On Liberty, truth in politics is not delivered to us from on high so we can then bring the world to its knees. We discover it together, or try to discover it, through inquiry and argument. We even change our minds sometimes—precisely because we want the truth and want to defend it. This is why maintaining norms of open debate and argument is so important in democracies. The alternative is a public square full of competing prophets, each with his own moral clarity, and gangs of followers high on the idea that their co-opted adversaries are traitors against truth and justice.

Many of us today are in the grip of nostalgia for moral clarity, and so we hold onto unambiguous stories of injustice and resistance like planks from a sinking ship. This is understandable because the world in which we now find ourselves is simultaneously cruel and obscure. But the truth is that ours is a time when the prophets on their perch see less than those in the fog below who are tapping their canes, taking one step at a time. Recall the first generation of Russian revolutionaries, who felt an enormous deflation after the Czar was deposed and the civil war had drawn to a close. Their lives up until that moment had consisted, to paraphrase Dostoevsky, of eating radishes and writing denunciations. Now suddenly they had to learn about the actual condition of their vast country and the machinery of the state they inherited. As their memoirs show, many fell into depressions as they tried to cope with their new roles. One can only feel sympathy for them. The romance gone, institutions paint their grey on grey. But in them one learns a valuable lesson: that achieving moral clarity is the work of a lifetime and we can’t do it alone.

The world suffers from its lack of faith in a transcendent truth.

—RENOUVIER1

Foreword to the First Edition

Leo Tolstoy tells of when he was an officer in the army, and saw one of his colleagues striking a man who had fallen out of line during a march. He asked him “aren’t you ashamed to treat one of your fellow men like this? You haven’t read the Gospels, then?” To which the other officer replied “You haven’t read the military regulations, then?” The same retort will always be thrown back at any spiritual man who attempts to impose himself on worldly affairs. And I think this response is a very wise one: after all, those who lead men in the conquest of material things have no need for justice and charity.1

But I think it important that there should exist men—even if they are ignored—who call on their fellow men to follow some religion other than material gain alone. The problem is, those who had long been entrusted with this role—those whom I call the scribes—not only no longer keep up this function, but they fulfil an exactly opposite role. For half a century, most of the influential moralists in Europe, and especially men of letters in France, have invited their fellow men to spit on the Gospels and to read the military regulations alone. This new teaching is all the more harmful given that it is directed at a humanity which, on its own initiative, has committed itself to worldly concerns with a determination such as it never previously had. This is what I shall begin by demonstrating.

Chapter One

The Sharpening of Political Passions in the Modern Era

We shall begin by considering the ‘political’ passions, through which some men rise up against others. The most important of these are the passions of race, class and nation. Even those men who most determinedly believe in the inexorable progress of mankind—or, more precisely, in its inevitable movement toward greater peace and love—must admit that over the last century these passions have in several important senses reached an unprecedented degree of perfection. And this becomes more true with each passing day.

This is firstly true in the sense that these passions had never previously affected such great numbers. When we study, for instance, the civil wars that convulsed France in the sixteenth and again in the late eighteenth century, we can only be struck by the small numbers whose souls they genuinely stirred. Indeed, history up until the nineteenth century is full of long wars in Europe that left the vast majority of its populations utterly indifferent, except insofar as they themselves suffered material damage.1 Today there is barely a soul in Europe who is not affected (or does not think himself affected) by the passions of class or race or nation—and more often than not, by all three. These passions seem to be making progress in the New World, too, and in the Far East vast bodies of men who had appeared exempt from these developments are now opening their eyes to social hatred, to the party regime, and to the national spirit conceived as a determination to humiliate others. Political passions are today taking on a universal character—something they had never previously possessed.

These passions are also gaining a certain cohesion. Thanks to the progress of human communications and, yet more importantly, the progress of the spirit of group formation, the adepts of any given kind of political hatred will today tend to form a compact passional mass, in which each individual feels connected to countless others. This is unlike the state of affairs that existed even a century ago, when these individuals had little chance of contact with one another and, so to speak, had to do their hating in a scattered fashion. This is particularly striking in the case of the working class. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, it showed only sporadic expressions of hostility toward the opposing class, and mounted only dispersed offensives (for instance, strikes limited to individual towns or professions); today, however, it forms a tightly-woven fabric of hatred, extending from one corner of Europe to the other. This growing cohesion is bound to become even stronger, since the will to band together with others is one of the most important characteristics of the modern era. This is increasingly becoming a world of leagues, ‘unions’ and ‘fasces’, even in the fields where one would least expect it (for instance, in the intellectual domain). It goes without saying that this feeling of standing side-by-side with thousands of the similarly impassioned is bound to inflame the individual’s passions. The individual who considers himself a member of a collective grants this collective a mystical personality and devotes to it a religious adoration. At root, this is nothing but the deification of his own passion, but it does a great deal to increase its power over him.

Alongside what could be called their growing cohesion at surface level, the political passions are also becoming more cohesive in their inner nature. By forming a compact passional mass, the partisans of a given political passion also form a more homogeneous mass, in which individual ways of feeling are swept aside, and the ardour burning within each of them takes on an increasingly uniform colouration. We can only be struck by the degree to which the opponents of democracy (and here I am speaking not of the leaders, but of the mass) in France, for example, express a passion that today shows little variation or difference among its vast numbers of exponents. It is striking how little personal or original ways of hating chip away at the overall edifice of hatred (we could say, how far hatred itself obeys the spirit of ‘democratic levelling’). And so, too, that the emotions called antisemitism, anticlericalism, and socialism (in all its multiple forms) seem so much more uniform than they did a hundred years ago. We can only be struck that, over this period, those who espouse each of these hatreds have increasingly all come to say the same thing.2 Political passions appear to have acquired a kind of discipline, as even the way in which their adepts feel them seems to follow the spirit of command. Clearly, this greatly strengthens these passions.

With some of these passions, this increased homogeneity is accompanied by an increased precision. For example, we all know that a hundred years ago socialism was—among most of its adepts, at least—a strong passion, but also a vague one. Today, however, it has better defined its intended objectives, determined the exact point where it seeks to strike against its adversary (the trusts) and the movement which it seeks to build toward that end. We can see the same progress visible in the anti-democratic movement. And we know how much stronger a hatred becomes as it becomes better targeted.

Political passions have also been sharpened in another way. Throughout history, up until our own present, we can see these passions acting intermittently—flaring up and then subsiding. The doubtless terrible and numerous explosions of class and race hatred were followed by long periods of calm, or at least torpor. Wars between nations lasted for years, but hatreds were not similarly enduring, even where they did exist. Today, one need only glance at a newspaper to see that political hatreds never take a day off. At most, some of them temporarily fall silent in favour of some other hatred, which suddenly commands the subject’s whole energies. While this is the era of unions sacrées, in no way does this herald the realm of love. Rather, it means the reign of a generalised hatred, which momentarily wins out over more partial hatreds. Today, political passions have acquired an attribute rare in the world of feelings: continuity.

We ought to focus for a moment on the change which leads partial hatreds to make way for another, more generalised hatred—a hatred which draws a new strength, and a new worship of itself, precisely from its sense of its own general character. Perhaps it has not been sufficiently observed that this sort of turn is one of the essential characteristics of the nineteenth century. Not only did this century twice see, in Germany and in Italy, the centuries-old hatreds among petty states vanish in favour of one great national passion, but during that same century (more precisely, at the end of the eighteenth century) in France, the mutual hatred of the courtly nobles and the nobles in the provinces was extinguished amidst the greater hatred of both for all who were not nobles. The hatred between the nobles of the robe and the nobles of the sword disappeared amidst this same change; the hatred between the upper and lower ranks of the clergy vanished amidst their common hatred of secularist movements; the hatred between clergy and nobility vanished in favour of their common hatred for the Third Estate. And in our times, the hatred among these three estates has melted into the propertied classes’ common hatred for the working class. This means the condensation of political passions into a small number of very simple hatreds, growing from the deepest roots of the human heart. And this is an achievement of the modern era.3

It appears that political passions are also making great progress, today, in terms of how they stand relative to the other passions harboured by the same host individual. Political passions occupied much more of the attention of a bourgeois of the old France than is ordinarily supposed, but they also occupied much less of his attention than the passion for profit, the appetite for pleasure, familial sentiments, and the yearnings of his vanity. But the least we can say of his modern counterpart is that when political passions do enter his heart, they have nothing to envy any other passion. Compare, for instance, the small place occupied by political passions in the French bourgeois as he appears in the Fabliaux,4 in medieval theatre, in the novels of Scarron, Furetière and Charles Sorel,5 or in this same bourgeois as depicted by Balzac, Stendhal, Anatole France, Abel Hermant or Paul Bourget. (I am not speaking of times of crisis, as in the days of the Ligue and the Fronde, when the political passions kindled within the bourgeois would, indeed, grip his whole person.)6 The truth is that, in this same bourgeois, political passions are today invading most of the other passions and turning them to their own advantage. Today family rivalries, commercial hostilities, career ambitions, and the competition for honours are all pregnant with political passion as well. An apostle of the modern soul seeks politics first; he can see politics everywhere, politics always, and politics alone.7 We need only open our eyes to see how far political passion is intensified by its combination with the great variety of other passions, themselves so unyielding and so energetic. The same goes for the common man in the modern era. We can measure how far his political passions have increased, relative to the other passions, simply by contemplating that vast span of history in which his passions were limited, as Stendhal put it, to the wish (1) not to be killed and (2) for a nice warm coat. And then by contemplating how, when some slight relief from destitution did allow him to develop a few general ideas, it took such a long time for his vague desire for social change to transform into a passion, meaning, to present the two essential characteristics of a passion: the fixed notion, and the need to move to action.8 I think we can say that, among those affected by political passions, they have today acquired an unprecedented degree of preponderance over all the other passions—and this holds true across all classes.

The reader has surely already noted one decisive factor in the shifts we have been describing: if political passions have now become universal, coherent, homogeneous, permanent, preponderant, then everyone can see the great influence that the cheap daily political newspaper has had in fostering this development. This is an instrument for cultivating human passions—or at least, raising them to an unprecedented degree of power—to which men devote themselves with the full splendour of their hearts, as soon as they wake up each morning. When we contemplate the fact that this is only a recent invention, we have to wonder whether inter-human warfare is only just getting started.

We have demonstrated what could be called the sharpening of political passions at surface level, in their more or less external aspects. But they have also become distinctly sharpened at a rather deeper level, having to do with their internal sources of strength.

Firstly, these passions have made remarkable progress in their consciousness of themselves. Today (again, largely thanks to the newspapers) it is clear that the soul affected by political hatred has become conscious of his own passion, formulates it in his own mind, imagines it, with a sharpness it did not have fifty years ago. It is clear how much this inflames the passion concerned. On this point, I should like to note two passions which—while doubtless not entirely a novelty of the present era—have arrived at an unprecedented self-consciousness, self-recognition, and pride in themselves.

The first is what I will call a certain Jewish nationalism. Previously, when the Jews were accused in various countries of constituting a lesser race, or at least a particular one which could not be assimilated, they responded by denying this particularity, by striving to remove any outward trace of this difference, and by refusing to admit the reality of race. But for a good few years now, we have seen that some Jews are in fact eager to proclaim this particularity, to specify its characteristics (or what they think are its characteristics), exalting these same characteristics and vilifying every effort at assimilation with their adversaries (see the works of Israel Zangwill, of André Spire, and the Revue juive).9 The point here is not to question whether these Jews’ impulses are more or less noble than the resolve which so many others display in seeking pardon for their origins. Rather, it is to point out to those interested in the progress of the world’s peace that our age has produced yet another of those expressions of pride which set men into conflict with each other, at least insofar as this pride is conscious and proud of itself.10

The other shift I have in mind is a certain ‘bourgeoisism’, by which I mean the bourgeois class’s passion to assert itself against the class that threatens it. One can say that up until our own times, ‘class hatred’, as a conscious hatred, proud of its own existence, was mainly a question of the worker’s hatred for the bourgeois world; the reciprocal hatred was much less clearly avowed. Ashamed of an egotism they believed peculiar to their own caste, the bourgeoisie avoided expressing this egotism directly, struggled to admit (even to themselves) that it existed, and wanted it to be taken (as they themselves took it) for an indirect form of concern for the common good.11 As against the dogma of the class war, the bourgeoisie replied by denying that classes truly exist—showing that even as they felt their indelible opposition to their adversary, they struggled to admit that they did indeed feel this. Today we need only think of Italian ‘Fascism’, of a certain Eloge du bourgeois français, and of so many other manifestations of the same kind,12 to see that the bourgeoisie are becoming fully conscious of their specific egotisms, are proclaiming them for what they are, and venerating them for what they are, as if they were bound up with the supreme interests of the human race. We also see that they revel in venerating these egotisms and in setting them up in opposition to all who seek the bourgeoisie’s destruction. Our era has seen the creation of the ‘mystique’ of bourgeois passion, in its opposition to the passions of the other class.13 Here again, our age has added yet another fully self-conscious passion to the moral balance-sheet of humanity.

The progress of deep political passions over the past century seems most remarkable in the case of national passions.

This first of all owes to the fact that, now that these passions are experienced by large masses of men, they have become much more purely passional. When national feeling was all but limited to kings and their ministers, it essentially consisted of attachment to some interest (hunger for territory, the quest for commercial advantage and profitable alliances). But today, now that it is continually felt in the soul of the popular masses, it most of all consists of an expression of pride. No one will deny that the national passion in the modern citizen is much less an embrace of his nation’s interests—of which he has little understanding, given both his lack of information and his failure to make any attempt to seek it (and we know his indifference to foreign policy)—than a matter of pride in his nation, of his will to feel at one with it, to react in some way to the honours and offences he thinks are done to it. For sure, he wants his nation to acquire territories, to be prosperous, and to have mighty allies. But he wants all this far less on account of the material fruits that the nation will reap from this (and of how much he personally will feel these benefits) than of the glory it will draw as a result. In becoming a popular sentiment, national feeling has become above all a national pride, a national sensitivity.14

To measure how much more purely passional, much more perfectly irrational and thus stronger it has become, one need only think of chauvinism—the form of patriotism invented by democracies in particular. Contrary to what is commonly thought, pride is a stronger passion than self-interest. To be persuaded of this, one need only observe how commonly men get themselves killed on account of some wound to their pride, and how much less frequently so for some assault against their interests.