Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Benda, Julien - Ray Nichols (essay date 1978)

Ray Nichols (essay date 1978)

SOURCE: "The 'Clerc' and the Intellectual," in Treason, Tradition, and the Intellectual: Julien Benda and Political Discourse, The Regents Press of Kansas, 1978, pp. 165-92.

[In the following excerpt, Nichols articulates a distinction in Benda's work between the clerc and the intellectual.]

"The intellectual": for Benda, this was a sort of sacred realm, a vocation, a clerkly ordination. And much of Benda's speech and action here remains pressingly alive, more so, indeed, today than at any time since the crises of the thirties. His concerns, his enemies, his hopes, his disillusionments, his career—all were quintessentially, representatively modern, in provocative and diverse ways. In practice, Benda was discriminating, pungent, wideranging, often valiant: there was much to respect in him. And there was much to learn through him. Most (if not, indeed, all) men find difficulty in living up to their...

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