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J. Benda La Trahison des Clercs-he Treason of the Intellectuals

This polemical essay argued that European intellectuals in the 19th and 20th century had often lost the ability to reason dispassionately about political and military matters, instead becoming apologists for crass nationalism, warmongering and racism

Closing this work, Benda darkly predicts that the augmentation of the "realistic" impulse to domination of the material world, justified by intellectuals into an "integral realism", risked producing an all-encompassing species-civilization that would completely cease "to situate the good outside the real world". Human aspirations, specifically after power, would become the sole end of society. In closing, bitterly, he concludes: "And History will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died"