SOURCE: "The Idealism of Julien Benda," in The New Republic Anthology, 1915-1935, edited by Groff Conklin, Dodge Publishing Company, 1936, pp. 293-300.

An American-born English poet, critic, essayist, and dramatist, Eliot was one of the most influential writers in English of the first half of the twentieth century. His work and thought are characterized by experimentation, formal complexity, artistic and intellectual eclecticism, and a classicist's view of the artist working at an emotional distance from his or her creation. In the following essay, which originally appeared in The New Republic on 12 December 1928, Eliot critiques Benda's theories about the responsibility of intellectuals as presented in La trahison des clercs.

M. Julien Benda is a critic who does not write often or too much. His Belpbhgor, which some of us recognized as an almost final statement of the attitude of contemporary society to art and the artist, was published in 1918 or...