La Trahison des clercs.

Paris: Bernard Grasset,, 1927. Undoubtedly one of the major events in political thought between the two wars First edition, first printing, of the author's best-known book, number 46 of 62 copies on Madagascar paper, from a total issue of 3,882 octavo copies on various papers, and 75 quarto copies. La Trahison des clercs was "undoubtedly one of the major events in political thought between the two wars. The 'Clerc' is what Benda conceived the intellectual to be, someone disengaged from the mere contingencies of existence and fighting for ideals which went beyond the demands of a given moment in space and time. In violent and brilliant invective, he attacked the intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for having fallen short of this ideal by becoming the devoted advocates not of ideals, but of groups of existences, material and transient, such as a nation of a social class. The title of Benda's manifesto became a kind of catch phrase which, by a curious irony of fate, inverted its original sense, and came sometimes to be used as a term of reproach for the intellectuals who shut themselves off from the march of events in an ivory tower. The Trahison des Clercs achieved a world-wide popularity and was translated and reprinted over and over again... Its invigorating attack on over-involvement deserves not to be forgotten" (PMM). Octavo (181 x 151 mm). Later 20th-century black half morocco, spine lettered in gilt, marbled sides and endpapers, top edge gilt. Original wrappers bound in. Bookplate of French industrialist Pierre Bergé to front pastedown; newspaper clipping concerning Benda loosely inserted. Save for a couple of very faint scratches to spine, a fine copy.