Education Quote by Julien Benda

Modern Europe, Benda suggests, is committing its sins with a permission slip signed by its intellectual class. The barb sits in the phrase "teachers who inform it that its realist instincts are beautiful": he’s not attacking realism as a method so much as the flattering story wrapped around it. Call your appetite for power, conquest, and national advantage "realist", declare it mature and clear-eyed, and suddenly brutality gets to pose as sobriety.

Benda’s intent is prosecutorial. He’s writing against the early-20th-century vogue for political realism and nationalist passion that treated moral restraint as naive. In his famous indictment of the "clerks" (les clercs) - the writers, scholars, and thinkers who should defend disinterested truth - he argues they instead became publicists for the tribe. The subtext is that Europe’s moral collapse isn’t only the work of generals and demagogues; it’s enabled by cultured people laundering impulse into principle. "Beautiful" is the tell: aesthetic approval replaces ethical judgment. Once violence is stylized as necessity, it becomes strangely glamorous, even while it remains "ill."

The line’s structure doubles the accusation: Europe "acts ill" and then "honors what is ill". That second clause is the more damning one. Wrongdoing can be a lapse; honoring wrongdoing is a value system. Benda is naming a civilization-level pivot where prestige attaches to cynicism, and where intelligence is used less to clarify reality than to excuse the worst parts of it.