The Manners of Liberalism: A Question of Limits

Abstract

not as a temporizer but as a corrupter. Socrates won fame by hurling the charge of temporizing with evil against intellectuals of his day. Nor is the charge always invoked by social radicals and rebels. Julian Benda's La Trahison des Clercs of only a few years ago convicts the new intellectuals not only of temporizing with evil but of prostituting themselves to it.2 The substance of this charge is that liberal education leads men to substitute intellectual tolerance or am biguity for righteous indignation. (This will be familiar to anyone who, from a few years ago, recalls the main