trahisons des clercs

Noun

trahison des clercs (plural trahisons des clercs)

1. A compromise of intellectual integrity by members of an intelligentsia.
   • The age of the ‘experimental’ and the highbrow has helped to relegate poetry to a condition of irrelevance and triviality, and our collective self-commitment to cleverness and self-consciousness may ultimately (but by whom?) be seen as the profoundest of the twentieth century’s much-discussed...2003, Colin Falck, American and British Verse in the Twentieth Century: The Poetry that Matters, Ashgate Publishing, →ISBN, page 3