In the century just past, the immense ethical and political destructiveness of intellectuals was so frequent and protean in form that intellectual historians have a story as complex as it is tragic to tell, and one that many of them do not relish, perhaps out of occupational solidarity or shame. The "treason of the intellectuals," to use Julien Benda's 1927 phrase, is a great but dismal and continuing chapter in the history of human fecklessness, folly, vanity, and will to power, not only on the "Left" and the "Right" but also among apparently detached, dispassionate "scientific intellectuals," who often proudly prescind from "values" altogether not only in research but in discussion of the wider realms of life itself. In this article, the author talks about public doctrines from several philosophers including Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." (Contains 35 endnotes.)