How did Julien Benda's writing influence T.S.Eliot?

Answer 1

I think Benda is generally considered much more influential for Pound in the early 1920s than he is for Eliot. Benda was part of a weird mish-MASH of radical leftist and right-wing political and economic fringe theorists, which also included Arthur Kitson and Major Douglas, that Pound was pulling together for the social theoriy behind his early work on The Cantos. The ultimate end of this line of thinking, of course, was his support for Mussolini, though it remains somewhat open whether that development was a strictly necessary consequence of his earlier investigations or merely an unfortunate outcome. Anyway, that all sounds a bit too socially engaged and overtly political for Eliot to be deigning to notice it.