SOURCE: "The Question of Sorel," in Journal of European Studies, Vol. 7, No. 27, September, 1977, pp. 204-13.

[In the following excerpt, Band declares that Sorel is more important as a populizer of ideas rather than as an original thinker.]

The publication of Professor John L. Stanley's splendid collection (From Georges Sorel: Essays in Socialism and Philosophy) affords students of Sorel and, indeed, of modern European social thought an opportunity to address themselves to the question of Sorel's "place"—the question, that is, of the sources and importance of his system. Tracing intellectual influences is an exercise of about the same degree of difficulty as hunting the snark, and this may be the reason why, in the case of Georges Sorel, attempts to carry out the exercise have been characterized by massive and undefended assumptions, false trails and no little amount of confusion. Nevertheless, volumes such as Professor Stanley's testify to the need for this problem to be faced assiduously and, if necessary, at length, not least because practically all serious scholarship on Sorel is, in effect, addressed to this question of his place.

Perhaps one useful way to commence this undertaking would be for scholars of Sorel to acknowledge that a very great deal of their subject's thought was simply unoriginal. This is certainly an impression which is often reinforced as the reader is carried along on the waves of Sorel's polemics in Professor Stanley's collection. Many purportedly "Sorelian" notions have passed into the history of ideas under that label because Sorel was their popularizer, not because he was their author (and no less worthy or important for that). To take but one example for the moment, as one reads his most famous (or notorious) work, Reflections on Violence (1908), with its central theme of the rottenness of society, and of the urgent need for its spiritual revitalization if it is not to decompose altogether, one is struck by its similarity to many of the concerns of Max Stirner, not least the latter's claim that society is not ill but aged, palsied, in need not of salvaging measures designed to extend its miserable life by a few more hours, but of a new life altogether. Indeed, this particular likeness has recently been noted by one critic, who observes that Stirner "takes the position that Georges Sorel was to popularize . .. , arguing that society, if it is not to decay, must be revitalized. With no presentiment of the reality of twentieth-century fascism he can enthusiastically argue that new sources of passion must be tapped."¹ (As will be seen, the same sorts of links have often been drawn between Sorel and various twentiethcentury fascisms.) But, even were one to concentrate on the specifics of Sorel's political thought, one would still be forced to acknowledge that a great many of them were, to a large extent, products of "the times".

Syndicalists and syndicalism were important political phenomena in Sorel's day: he did not invent them. Syndicalism's basic political tactic was to engage in ceaseless struggle against the forces of capitalism in the factories of Europe and at the same time to await and prepare for an apocalyptic general strike. This would reduce the bourgeois political system to impotence and thus to its doom. Now, of course, twentieth-century Europe has witnessed not a single example of the general strike as the thin edge of a proletarian state, but the "myth" of the general strike was a by-no-means unimportant factor in revolutionary politics during the middle period of Sorel's intellectual career. The question of the general strike was the subject of long and heated argument among socialists, both internationally and within their own parties, at this time. The myth of the general strike already had a long proletarian pedigree, but rarely before had it been an issue of such contention, and that contention was at least one of the factors which allowed Sorel to make such assertions as: "The bond . . . between Socialism and proletarian violence appears to us now in all its strength. It is to violence that Socialism owes these high ethical values by mans of which it brings salvation to the modern world."² The general strike, says Sorel, is the "powerful construction which the proletarian mind has conceived in the course of social conflicts"

It must never be forgotten that the perfection of this method of representation would vanish in a moment if any attempt were made to resolve the general strike into a sum of historical details;the general strike must be taken as a whole and undivided, and the passage from capitalism to Socialism conceived as a catastrophe, the development of which baffles description.³

The concept of the general strike involved, by extension, that of working-class consciousness as well, and together they assisted in clarifying the growing estrangement of the radical and violent socialism emerging in Russia from the socialism practised—although, as Eduard Bernstein had complained,⁴ not always preached—by the hitherto organizational and theoretical leader of European 'Marxist' parties, the SPD in Germany. Yet Sorel's aspirations and Bernstein's trepidations were both signs of the collapse of the standard interpretation of Marx's predictions—namely, that the socialist society would appear according to certain canons of economic development and that it would realize all the hopes of the Enlightenment in producing stability and benevolence in relations between citizens and between states. Such a hopeful faith in the power of reason is absent from both Bernstein and Sorel. Bernstein rejects what he takes to be the mechanicism of Marx's historical canons and avers that "Social conditions have not developed to such an acute opposition of things and classes as is depicted in the Manifesto".⁵ Sorel is just as unequivocal in his rejection of what he perceives as Marx's views, but comes to very distinct inferences to those of Bernstein. For Sorel, two prerequisites for the socialist society are the rejection of rationalism and the taking of a determined position against the idea of development in terms of goods and wealth: " . . . use must be made of a body of images which, by intuition alone, and before any considerable analyses are made, is capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of sentiments which corresponds to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism against modern society."⁶

It is sentiments such as these which have led many commentators to assert that the answer to our "question" is that Sorel is a "reactionary". This claim typically assumes one or both of two forms: a view that his thought is literally reactionary, inasmuch as he is an advocate of prerationalist modes of political thinking and behaviour; and a view that these sorts of prescriptions logically and predictably were picked up by many extreme right-wing elements in European politics in the years after his death. The descriptive element of this latter view has a certain validity, and I shall leave it aside for the moment. The first view, however, needs to be dealt with at once. A social theorist's rejection of what he takes to be fashionable modes of thought and behaviour does not necessarily render his views reactionary. We need to ask why a Sorel advocates alternative modes of political thought and action: what purpose does he believe that they will serve? The answer, surely, is that they will help to create myths.⁷ If Sorel is interested in what are essentially premodern modes of thought and action, it is because he sees in them the capacity to beget myths. Ruskin, Kropotkin, Proudhon and others are surely not reactionaries by virtue of their being students of mediaeval society; Engels is surely not a reactionary because he is interested in the organization and life-style of American Indians. As with Sorel, such theorists as these are attempting to see what assistance their fields of study can provide in the corroboration of their particular prescriptions for political endeavour. As one recent writer puts it: "Our judgment as to whether a thinker is reactionary or progressive must be based on the content of [his] model, not on the mere fact that a model from the past, even from a particular epoch of the past, exists."⁸

Thus, Sorel's supposedly "reactionary" irrationalism is, in fact, pursued with a view to creating myths, which will in turn lead to the appropriate forms of political action being taken. Myths are, in other words, central to his system and, for that reason, central also to our question. Typically and regrettably, however, the tendency in scholarly treatments of that system has been to glide rather furtively over this crucial Sorelian concept—although this is not an accusation that can be levelled against Professor Stanley.⁹ Inasmuch as the largest part of our question is concerned with Sorel's "place", it is instructive to make a comparison of Sorelian myths with some of the ideas of his near-contemporary, Vilfredo Pareto,¹⁰ for, whereas avowed followers of Marx think in terms of ideology and Sorel thinks in terms of myth, Pareto is concerned with what he terms 'derivations'. But Sorel's and Pareto's concepts have a great deal in common. Marx holds that, in bourgeois society, the concerns of social classes find expression in ideologies and that the proletariat, through the development of class consciousness, will become singularly free of ideological blinkers. Neither Sorel nor Pareto holds either of these views as far as his respective alternative to ideology is concerned.

Indeed, Sorel's and Pareto's attempts to distance themselves from Marx reveal certain scholarly fashions—fashons that are still with us—in the discussion of political beliefs. Both myths and derivations can be defined as groups of opinions or tenets which act as vindication of and, partly, as guide to the behaviour of political associations. Pareto holds that this behaviour has as its source instincts which accord with 'residues'. Residues are that which is shared by ideas, the particulars of which vary but the purposes of which do not, allowing for the debt of each to environmental and contextual considerations. Similarly, Sorel claims that this behaviour's source can be found in what he calls 'impulses'. I have not the space to pursue the subtleties of meaning of terms such as instincts, impulses and residues, let alone the question of whether or not, as employed by their respective authors, they enjoy subtleties of meaning. I shall content myself with operating upon the basis of my judgement that, for the sake of the argument of this paper, the meaning and role of Sorel's impulses and Pareto's instincts are virtually identical. Pareto holds that instincts can be discovered in all persons sempre, but that they will be of different force in different individals. The behaviour issuing out of them, and thus the derivations which are that behaviour's vindication and guide, varies as required by each particular case, since the way in which behaviour is the expression of instincts hinges very largely on the circumstances of those whom they provoke into that behaviour.

Now, all this is very similar to the role that Sorel claims for impulses. Yet another similarity is to be found in the fact that each thinker assumes that the behaviour arising out of impulses or instincts is irrational.¹¹ Here, of course, we come across a major problem in Sorel, for this assumption is hard to defend. It is true that individuals more than occasionally do behave irrationally, in the sense of behaving in accordance with their passions and not stopping to reflect upon the situation. Yet their passions, their unreflective sources of behaviour, may in addition produce felt wants and thus objectives. To the extent that these objectives are not contradictory or irreconcilable and that behaviour is aimed sensibly at reaching them, that behaviour is reasonable. This holds even when the individual so conducting himself is ignorant of the passions which are the origins of his felt wants and objectives. It seems that Sorel never acknowledged this. He, like Pareto, in addressing himself to behaviour buttressed by myths, does not conceive of the individuals involved as men who hold achievable and congruous objectives and who join forces in an attempt to realize them. Instead, he holds that they converge because of the necessity to express impulses that they do not know are within them. Such impulses have these men's behaviour as their débouché, but for Sorel the hypotheses that they employ to vindicate their actions are no more than pretexts for behaviour the secret impulses of which they do not know.

Sorel is a revolutionary like no other. He romanticizes the radical disposition and is Marxist at least to the extent that he believes the proletariat to be the unrivalled vanguard of the revolution, and to the extent that he is primarily interested in the myths and the deeds of the workers. He rejects, however, Marx's notion of the proletariat's seeking the fulfilment of its concerns qua class. Sorel's view is that social upheaval does not take place for the benefit of a single social group. It simply expresses radical impulses, that is, the impulse to progress, to go forward without the burdens imposed by history: the impulse to smash whatever seem to be corrupt impediments of man's development. The role of the myth, then, is to validate the deeds that spring from the impulses. "The myth is accepted, not because it has been critically examined and found to be true, nor because it justifies the pursuit of common interests, but because it justifies what those who accept it are impelled to do."¹² In yet another sense, of course, Sorel is a true descendant of Marx, since the latter's prophecies concerning the higher phase of communist society¹³ are similarly pieces of revelation and not of political theory.¹⁴ Socialism has been provided with its aura precisely because of the predictive trappings with which Marx embellishes his system.

It is Sorel's view that all creeds, all groups that seek to win over the people must have their myths, which can grasp the people's mind and fire it to revolutionary deeds. Society will be overturned by the very credence that is placed in the fact of an 'impending event'. "What that event is and how it will come to pass is never clearly defined, for if it could be it would lose its potency; but there is always something praiseworthy or glorious in contributing to its consummation."¹⁵ And yet loss of potency can also occur as a result of this very lack of clarity and definition. Pre-war European socialism—of whatever stripe—had no systematic theoretical response to offer to the phenomenon of nationalism. The Italian syndicalists were advocates of their country's Mediterranean adventures, even the Libyan War of 1911-12; British naval and colonial policy had no more consistent supporter than Hyndman; few luminaries of the SPD were unconcerned with the bolstering of Germany's international position;¹⁶ and the French syndicalists publicly conceded the people's nationalist prejudices and bellicosity very early in the new century. It was in this atmosphere that Sorel was to achieve what he took to be an intellectual accommodation with Gallic chauvinism, a rapprochement that ran counter to the spirit, but not the letter, of his writings, since those writings were so often imprecise in their formulation.

But this fact does not minimize Sorel's importance. Indeed, to return to a previous point, one of his genuinely original achievements was the extension of the activities of Bernstein and other revisionists. Bernstein claims to have corrected Marx in asserting that in no social system is the bourgeois social and economic structure faced with certain extinction by means of a revolutionary holocaust. That with which the Marxian argument should rather concern itself is a particular sort of associational behaviour: that of groups who form for the purpose of creating new political forms and practices. Now, of course, Bernstein is especially interested in Marxist groups, formed to try to overturn the forms and practices of capitalist society. Sorel, however, extends Bernstein's point to include every kind of group seeking political change. In this way, Sorel is rendering Marxism into an attack on the classifications employed by economics, sociology, political science and their kin: after Sorel, Marxism is never again merely an attack on bourgeois economics, although he probably would not have thought of his activity in those terms, for he works, as mentioned, in the name of French syndicalism, and the adjective is important. French syndicalism does not address itself to many of the issues which the scientific Marx felt compelled to confront. It is unconcerned with the nature of socialist society, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or how the passage to classlessness will be effected. It has no theory of the state.

It is a product both of the French proletariat's souvenirs and of the actual circumstances of society and politics in France at the time. Its intellectual origins are to be found with Blanquism and with Proudhon's Système des Contradictions economiques (1850) and De la Justice, dans la Revolution et dans l'Eglise (1858). French syndicalism's alienation from the totality of bourgeois society can be seen in two ways. It rejects the notion that the proletariat is becoming richer in, and therefore happier with, the capitalist system—a notion reflected in some of the "bread-and-butter" attempts to revise Marx; and it believes in the existence of a workingclass essence, a fundamental fellowship, which it seeks to arouse. Sorel, as in his treatment of Marxism, takes syndicalism one step further. He disavows the entire liberal, reasoned ethos that the revisionists attempt to claim for socialism. Sorel takes an irrational pleasure in the imminent destruction of all the perfidious mores of bourgeois society. He has moved beyond the point of merely seeking protection from the capitalist economic system and its bourgeois class structure. "Sorel and Bernstein stand at the point of highest interdependence between socialist theory (and especially Marxism) and the Continental working-class movement."¹⁷

Let us finally and very briefly consider just one more of the many aspects of the question of Sorel's place that are stimulated by Professor Stanley's original collection—the problem of the affinities between Sorel's thought and fascism. Indeed, since this has been a problem of considerable moment in Sorelian scholarship, Professor Stanley might well have concentrated more of his energies upon it in his Introduction.

A great deal of this scholarship has been concentrated on the impact of Sorel's ideas upon Mussolini, especially the young Mussolini. It is apparent that, in the early years of the century, Mussolini—at that stage a revolutionary follower of Marx—had started to imbibe of the "irrational" or "sentimental" views of Sorel and Pareto, among others, and thus to qualify the particular variety of socialism to which he had previously been attached. In 1908, the student of Pareto and Sorel wrote "The Philosophy of Violence" for his local newspaper. It was the work, not just of a devotee of violent methods, but of a nationalist, and the Italian nationalists of the time were as fervent in their proclaimed adherence to the thought of Sorel as were their syndicalist compatriots. (This, indeed, is a large part of the explanation of Italian fascism's split personality. It was always characterized by both radical and anti-radical elements, a legacy of its having absorbed so many diverse persuasions.) At any rate, there seems to be no other way of viewing Sorel's intellectual effect on Mussolini as other than a "clear case of influence", a "known fact of direct influence".¹⁹ But may we also say that "It was not entirely illogical from his point of view that he should have become a philosophical progenitor of Italian fascism"?²⁰

One thing, at least, is clear: by the time that the Great War erupted, the Italian followers of the chauvinists, Alfredo Rocco, Enrico Corradini²¹ and Scipio Sighele; the political economists and socialists, Pareto, Roberto Michels and Gaetano Mosca; the social psychologist Gustave Le Bon; and Sorel, with his elements of both Marxism and syndicalism, felt unconstrained in biting from each of these cherries and assuming that they came from the one basket.²² Unlike Mosca and Pareto, however, Sorel neither had his origins in democratic progressivism nor ever fell under its sway. He perceived the emergence and strengthening of Marx's "indefinite, disintegrated mass" of "parasites and self-indulgent drones", the lumpenproletariat,^23, and he sought to combat this growth with a Marxist/syndicalist proletariat. This is the sense in which Freund was able to describe Sorel as a revolutionary conservative: the one term refers to his means, the other to his ends. Charles Maurras's royalist movement, the Action Française, hailed him as "notre maître Sorel" and he was, indeed, involved in its activities from 1910 to 1914. Yet he rejected the notion of party, placing his faith in the proletariat's taking actions which would culminate in the general strike. But, he says, the situation of each national proletariat is unique, and the particular actions of each proletariat will vary accordingly.

In this way the repudiator of party felt able to hail both the March on Rome and the October Revolution. (Consistency, pace Professor Stanley, is not his subject's long suit—indeed, it seems to me not a claim that Sorel would wish to be made on his behalf.) The proletarian activists and supporters of both revolutions had realized their myths. There was no little raw material, in other words, for an Ernst Jünger²⁴ to get hold of, accurately call it 'Sorelianism', and provide a new yet harmonious ingredient to the blend of inter-war German nationalist philosophy. In Italy some of Sorel's views were translated more directly into action. The creed of the squadristi resulted from their seizing his leimotiv of violence and giving expression to it in the language of Marinetti. The claim that all Italians were "working-class" was the chiodo del mozzo of a body of thought which Mussolini's adherents dubbed 'national syndicalism'. Italian Fascism, in settling to its own satisfaction the question of working-class sentiments versus nationalist sentiments, achieved a fusion foreseen by Pareto, Michels, Corradini²⁵—and Georges Sorel.

This is but a sample of the evidence for the prosecution. Taken in its entirety—and surely no single individual has ever seen it thus—it would represent a very persuasive case. Yet the case for the defence, if unable to draw on as great a quantity of documentation, can make its points no less tellingly, and it has found the perfect advocate in Professor Stanley:

The last thing that Sorel desires is what he calls "creative hatred" of the kind used by demagogues—a hatred that creates . . . brutality.²⁶

Sorel defines violence specifically as a rebellion against the existing order, while force is the might of the state used to maintain the existing order.²⁷

. . . confusing Sorelianism with Fascism is to make the same mistake as to single out war as the most characteristic trait of Fascism rather than internal state terror, which Sorel abhorred.²⁸

Sorel is best regarded, says Professor Stanley, "as a highly suggestive social theorist, in the grand manner",²⁹ which might well be even an underestimation of his worth, for this grand social theorist is richly suggestive in so many different ways. The Sorelian paradox lingers, tantalizingly: our question remains unanswered.

NOTES

¹John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace. The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky (London, 1974), 52.

² Georges Sorel,Reflections on Violence, trans. by J. Roth and T. E. Hulme (New York, 1961), 249; italics in original. (I shall refer to the Roth and Hulme edition, rather than the Stanley translation, for the latter provides only excepts from the Reflections in the work under review. This is a curious editorial decision on Professor Stanley's part, for there is surely no intellectually satisfying way in which to decide which sections of the Reflections constitute the more notable contributions to "Socialism and Philosophy".)

³Ibid., 148 (italics in original).

⁴ In his Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation (1898).

⁵Ibid., p. x.

⁶ Sorel, op. cit., 130.

⁷ See ibid., 50.

⁸ Philip Rosenberg, The Seventh Hero: Thomas Carlyle and the Theory of Radical Activism (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 151. I am indebted to Mr Rosenberg's splendid analysis of this problem and to his provision of the examples of Kropotkin, Proudhon and Engels.

⁹ See especially pp. 39-47 of his Introduction.

¹⁰ Sorel's dates are 1847-1922, Pareto's 1848-1923. The points raised about Pareto can be illustrated by referring to his Sociological Writings, ed. S. E. Finer (London, 1966), especially Part II.

¹¹ Pareto's term is 'non-logical'.

¹² John Plamenatz, Ideology (London, 1970), 126.

¹³ See especially the "Critique of the Gotha Programme", Selected Works, ii (New York, 1950), 23.

¹⁴ The same might be said of the predictive passages of Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.

¹⁵ R. N. Carew Hunt, The Theory and Practice of Communism: An Introduction (Harmondsworth, 1963), 106.

¹⁶ Cf. H. B. Davis, Nationalism and Socialism (New York, 1967), chs 4 and 5.

¹⁷ Adam B. Ulam, The Unfinished Revolution: An Essay on the Sources of Influence of Marxism and Communism (New York, 1964), 158.

¹⁸ Pareto's view of 'sentiment' and 'solidarity' is outlined in his "Applicazione di teoria sociologiche" (1901).

¹⁹ The terms employed by Leonard Schapiro, Totalitarianism (London, 1972), 73.

²⁰ R. N. Berki, Socialism (London, 1975), 169 n.52; italics added.

²¹ See his La Vita nazionale (Florence, 1907); La unità e la potenza della nazioni (Florence, 1912); and Discorsi politici (1902-1923) (Florence, 1923).

²² This point is elaborated in A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism (New York, 1969), ch. 2.

²³ Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York, 1963), 75; also Theorien ueberden Mehrwert, quoted in Ronald L. Meek (ed.), Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb (Berkeley, 1971), 176.

²⁴ See, for example, his Der Arbeiter, Herrschaft und Gestalt (1932).

²⁵ The case of Corradini is an interesting one. In 1900 Sorel pointed to him as a "remarkably intelligent" person who had grasped "very well the value" of Sorel's philosophy. Quoted in James Meisel, The Genesis of Georges Sorel (Ann Arbor, 1953), 219.

²⁶ Stanley, "Editor's Introduction", 44.

²⁷Ibid., 43 (italics in original).

²⁸Ibid., 4.

²⁹Ibid., 5.