SOURCE: "Myth and Symbol in Georges Sorel," in Political Symbolism in Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of George L Mosse, edited by Seymour Drescher, David Sabean, and Allan Sharlin, Transaction Books, 1982, pp. 100-17.

[In the following excerpt, Gross traces the treatment of myth and symbolic images in Sorel's body of work.]

Every student of modern political symbolism must sooner or later confront the work of Georges Sorel (1847-1922). As one of the more engaging minds of his generation, Sorel made a number of original and important observations about the nature of symbolic images and their relationship to political action. These observations are not always easy to uncover, since they are scattered throughout an enormous range of work, some of it dealing with topics as seemingly remote from the subject as the history of Christianity, modern economics, the methodology of the sciences, or the trial of Socrates.¹ Often Sorel's most interesting ideas are mentioned only in passing, or else developed in a fragmentary and unsatisfactory manner. At other times he disdains to follow step-by-step the logic of his own thought, saying that what he writes is entirely "personal and individual," and consequently there is no need to be concerned with the transitions between things "because they nearly always come under the heading of commonplaces."²

Despite these many difficulties Sorel's work easily repays careful study. This is especially true with regard to what may well be the most innovative aspect of his oeuvre: his study of the psychology of political motivation, including the numerous irrational, spontaneous elements that affect all human behavior. Sorel was one of the first to explore this area with any degree of sophistication, and his conclusions had notable consequences.

In the following pages the focus of attention will be on one part of Sorel's "psychology of political motivation": the place that myths and symbols must occupy in modern political movements and in modern life in general. Three aspects of this topic need to be investigated in some detail: first, how it came about that myths and symbols moved into a central, pivotal position in Sorel's thought; second, what he meant by these terms and what he expected to achieve by utilizing them; and third, what significant differences, if any, exist between the concepts of mythology and symbolism as found in Sorel, and these same concepts found later in fascism and national socialism. To pursue each of these issues, it is important to grasp the cultural and intellectual context out of which Sorel emerged. This will help explain why he felt compelled to enter into the study of myths and symbols in the first place.

The more one looks at the period in Europe roughly between 1870 and 1914, the more this age seems to represent a decisive turning point in Western consciousness. It was at this time that a "crisis of certainty" gripped many of Europe's leading intellectuals, artists, and writers. The aftereffects of this crisis have remained with us. What began to be asserted during this period was the following, put here in the most condensed terms. (1) There is no objective, verifiable structure to existence. (2) There is no telos operating in the universe, including inevitable progress. (3) There is no essence behind appearance, but rather only appearances referring to other appearances ad infinitum. With only appearances, and nothing solid behind or within them, everything becomes arbitrary—hence a collapse of signification itself. (4) On the social and scientific level there are no facts, only interpretations. (5) On the personal level there are nothing but masks hiding other masks which lie still deeper inside a fiction called the "self." (6) In all areas of life there is no ultimate eternal truth. In earlier times, truth usually meant the identity of an idea or concept with reality, but since reality itself was now being called into question, there was no way to measure the truth of anything. This line of reasoning represented a profound development in modern thought which had become fairly widespread by the end of the nineteenth century. Before this time most thinkers assumed there was a truth: they simply disagreed about the best methods of reaching it (by reason, feeling, intuition, etc.). By 1900 many influential thinkers had come to doubt* whether the word truth had any meaning at all. Moreover, if there were no truths, perhaps there were no values either.

In this context the whole "appearance vs. reality" problem emerged strongly in all areas of European culture: in literature (Hofmannsthal, Musil, Strindberg, Gide, Huysmans, D'Annunzio), in art (impressionism, expressionism, futurism), and in philosophy (Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl). Oscar Wilde put it this way: "Try as we may, we cannot get behind the appearance of things to reality. And the terrible reality may be, that there is no reality in things apart from their experiences."³ Nietzsche pushed matters still further by suggesting the even more frightening prospect of no anchorage whatever: "We have abolished the true world [reality]: what has remained? The world of appearances perhaps? . . . Oh, no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one!"⁴ These concerns led to one of the central dilemmas of the period: if there are no fixed truths or values, how then should one live? Some, like the fin de siècle dandies, answered this question by saying that one should live wholly in appearances, since this is all there is. Others urged hedonism, or the life of pure sensation, where as many pulsations as possible are crammed into every moment. Still others argued that one should live "as if" there were ascertainable truths, even though there were none, since this was the only way to give life meaning.

Sorel was aware of these and other solutions to the dilemma of his age—and rejected most of them. Each seemed built upon the assumption that truth was undiscernible; and each was an alternative to this state of affairs, a way of being-in-the-world without any grounding in an ultimate reality. Sorel denied the premise of this argument. The truth of an idea or value could be determined, though not by the usual methods of studying its "inherent worth" or measuring it against some putative "objective reality," which Sorel admitted did not exist.⁵ Rather, the truth of something was discovered solely by looking at its effects. A thing is true if, subjectively speaking, it has true or useful consequences, and a thing has value if its results are valuable for the individual.⁶

An idea can be judged good or bad exclusively in terms of the results it produces in those who hold it and believe in it. He seemed to have three criteria to determine whether an idea was true, i.e. beneficial: if it made the individual who embraced it more creative; if it increased an individual's character or moral consciousness; and above all if it led to action—a combative, engaged orientation toward life. For Sorel life is action, and ideas must be valued by the degree to which they lead to praxis, or produce lifeenhancing qualities. In all this there is some amount of determinable truth from Sorel's point of view, but it lies entirely in its efficacy and advantageous consequences. Sorel very adroitly managed to shift the whole question of truth to a new level and thereby overcome the pervasive appearance/reality dualism that obsessed so many of his contemporaries. The point was not to distinguish, as Yeats put it, the "dancer" (reality) from the "dance" (appearance), but to investigate the completely different area of how the dance is received by those observing it. If it increases an individual viewer's creative energy, if it drives him toward more intense participation in life, then the dance possesses "truth" regardless of the supposedly objective qualities of the performance. All that is important about anything resides in its consequences.

Once Sorel hit upon this instrumental notion of truth, he felt that he had solved a problem that continued to transfix many other thinkers of his generation. He no longer had to remain incapacitated by the crisis of certainty, but could transcend it and move on to more important matters. One of these was what he considered the deplorable moral and spiritual condition of his age. It was sunk in a miasma of decadence, mediocrity, and corruption. No one was shriller in condemning the general tone of European civilization around 1900 than Sorel. Everywhere he saw attitudes which revolted him. The leading ideas of his age appeared to encourage selfindulgence, resignation, degeneration. Since he judged the consequences of these ideas to be uniformly pernicious—the decadence he saw around him seemed incontrovertible, for its effects were everywhere⁷—the ideas that produced them had also to be judged pernicious.

The major blame for this condition was placed at the feet of the bourgeoisie. To Sorel the dominant class in Europe had become desiccated by too much rationality, or what he called, following Vico, the "barbarism of reflection."⁸ Furthermore, it generally lived "without morals," and had gradually given up certain important "habits of liberty" with which it was once acquainted.⁹ The result was a total loss of virtue and honor, a drastic decline in the "heroic" qualities which Sorel believed the bourgeoisie once possessed. But something more was involved. Since this class also controlled the dominant political, economic, and cultural institutions of the period, the corruption unavoidably spread out beyond the class itself and became firmly embedded in the very fabric of modern society. When the middle class became decadent, so did the whole world of institutionalized values it created. There was therefore the added danger that other classes would be dragged down with the bourgeoisie unless something drastic were done to remedy the situation.

What was needed, Sorel thought, was the infusion of a new sense of morality into modern life. As a French moralist of the type extending back to Pascal and Rousseau, Sorel defined the central problems of the age in ethical terms. Therefore the principal solutions also had to be ethical. According to Sorel, the bourgeoisie lost its morality because it ceased to have convictions or believe in anything "indemonstrable." This took the mystery and elevation out of life, and the bourgeoisie lost contact with the energizing ideals that any group must have to be great or ethical. Without ideals or strong beliefs, there can be no inward force capable of stimulating creativity, morality, or the impetus to act—the three qualities Sorel identified with his instrumental view of truth. This loss of belief had happened before in history, in ancient Greece around the time of Socrates,¹⁰ and in Christian Europe after the "age of the martyrs."¹¹ In the face of this kind of spiritual enervation the only hope lay in a revitalization or restoration of heroic ideals. Only in this way could a dynamic quality be restored to daily life. Even more important, only such energizing ideals could animate the inner state of the soul, out of which might come a more vigorous social ethic. It was a matter of indifference to Sorel what the ideals might happen to be. All that mattered was that they produce vigorous moral sentiments. "It is not a question of knowing what is the best morality, but only of determining if there exists a mechanism capable of guaranteeing the development of morality."¹² Much of Sorel's thought was taken up with precisely these two questions: how to reconstruct morality now that it had broken down, and what "agent" to rely on in order to bring this about.

Sorel's reasoning unfolded in the following sequence: The only way out of decadence was to support some group which is in society but not of it—a group able to believe in something again—for only such a group could find its way to a new ethic. Sorel was resolute in his claim to defend any social element that could accomplish this. The working class seemed the most likely group in contemporary life with the potential to remoralize society.

But, Sorel added, this was true only if the proletariat was rescued from the bourgeoisie, which was trying to make it decadent, and from parliamentary socialists like Jaurès who wanted to lure the proletariat into a dependence upon the state. Only by forming independent syndicates or bourses du travail could workers acquire the initiative and autonomy from bourgeois values that would be necessary to reinstate virtue. Still, even determining that the proletariat offered the greatest possibility for a revaluation of values, Sorel felt that it could not originate action toward this end without outside help.¹³ The workers needed to be spurred into action, since only by doing, rather than talking or theorizing (another middle-class fault!), does a new morality get embodied in practice. Consequently, the way to motivate the workers was through myths or "mobilizing ideas" which would decisively move them into action. Even if it could be shown that these myths were objectively untrue, they might still be effectively true if they had significant consequences—if they set the working class in motion and helped it bring about a transforming ethic. These myths had to be embodied in symbols and images of great power. Otherwise the impact of a myth was not successfully communicated. The pivot of Sorel's theory turned on these last points: the effective use of both myths and symbols vis à vis the working class. We shall now take a closer look at what he intended to achieve by means of each of these.

What is a myth? For Sorel a myth is an emotionally charged artificial construct or interpretation which, though perhaps inaccurate or absurd, reaches people at a deeply unconscious level and inspires them to action. Being an "imaginary picture" rooted in and inseparable from the sentiments it evokes, a myth is always mysterious. It can never be cognitively understood because it operates in some prereflexive area of the mind where intuition and beliefs are also stimulated. Even more mysteriously, a myth is frequently the objectification of the convictions of a group, that is, an expression, in the form of images, of the goals and aspirations of an entire collectivity.¹⁴ For these reasons it is too amorphous and volatile, too filled with "indeterminate nuances" ever to be accessible to scientific investigation. A myth cannot be broken down into its component parts, or subjected to face-value statements as to whether it is true or false, valid or invalid, since only its consequences can ultimately reveal that. It follows that a myth, because it is not a description but only an action-image, cannot be criticized. It is for all practical purposes irrefutable, just as a belief (as opposed to a fact) is irrefutable, since the power of a myth rests on faith, which does not lend itself to rational analysis.¹⁵

Myths are composed of a "body of images" which elicit a "mass of sentiments" that are then "grasped by intuition alone, before any considered analyses are made."¹⁶ By their very nature they are indemonstrable, standing outside the realm of verification. But, Sorel insisted, this is why they are tremendously forceful constructions. People want and need to believe in things that are beyond confirmation.¹⁷ Because myths "seize the imagination with an extraordinary tenacity," they provoke emotions and qualities of sacrifice and struggle without which nothing great or heroic has ever been achieved. Even if they are exaggerations or misrepresentations, myths are, precisely for this reason, more true than exact descriptions because they tap a vital part of the psyche which would otherwise never be activated.¹⁸

Yet for Sorel myths are not the same as lies. Nor do they carry connotations which would link them with propaganda or ideology as these terms are usually understood today. It is essential to Sorel that these are not cynically manufactured and imposed upon the masses but that they are already present, in latent form, within the mass itself, and need only be drawn out to become real forces in people's lives. Well before Jung's discussion of archetypes, there is some hint here of myths being anchored to predispositions within a collective unconscious. When myths work effectively they stir up, in Sorel's words, the "quickening fire .. . hidden under the ashes," making "the flames leap up."¹⁹ Myths actuate sentiments never touched by ratiocination. The more successfully they hit responsive chords inside individuals, the more people are likely to become aware of their deepest needs and desires. And, Sorel conjectured, the more this awareness grows, the more they will be willing to struggle against decadence and for a new morality. This is why myths became so essential to Sorel's social philosophy. Without them there would be no movement and hence no moral change.

Just as for Sorel the value of a thing lay in its consequences, the same was true with myths. A myth was pronounced good (effective) if it yielded some or all of the following results. First, it had to arouse qualities of enthusiasm and inspriation, intensity and passion, since these were in danger of disappearing in periods of decline. Sorel thought that decadent ages like his own were more inclined to encourage utopias than myths. Utopias, in his view, always lacked the fire, the emotion, and the energizing power of myths since they were merely intellectual constructs, rationally formulated for some distant future, and therefore generally conducive to passivity rather than activism in the present.

Second, a myth had to engender an inclination toward action. Sorel was convinced that if people did not project an entirely "artificial world" out in front of them, and then let it affect their motivation, they would never act to "attain durable results."²⁰ According to Sorel there would probably have been no French Revolution if "enchanting pictures" of what might occur had not been prompted in people's minds beforehand. Sorel remained certain that the greatest value myths can have is to trigger action in those who adhere to them. "We do nothing great without warmly coloured and clearly defined images, which absorb the whole of our attention."²¹

Third, to be beneficial a myth had to produce freedom. By Sorel's reasoning, freedom developed in an individual when he acquired a more holistic or inclusive sense of himself, thereby making it possible to act from within and freely, since freedom was equated with self-direction. Sorel cited Bergson in this respect: "To act freely is to recover possession of oneself."²² But myths help recover the fuller, unconscious, irrational side of the self. Consequently they necessarily lead toward freedom—and freedom means more than simply wanting something, it also implies training the will to pursue what one wants. An individual is most free when he wills. If he ceases to will, all his efforts begin to "fade away into rhapsodies" and he sinks into lethargy and mediocrity.²³ Myths can prevent this by focusing emotions and mobilizing will. They can keep people agitated and constantly attuned to an inner drive for the ideal. Even more, they can awaken in the depths of the soul a "sentiment of the sublime."²⁴ To cultivate such a sentiment under the guidance of a firm inward motivation would be the essence of freedom.

Fourth, a myth had to simplify the world, make it clear and transparent again, so that equivocation would be impossible and nothing could be left in a state of indecision.²⁵ It was especially important for myths to identify enemies so that an unbridgeable gulf could be established between two sides, as happened between Christians and pagans in the late Roman era. Sorel insisted on the necessity of this cleavage. Not only did it set up battle lines and promote the martial spirit so crucial for an unconditional war against the status quo; it also permitted one's own side to be portrayed as oppressed or unjustly abused, thereby provoking an active mood of resistance which always brings out the noblest elements of character. Like Proudhon, Sorel believed that only by resisting something, by fighting and struggling against it, were extraordinary accomplishments possible. Even the artist needed the physical resistance of his material in order to give it form. It was the same with myths. They distinctly point out who or what is to be opposed, so that monumental energies can be generated to fight against them.

Finally, a myth had to stimulate creativity, either in an individual or in whole groups. Because it so sharply cuts through the veneer of civilization and stirs up primitive residues within the mind, a myth can elicit an entire range of perceptions and feelings that would otherwise never be tapped. In Sorel's view, myths heighten the imaginary and even mystical quality of experience which appeared to be eroding under the impact of rational, bourgeois values. A myth, in contrast to the normal habits of mind, releases internal energies which are more "barbaric" (in Vico's sense), but also more creative, poetic, and revitalizing. However, a myth has not done enough when it merely arouses an "inner turmoil" no matter how creative; it fulfills its function only when it turns this inner turmoil in the direction of action bent on moral and spiritual liberation.²⁶

In these five positive results of myths, all the qualities mentioned earlier which made something "true" for Sorel were present: morality, action, and creativity. To the extent that a myth encouraged each of these, it was a valid myth. To the extent that it did not, it was invalid. This latter type Sorel called "illusions." An illusion could have different origins. It could, for example, be an "artifice for dissimulating" purposely devised by a ruling group to manipulate other elements of society.²⁷ Illusions here became, in Sorel's words, "multiple fantasies" or "conventional falsehoods" which might roughly correspond with Marx's notion of false consciousness. Or an illusion could simply be an outdated myth which had become unserviceable because, with its loss of ability to evoke moral responses, it had assumed a co-optive and "morbid" influence on the population. Whatever its origin, an illusion performed a function almost exactly opposite that of a myth. When it had a "stranglehold on men's minds," as Sorel believed it did for most people during his own age, it produced passivity, immorality, and a stultifying frame of mind. This side of Sorel's work has never been closely studied, but it provides an interesting and important counterpoint to his more familiar ideas about myth.

If one accepts Sorel's definition of what a myth is and what it should achieve, there is still the question of how a myth is embodied or made manifest. Sorel's answer: by means of symbols. A myth cannot be conveyed except by being depicted in some striking form which appeals to the imagination and emotions. Thus, Sorel's discussion of mythology led him directly into a discussion of symbolism as well. Though Sorel nowhere specifically defined a symbol, it is obvious that his meaning was the traditional one. A symbol is, as Mosse has summarized it, a "visible, concrete objectification" of a myth, a myth made operative.²⁸ Symbolism occurs when one word or thing, perhaps not meaningful in itself, represents something else (or a whole line of emotional associations and wider meanings), and is therefore more dynamically charged because of these emotional associations.²⁹ When Sorel talked about symbols in relation to myths, he usually implied that symbols were forms which expressed a mythical content; in this sense they were treated as outward signs representing an inward message. At other times he implied that the symbols were themselves the content, or the form and content compressed into one, so that myths and symbols were intimately fused and analytically inseparable. In either case, a symbol was always understood to be an image, but an image with a double existence. It was present both in the mind of the believer and in an external manifestation which captured an awareness already in the psyche. This is why Sorel could speak of symbols that exalted deep-seated "psychological qualities," or enkindled latent awarenesses which were then drawn out of the unconscious, not implanted there.³⁰

But by linking symbols with images Sorel did not always have artistic metaphors in mind. More often he seemed to think that not art but the spoken word was most effective in arousing "warmly coloured images" which incite people to act. The written word was played down. Except for Marx's Das Kapital which Sorel found full of "social poetry" and moving apocalyptic images,³¹ written language seemed to be associated with linear thinking, rationality, logic, and calculated expression. Writing was by nature "cunning" and analytical, the natural medium of intellectuals. Speaking was seen as evocative and inspiring, the appropriate medium for those who want action rather than thought. Sorel considered direct verbal communication the most conducive means for stirring others to movement because it "act[s] on the feelings in a mysterious way and easily establishes] a current of sympathy between people."³² The fact that the spoken word, not art forms or texts, was singled out as the primary agency for conveying or inducing symbols is important. It underscores how much Sorel thought symbols ultimately reside in the believer's psyche. He discussed no fixed embodiments of symbolic awareness in signs, emblems, or posters beyond the fleeting words of an inspiring speaker.

For Sorel, history supplied important examples of successful myths and symbols. The ancient Greek mind, for instance, was moved by Homeric myths and images mystically in tune with the Greek character and therefore eliciting its best qualities to epic achievements. Christianity had a myth of the Second Coming, beautifully captured in the symbolic evocation of the Apocalypse. Even though this image of the future was untrue, since the Second Coming never came, it was nevertheless effectively true because it aroused great courage and conviction in those who believed, and in the long run led to significant moral progress.³³ The French Revolution also evoked a number of highly effective myths and symbols. According to Sorel, the armies of the revolution fought with a ferocity unknown in the ancien régime because the symbols they responded to prompted a fervent "will-to-victory."

The age in which Sorel wrote was the early twentieth century. All the old myths and symbols seemed to have lost their efficacy. Precisely because, in Sorel's opinion, so much of Europe had stopped believing in anything, it had fallen into decadence and mediocrity. It was living by illusions rather than myths. However, there appeared to be one sector of the population that still revealed qualities of will, drive, idealism, and morality however buried or hidden they might be. If this sector could be set in motion to actualize its values, Europe would perhaps experience the moral revitalization which Sorel so greatly desired. The group Sorel had in mind was the proletariat. To perform its proper role, it had to be aroused to action by suitable myths. According to Sorel, the myth which most corresponded to the "working-class mind," and had the potential for "dominating [it] in an absolute manner," was the myth of the general strike.³⁴

Since this is the concept for which Sorel is best known, there is no need to repeat what has been analyzed elsewhere.³⁵ It is sufficient to touch briefly on those aspects of the general strike which relate to the above discussion of myth and symbol. The myth of the general strike was for Sorel a kind of updated version of the Apocalypse. It was a vision of an approaching Dies Irac in which the whole bourgeois world would collapse under the impact of a mass prolctarian strike. As a vision the myth acquired a compelling force because it was the projection of the collective "will to deliverance" of the entire proletariat, and not because it was the creation of a handful of syndicalist intellectuals.

To be effective as a myth, the general strike had to be pictured in vivid, catastrophic images. This meant that its inevitably violent nature had to be accented. Yet for Sorel the violence did not necessarily have to be carried out in practice. He appears to have been repelled by certain forms of violence such as terrorism, which one might be engaged in for impure motives, or sabotage, which he viewed as a blow against the objectification of some unknown worker's labor—labor that needed to be respected rather than destroyed.³⁶ When Sorel spoke of violence he usually meant the state of "battle readiness" which talk of violence usually brings. Being prepared to use violence, he believed, was often more effective than actual use of it, and the effectiveness or utility of an idea was always Sorel's primary concern. If violence were resorted to, Sorel set several conditions for its proper use. For instance, it would have to be done gratuitously, "without hatred and without the spirit of revenge."³⁷ It could not be exercised for material gain or the "profits of conquest," since this would reflect the value system of the bourgeoisie which violence was to overcome.³⁸ It had to be implemented with reserve, and in light of the high moral aspirations of the proletariat, violence only becomes "purified" when fused with the most exalted ethical intentions. Sorel seemed to think that proletarian violence would not get out of hand and become brutality because of the intensity and spiritual beauty of the workers who perpetrated it. They would always be responsible people, basically in possession of themselves, proud, confident, and disciplined due to the sense of rigor and self-control they learned as producers in their workplaces. From them, violence was always very beautiful and heroic, and it always produced the right effects of inspiring fear in the enemy. It simultaneously promoted class solidarity, determination to act, and primordial creative energies, which Sorel lyrically associated with that "torment of the infinite" which the timorous middle class had long since lost.³⁹

For Sorel the general strike, embellished with frightful images of violence, did not have to be achieved in order to bring about the results he intended. Its efficacy as a myth rested solely on the action-inducing qualities it engendered among those who merely believed it would come about. This was the whole purpose of myth as opposed to illusion. It set people in motion to accomplish the moral revolution Sorel wanted to see in modern society. The general strike appeared to be the last viable myth that could successfully mobilize people to reappraise values. It alone could provide the motivation and "epic state of mind" out of which the proletariat could forge a new moral order.

This was Sorel's most pressing concern. It even appears at times that he availed himself of the proletariat not so much because he valued it as a class, but because of what he thought it could do for the renovation of morals. When, around 1908-13, Sorel became disillusioned with the syndicates and doubted that they would be "instruments of moralization" as he had once hoped,⁴⁰ he momentarily abandoned the working class as an agent of revolution and searched for other groups which might perform the same role. By the end of his life, he returned with somewhat less enthusiasm to the proletariat as the only sector of society still able to ethically refashion a decadent world.

Though Sorel must certainly be treated as a man of the Left, it is undeniable that he had some influence on extremist elements within the European Right. For a time the Camelots du Roi, a youth group tied to Maurras's Action Française, were attracted to him, and a curious association called the Cercle Proudhon was formed (1912) to bring together radical syndicalist and royalist elements on the basis of some of Sorel's ideas. Mussolini, too, was reputed to have been influenced by Sorel's views on myth and violence, though here the ties seem somewhat more dubious.⁴¹ It is no wonder, then, that in the 1930s some of Sorel's remaining syndicalist followers often found themselves in the embarrassing position of defending their mentor from charges of being one of the progenitors of fascism.

Since a connection between Sorel and the far Right has consistently been made, it would be useful to investigate this link in more detail. Here there is space to do this only in the realm of myth and symbols. What follows is a brief comparison of Sorel's treatment of both these concepts with their treatment in fascism and national socialism. No effort at establishing a causal link between Sorel's ideas and the radical Right can be attempted here, nor is there any pretense at systematic analysis. Taking note of similarities and significant differences between Sorel's mythology and imagery and that found in fascism and national socialism, one may get a better sense of the dividing line that separates this theorist of proletarian violence from the theorists and practitioners of fascist violence.

First, some similarities. Sorel, fascism, and national socialism all attacked the status quo for its venality and decadence, and called for moral regeneration. All were antiparliamentarian, since they wanted to create a mood of solidarity outside bourgeois institutions. At the same time they were antiliberal, since liberalism seemed cowardly, weak-minded, "feminine." Sorel and the extreme Right were also repulsed by the alleged hedonism and materialism of modern life, and wanted to see a return to a more austere, rigorous, and self-disciplined lifestyle. Consequently each defended old middle-class, as opposed to modern bourgeois, values. Despite much talk about heroism, vitality, and the epic state of mind, one often finds underneath such rhetoric an emphasis on simple domestic virtues: family closeness, chastity, honesty, industry. In Sorel as well as in fascism and national socialism there was a strong idealization of some group as the embodiment of virtue. For Sorel it was the proletariat, which he characterized as pure in heart, rich in sentiment, resolute, noble, decisive, hostile to shallow rationality, and in possession of a superior "moral culture."⁴² In national socialism the Volk was idealized, usually in terms very similar to Sorel's working class. Similarly, Sorel and the Right placed tremendous importance on the power of ideas to affect life, agreeing, as Sorel expressed it, that "ethics springs from aspiration." Both also believed, perhaps contradictorily, that the value of ideas lies in their effects, and that "truth" must be judged by results. Even myths and symbols were dealt with pragmatically, their operational function always foremost.

Both for Sorel and the far Right there was a fascination with the psychology of motivation. It seemed imperative to understand what makes people act, so that the masses or the proletariat could be set in motion. This meant exploring the subjective and nonlogical side of human behavior (which the Left at the time usually failed to do), since it was thought that emotion and sentiment held the key to the secrets of motivation. Once Sorel and the fascists grasped the role that instincts and subconscious drives play in collective psychology, both went on to utilize myths and symbols to stimulate purposive behavior. They sought to activate archaic residues by means of forceful images which often centered on suggestions that combat, struggle, the glory of war, and "barbaric simplicity" would restore vigor and vitality to life. Finally, both Sorel and the Right implied that ultimately just being in movement may be more important than arriving at a goal. The ferment of movement provides everything that is needed: action, morality, energy, creative turmoil. If the goal was reduced to the process, the process in turn was frequently reduced to a psychological disposition or a state of mind. The fascists often described their movements, not in terms of ideologies but of "attitudes" ("Our movement," said Primo de Rivera, "is not a manner of thinking; it is a manner of being.)"⁴³ The same was true of Sorel. In a revealing article on the ethics of socialism he wrote: "Little does it matter whether communism is realized sooner or later. . . . The essential thing is our ability to render account of our own conduct. What is called the final goal exists only for our internal life."⁴⁴

These are the considerable similarities between Sorel and the radical Right; but they are offset by notable differences. Sorel always called for a real social revolution, not simply a "spiritual" one as the fascist ideologues did. At least in theory, he wanted bourgeois institutions (including capitalism) abolished and power turned over to the proletariat. Also unlike the extreme Right, Sorel was not hostile to modernity. He accepted the configurations of modern industrial society and leveled no attack on urbanization, the machine, or the technological depersonalization of man. Similarly, there was no Führerprinzip in Sorel. "Anonymous heroes" might be needed to evoke mythological thinking in the proletariat, but their role would fade as the myths took hold and became selfgenerating.⁴⁵ With fascism and national socialism it was different. The myths were intended to create a mystical symbiosis between leader and led, so that the leader was not to disappear but remain to guide and discipline the masses by manipulating symbols. Hitler never relinquished his role as leader, unless it was to tie the masses to symbolic rituals rather than to himself, since these would perpetuate the political system after he was gone.⁴⁶ Mussolini also learned how to direct popular energies to himself as leader, and then through this role to attach them to the state. Sorel was opposed on principle to leader figures and states. In this case, the radical Right learned more from Gustave LeBon than from Sorel, for it was LeBon who spoke of a leader mystique, the mobilization of crowds, and the manipulation of mass contagion.⁴⁷ All of this was foreign to Sorel's thought.

The attitude toward symbolism was markedly different in Sorel and the extreme Right. For Sorel symbols were internal psychic images (or external signs used to activate these images) which he had no interest in institutionalizing. In Sorel there was no focus on emblems, cultic rites, processions, holy flames, Thing convocations, and the like, so central to national socialism. There was also no nature mysticism, no concern with cosmic forces to be tapped, no blood and soil imagery. Neither was there any visual stereotyping of the Jew, since anti-Semitism was never a major issue for Sorel. (There was a streak of anti-Semitism in him, but it derived from Proudhon and Renan rather than Drumont; not the Jews as such, but the decadent nouveaux riches and their retainers, were defined as the real enemies of the working class.)

Like the fascist and nazi Right, Sorel placed great importance on the function of speech in symbol formation. He strongly believed that it was primarily through the spoken word that myths become activated. Hitler understood this well, and so did Mussolini, with his ritual balcony dialogues recalling the liturgy of the Christian Responsa.⁴⁸ But Sorel viewed the relationship between words and symbols very differently than either of them. In his opinion language always had to be ethical; even when an orator spoke before large crowds he was obliged to remain within the constraints of his moral attitude toward the world. It was otherwise with someone like Hitler. In Mein Kampf he unabashedly described how a speaker needs to manipulate his audience with propaganda and highly charged "verbal images" which appeal to the susceptibilities of the "narrow-minded" masses whose "powers of assimilation .. . are extremely restricted."⁴⁹ This kind of cynicism would have been wholly unacceptable to Sorel. But even more than this, the effect of a Hitler speech was not so much in what was said, ethical or not, as in how it was said. As Mosse has described it, there was an undulating rhythm and cadence to Hitler's speeches: the rhetorical question, followed by an unambiguous statement, with plenty of room for people to join in with exclamations at the right places.⁵⁰ The liturgical context in which words were spoken was also essential to Hitler—as for example at the Nuremberg rallies where the total impact was made by the visual and acoustical power of the setting, not the specific and easily forgotten message of Hitler's speech. This was a far cry from Sorel's stress on ethical words or his "body of images" which were supposed to strike a chord in the workers' hearts without manipulation.

Finally, there was a significant difference between Sorel and the far Right on the question of myth. Though myths performed the same function for both—they mobilized people—in practice they operated in divergent ways and were designed to achieve opposite results. For Sorel and the nazis, for example, one of the points of a myth was to simplify the world into opposing camps by encouraging a Manichean perception of reality. But to Sorel the approaching battle of virtue against vice would be waged between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, not between Aryans and Jews. The intent of a myth like the general strike was to arouse "ardent sentiments of revolt" leading to a catastrophic class was and victory for the proletariat. In nazi mythology the effect was altogether different since myths were calculated to elicit at least three kinds of responses, none of which Sorel could approve. The first was self-abandonment, or the loss of one'e individuality to the group (while Sorel, by contrast, wanted myths to spark autonomy, independence, and self-activity). The second was patriotism. Most nazi myths celebrated the joys of conformity and the excitement of belonging to a superior racial group. Consequently, tribal symbolism prevailed wherein the Volk worshipped itself—hence the stress on national festivals, monuments, and racial and traditional imagery drawn from the German past. Sorel's myths were antipatriotic; he was not interested in consolidating national identities but in demolishing them.⁵¹ The third response was hatred of an enemy. In Nazi ideology the enemy was defined in racial terms. It was always the Jews, or the dark-haired Tschandalas, or the "dwarfed Sodomites," or the ape-like "creatures of darkness" who had to be overcome by the blond, Nordic "god-men."⁵² Though Sorel had his enemy, the venal middle class, he never stereotyped it in this way, but rather treated it as a somewhat impotent adversary. The real issue for him was not the nature of an external enemy, but the more pressing internal task of creating proletarian self-consciousness.

In retrospect, Sorel's concept of myth may seem inherently dangerous, even if it was not identical with the mythology of fascism or national socialism. There are legitimate grounds for this position. But it should also be remembered that historical events since Sorel's time have made one think that any interest in myth or its psychological underpinnings must necessarily have fascist overtones. This has closed off discussion of areas which need further exploration from different points of view. There are many features of Sorel's thought which are wholly unattractive. Some of these might be mentioned in passing: his pronounced antidemocratic strain, his overzealous attack on reason, his rigid Huguenot puritanism, his excessive fascination (like Péguy's) with mystique over politique, his contempt for peace and humanitarianism, his moral absolutism bordering on dogmatism, his often mindless defense of violence without regard for the perils of collective mythology, and his simplistic division of the world into two hostile camps, with no sensitivity for nuances. Without justifying these numerous misjudgments and dubious positions, Sorel still deserves credit for being one of the first on the Left to try and grasp the psychological mainsprings of action without having recourse to the crude economism and positivism of Second International Marxism. It is this side of his thought which has been given most attention in this essay.

During his own lifetime Sorel's influence was minimal on orthodox syndicalist and socialist circles of Western Europe. Victor Griffuelhes, the anarcho-syndicalist secretary of the French Confédération Générale du Travail, was once asked if he read Sorel and he replied: "I read Dumas."⁵³ The Italian Marxist Arturo Labriola also spoke for many socialists when he voiced the following criticism of Sorel: "Myths, fables, and revelations are precisely the opposite of socialism, which proposes to teach individuals as such to fashion for themselves their own lives, and in thus constructing their lives, to see within themselves as in clear, transparent water."⁵⁴ In the work of some contemporary Marxists of the younger generation—Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, among others—the traces of Sorel are much in evidence in certain aspects of their thought. This topic has yet to be thoroughly investigated. Despite various differences, one thing this younger generation could agree on was that a comprehensive understanding of human behavior could not be attained without understanding the role that myths, symbols, and emotions play in motivating people to act. This was what Sorel grasped at the turn of the century.

NOTES

¹ See, for example, the following works by Sorel: La Ruine du monde antique (Paris, 1902); Introduction à l'économie moderne (Paris, 1903); Le Procès de Socrate (Paris, 1889).

² Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T.E. Hulme (New York, 1961), p. 28.

³ Oscar Wilde, cited in Thomas Mann, Last Essays, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (London, 1959), p. 157.

⁴ Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dammerung. In Werke in zwei Bänden, vol. 2, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich, 1967), p. 341.

⁵ Sorel frequently spoke of reality being "fluid," "inexplicable," or merely "a hypothesis." In Les Illusions du progrès (Paris, 1908), for example, he claimed that reality is a "fundamental mystery" which is "protected by obscurity" (p. 2).

⁶ This notion resembles the pragmatism of William James, but Sorel developed this approach to truth before his discovery of the American philosopher. For Sorel's later views on pragmatism, see his De Vutilité du pragmatisme (Paris, 1921).

⁷ See Jean Wanner, Georges Sorel et la décadence (Lausanne, 1943), pp. 39-55.

⁸ Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 88; id., Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat (Paris, 1919), pp. 145-51, passim.

⁹ See Sorel, Reflections on Violence, pp. 80-98, 249.

¹⁰ For Sorel's critique of Socrates (which in many respects resembled Nietzsche's, whose work Sorel did not then know), see his Procès de Socrate, esp. pp. 170-72, 375 ff. Sorel attacked Socrates for being an urban middle class intellectual whose strict rationalism destroyed the religious, heroic, and rural-warrior orientation which once made Greece thrive. Since pure rationalism cannot inspire either morality or faith, post-Socratic Greece fell into decadence.

¹¹ Sorel, Ruine du monde antique, pp. 1-28.

¹² Sorel, Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat, p. 127 (Sorel's italics).

¹³ Sorel never adequately explained why he believed this. Perhaps it was his deepseated pessimism about most aspects of human nature. But ironically he was optimistic as well, since he did have confidence in the working class once they were in movement. The key problem of much of Sorel's most interesting work was how to set them in movement to begin with.

¹⁴ Sorel,Reflections on Violence, p. 50.

¹⁵ Sorel, Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat, pp. 61-68.

¹⁶ Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 122.

¹⁷ "According to a law embedded in our nature, we want to have something indemonstrable to believe in." Georges Sorel, Procès de Socrate, pp. 145-46.

¹⁸ Sorel, Reflections on Violence, pp. 183-84, 240.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 30.

²⁰ Sorel, Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat, p. 138; id., "Critical Essays in Marxism." In From Georges Sorel: Essays in Socialism and Philosophy, ed. John L. Stanley (New York, 1976), p. 117.

²¹ Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 148.

²² Ibid., pp. 47-48.

²³ Ibid., p. 45.

²⁴ Georges Sorel, cited in Irving Louis Horowitz, Radicalism and the Revolt against Reason: The Social Theories of Georges Sorel (Carbondale, 111., 1961), p. 82.

²⁵ Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 122.

²⁶ Horowitz, Radicalism and the Revolt against Reason, p. 49.

²⁷ Georges Sorel, "Vues sur les problèmes de la philosophie," Revue de la Métaphysique et du Monde (September 1910), p. 616; see Richard Humphrey, Georges Sorel: Prophet without Honor (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), p. 122.

²⁸ George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York, 1975), p. 7.

²⁹ Edward Sapir, "Symbolism." In Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 14 (New York, 1934), p. 495.

³⁰ Sorel, Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat, pp. 7, 188-89.

³¹ Ibid., p. 189.

³² Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 28.

³³ Ibid., pp. 35, 182 ff.

³⁴ Ibid., p. 129.

³⁵ The best short discussion of the general strike can be found in the following works: Horowitz, Radicalism and the Revolt against Reason, pp. 78-89, 127-40; Humphrey, Georges Sorel, pp. 186-203; Jacques Rennes, Georges Sorel et le syndicalisme révolutionnaire (Paris, 1936), pp. 156-79; Helmut Berding, Rationalismus und Mythos: Geschichtsauffassung und politische Theorie bei Georges Sorel (Munich, 1969), pp. 102-17.

³⁶ See Isiah Berlin, "Georges Sorel." In Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (New York, 1980), p. 314. Sorel also strongly attacked: (1) brutality, which he defined as an unnecessary excess of violence, or rather as a form of violence that had lost touch with the moral ends it was supposed to serve; and (2) force, which he invariably associated with the state, which used it as an instrument of control and domination. Force was always exercised by a ruling class to stabilize a status quo, whereas violence was a proletarian tool for destabilization.

³⁷ Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 115.

³⁸ Ibid., pp. 164-65, 167, 275.

³⁹ Ibid., p. 46.

⁴⁰ Sorel Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat, p. 129.

⁴¹ In an inteview given in 1932, he claimed that Sorel was his intellectual "master," though for a long time before this he rarely referred to him and in fact called Marx "the magnificent philosopher of working-class violence." See James H. Meisel, The Genesis of Georges Sorel (Ann Arbor, 1951), p. 219; Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York, 1966), p. 153.

⁴² Sorel, Reflections on Violence, pp. 122, 127, 129; id., Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat, p. 125.

⁴³ José Antonio Primo de Rivera, "What the Falange Wants." In Varieties of Fascism, ed. Eugen Weber (Princeton, 1964), p. 177.

⁴⁴ Sorel, cited in Meisel, The Genesis of Georges Sorel, p. 120. See Sorel's "The Ethics of Socialism." In From Georges Sorel, ed. Stanley, pp. 94-110.

⁴⁵ Only when Sorel temporarily gave up on syndicalism (ca. 1908-13) did he begin to toy with the notion of charismatic leadership. This was not typical, but it was in this context that he hailed (in 1912) the young Mussolini as a modernday condottiere, "the only energetic man capable of redressing the weaknesses of government." See Scott H. Lytle, "Georges Sorel: Apostle of Fanaticism." In Modern France: Problems of the Third and Fourth Republics, ed. Edward Mead Earle (Princeton, 1951), p. 288.

⁴⁶ Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses, p. 200.

⁴⁷ See Gustave LeBon, The Crowd (New York, 1966), pp. 1-71.

⁴⁸ George L. Mosse, Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis of National Socialism (New Brunswick, 1978), pp. 34, 37. Marxism, by contrast, remained highly textual, building on a corpus of works that had to be interpreted.

⁴⁹ Hitler, cited in Werner Betz, "The National Socialist Vocabulary." In The Third Reich, ed. by the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies (New York, 1975), p. 784. See also Jean Pierre Faye, Langages totalitaires (Paris, 1972).

⁵⁰ Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses, p. 201.

⁵¹ Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 117.

⁵² For an excellent short discussion of this aspect of nazi mythology see Jost Hermand, "The Distorted Vision: Pre-Fascist Mythology at the Turn of the Century." In Myth and Reason: A Symposium, ed. Walter D. Wetzels (Austin, 1973), pp. 101-26.

⁵³ Edouard Dolléans, Histoire du mouvement ouvrier, vol. 2 (Paris, 1948), pp. 126-27.

⁵⁴ Arturo Labriola, cited in David Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979), p. 78.