SOURCE: "Sorel: Philosopher of Syndicalism," in Studies in Revolution, Grosset & Dunlap, 1964, pp. 152-65.

[In the following excerpt, Carr identifies the intellectual sources of Sorel's most important writings.]

Born at Cherbourg on November 2, 1847, Georges Sorel was, from the early twenties to the age of forty-five, a blameless ingénieur des ponts-etchaussées. Then in 1892 he abandoned his profession to devote himself to his newly found hobby of writing about socialism. He helped to found two reviews and contributed to many more, wrote several books (of which one, Reflections on Violence—the only one of his works to be translated into English—enjoyed a succès de scandale) and became the recognized philosopher of the French trade-union or "syndicalist" movement. He died in August 1922 at Boulogne-sur-Seine, where he had spent the last twentyfive years of his uneventful life.

Sorel wrote—or at any rate published—nothing till he was in the forties; his masterpiece was written at fiftynine, and he wrote with undiminished vigour till well on in his sixties. His late maturity gives a peculiar shape to his career. His formative years covered two intellectual generations; he wrote primarily for a third. He stands, a solitary and daring pioneer, at the most important crossroads of modern social and political thought. Born a few weeks before the Communist Manifesto and living on till the eve of the "march on Rome", he looks back to Marx and Nietzsche (of the great thinkers who, more than anyone, undermined the foundations of bourgeois society and bourgeois morality—Marx, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky—Sorel missed only the third) and forward to Lenin, to the neo-Catholicism of Bloy and Péguy, and to Mussolini. There is no conceivable parallel in any other country to Sorel, except perhaps Bernard Shaw, ten years his junior in age, his contemporary in literary apprenticeship. But this parallel breaks down in at least one respect: Sorel was no artist and not even a very good writer.

Marx was Sorel's first master. He states in his Confessions that he was an orthodox Marxist till 1897; and this is as nearly true as it could be of one who was temperamentally incapable of bowing the knee to any orthodoxy. His starting-point, according to his own statement, was to discover "how the essential of the Marxist doctrines could be realized". He drew largely from Nietzsche, in part directly, in part through Bergson, the philosopher of L'Evolution créatrice and the élan vital. The other, though less important, literary influence was Renan. Sorel wittily describes Renan as one of those French writers—he also counts Molière and Racine among them—who have eschewed profundity for fear of being excluded from the salons of their female admirers. But it was from Renan's belief in religious dogma as "a necessary imposture" that he derived his famous conception of the socialist "myth".

The study of Sorel reveals unexpectedly numerous points of contact between Marx and Nietzsche. It is often puzzling whether Sorel's thought should be described as Marx reflected through a Nietzschean prism, or vice versa. But the dual influence, blended with an extreme subtlety, is always there, and colours all Sorel's fundamental beliefs.

The first article in Sorel's corrosive creed is derived equally from both his masters—his conviction of the decadence of bourgeois society. Sorel, one of his commentators has said, was literally haunted with the idea of decadence. La Ruine du monde antique was his first major work. The persistent attraction of Christianity for him is its dogma of original sin. The "princes of secular thought", from Diderot onwards, are "philistines"; they bear (like Marx's "vulgar economists") the hallmark of bourgeois culture—the belief in progress. Les Illusions du progrès, published in the same year as Réflexions sur la violence, is the most clearly and closely reasoned of his books.

Secondly, the rejection of the bourgeoisie and of bourgeois philosophy carries with it a revolt against the intellect. Sorel's earliest literary essay, Le Procès de Socrate, denounces Socrates for having corrupted civilization through the false doctrine that history moves forward through a process of intellectual inquiry and persuasion. This is the essence of the bourgeois heresy: "Est bourgeois", in Alain's well-known aphorism, "tout ce qui vit de persuader." Like Marx, Sorel believes in Nietzsche's (or rather, Pindar's) "eternal strife, father of all things". Struggle and pain are the realities of life. Violence is the only cure for the evils of bourgeois civilization.

Thirdly, Sorel shares the common contempt of Nietzsche and Marx for bourgeois pacifism. In his specific glorification of war he harks back to Proudhon rather than to Marx (though Marx, in preaching class war, did not condemn national wars provided they were the right ones). Never, he remarks in La Ruine du monde antique, was there a great State so averse from war as the Roman Empire in its decadence. "In England the pacifist movement is closely connected with the chronic intellectual decadence which has overtaken that country." The surest symptom of the decay of the English bourgeoisie is its inability to take war seriously; English officers in South Africa (the date is 1900-01) "go to war like gentlemen to a football match". The only alternative to a proletarian revolution as the creator of a new and healthy society would be a great European war; and this seemed to Sorel in the early 1900s a solution scarcely to be hoped for.

The fourth target of Sorel's animosity is bourgeois democracy. The case against bourgeois democracy has been so amply developed by others from the original Marxist premises that Sorel's contributions, though copious, are no longer specially significant:

Government by the mass of the citizens has never yet been anything but a fiction: yet this fiction was the last word of democratic science. No attempt has ever been made to justify this singular paradox by which the vote of a chaotic majority is supposed to produce what Rousseau calls the "general will" which is infalliable.

Sorel's bitterness against democratic politics and democratic politicians was further sharpened by the affaire Dreyfus, when what had started as a noble campaign to vindicate justice was exploited for the mean ends of party or personal ambition. It was an error to look for noble aims in the masses. The majority, he had already declared in Le Procès de Socrate, "cannot in general accept great upheavals"; they "cling to their traditions". The audacious minority is always the instrument of change.

Sorel does not, however, remain merely destructive. His pessimism, he insists, is not the barren pessimism of the disillusioned optimist but the pessimism which, by accepting the decadence of the existing order, already constitutes "a step towards deliverance". Yet while the goal is the goal of Marx, the voice is the voice of Nietzsche:

Socialism is a moral question in the sense that it brings into the world a new way of judging all human actions or, following a famous expression of Nietzsche, a transvaluation of all values. . . . The middle classes cannot find in their conditions of life any source of ideas which stand in direct opposition to bourgeois ideas; the notion of catastrophe [Nietzsche called it "tragedy"] escapes them entirely. The proletariat, on the contrary, finds in its conditions of life something to nourish sentiments of solidarity and revolt; it is in daily warfare with hierarchy and with property; it can thus conceive moral values opposed to those consecrated by tradition. In this transvaluation of all values by the militant proletariat lies the high originality of contemporary socialism.

The two moralities of Marx (proletarian morality and bourgeois morality) have oddly blended with the two moralities ("master" and "slave" morality) of Nietzsche. Sorel preached a "morality of producers" (among whom intellectuals were apparently not included); and in a further echo of the German philosopher he branded Christian morality as a "morality of mendicants". Curiously enough it was Jaurès, a favourite target of Sorel's ridicule, who made the apt remark that the proletarian was the contemporary superman.

Such is the basis of Sorel's cult of "revolutionary syndicalism". Syndicalism is, in Sorel's eyes, the true heir of Marxism. It is anti-political in two senses, both of them Marxist. In the first place it rejects the State, as Marx did and as most contemporary Marxists did not; it seeks not to capture the machinery of the State—much less to find places for socialist ministers in bourgeois governments—but to destroy it. Secondly, it asserts, as Marx did, the essential primacy of economics over politics. Political action is not class action: only economic action can be truly revolutionary. The syndicats, the trade unions, being not political parties but organizations of the workers, are alone capable of such action.

Revolutionary syndicalism, the economic action of the workers, can take the form only of the strike, and of the most absolute form of strike, the general strike, which had been a central point in the French syndicalist programme since 1892. A sworn enemy of all Utopias, Sorel refuses to draw any picture at all of the social order which will follow this health-giving outburst of proletarian violence. He borrows a phrase from Bernstein, the German "revisionist" who, from a different point of view, also laboured to purge Marxism of its Utopian ingredients: "The end is nothing, the movement is all". And if critics drew attention to the motivelessness of the general strike so conceived, Sorel boldly rejected this excursion into rationalism. The general strike was not a rational construction, but the "myth" of socialism, necessary like the dogmas of the Christian Church and, like them, above rational criticism.

This famous Sorelian concept of the myth involves two significant consequences. The first is a purely relativist and pragmatic view of truth which in his earlier writings he had vigorously rejected. The myth is not something which is true in any abstract sense, but something in which it is useful to believe: this is indeed the meaning of truth. From the implied pragmatism of Bergson Sorel went on to the avowed pragmatism of William James and the American school. The last of all his writings was De l'utilité du pragmatisme, published in 1921.

The other consequence, which Sorel faced less clearly, was an "aristocratic" view of the movement which was asked to accept this philosophy. The syndicalist movement was to be based on a myth devised and propagated by an élite of leaders and enthusiastically accepted by the rank and file. Such a view accorded well with Sorel's long-standing rejection of democracy and belief in "audacious minorities". But it was not an easy view to fit into the principles and programmes of the CGT. The rift between the syndicalist movement in France and syndicalist philosophy elaborated for it by Sorel and his disciples was never really bridged.

It was perhaps some dim consciousness of the unreality of his position which brought Sorel to an intellectual crisis in 1910. It was a lean year in the history of socialism. It marked the nadir of the fortunes of Bolshevism; and even Lenin fell a prey to some discouragement. What is more to the present point, it was in this year that Benedetto Croce, who had hailed syndicalism as "a new form of Marx's great dream, dreamed a second time by Georges Sorel", declared that socialism, whether in its old Marxist or its new Sorelian form, was "dead". Sorel, in his sixty-third year but still at the height of his powers, was too restless a spirit to resign himself to defeat. His main work had been done. But the turn which he now took is of immense significance in assessing his ultimate influence. Of the three paths which led forward from the crossroads at which Sorel stood—Neo-Catholicism, Bolshevism and Fascism—all were tentatively explored by Sorel himself. But he followed none of them to the end.

One of the more baffling by-products of the affaire Dreyfus had been the formation of a tiny group of which the moving spirit was a young Dreyfusard, the self-taught son of a peasant, Charles Péguy. It centred round a modest periodical, Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine, edited, and for the most part written, by Péguy himself. Contrary to all the traditions of the affaire, Péguy was strongly nationalist, pro-Catholic, anti-democratic and a hater of the bourgeoisie. Since 1902 Sorel had written occasional papers for the Cahiers, had attended the weekly Thursdays of the group, and had been accepted as its "elder statesman" and mentor. Through this group Sorel elaborated the idea of a reconciliation between French syndicalism and French nationalism. His first contribution to the Cahiers had borne the significant title, "Socialismes nationaux": its theme was that "there are at least as many socialisms as there are great nations".

French nationalism was at this time scarcely thinkable outside the framework of Catholicism, and it was therefore logical, though surprising, that Sorel and his syndicalist disciple Berth should in 1910 have formed, in alliance with three members of the Action Française, a group which they called La Cité Française, to publish a periodical under the title L'lndépendance Française; and in the same year Sorel wrote in Action Française (his sole contribution to the journal) an appreciation of Péguy's Mystère de la charité de Feanne d'Arc. The whole enterprise, the form of which changed in 1912 to a "Cercle Proudhon", was short lived; the cohabitation was never easy. But the break came in 1913, not from Sorel but from Péguy.

The causes of the rupture are obscure, and Péguy may have suffered from persecution mania. But it seems clear that Peguy, young, devout and austere, could not in the long run accommodate himself to a philosophy which enthusiastically hailed the dogmas of the Church as necessary myths. Nevertheless, when Péguy died on the Marne in September 1914, it was in that firm faith in war as the means of salvation for a decadent French society which Sorel had held from the outset of his career. No study either of the movement represented by the Cahiers de la Quinzaine or of the revival of French nationalism in general in the decade before 1914 can ignore the author of Réflexions sur la violence. It is these years which have led Sorel's able German biographer, Michael Freund, to give his book the inept subtitle, "Revolutionary Conservatism".

The story of Sorel's affinities with Bolshevism is less complex and probably less important. The documents are at least unequivocal. Lenin was a sworn enemy of syndicalism, which he regarded as tantamount to anarchism. He had no faith in the all-sufficiency of the general strike. He believed firmly in political as well as economic action; and, though he was more deeply committed before 1917 than after to the ultimate denial of the State, he was convinced that a political dictatorship of the proletariat was the immediate goal of revolution. He seems to have mentioned Sorel only once in his published works, dismissing him curtly as "muddleheaded" and his writings as "senseless". Nobody familiar with the clear logic of Lenin's own thought will find the verdict surprising.

Sorel, on the other hand, welcomed the October revolution with open arms. For five years he had written scarcely anything. The war, begun as a war for the French nation, which he loved, was being more and more widely hailed as a war for democracy, which he loathed. Here was a long-awaited breath of fresh air—a revolution which preached and practised a salutary violence, spat on bourgeois democracy, exalted the "morality of the producer", alias the proletariat, and installed Soviets as autonomous organs of self-government. Moreover, the Bolshevik Party—had Sorel cared to note the fact—was built up precisely on the Sorelian premises of an "audacious minority" leading the instinctive proletarian mass.

Sorel made no formal declaration of adhesion to the new cause and creed. But he wrote several articles for the French Revue Communiste; and in 1920, when Bolshevism was at the height of its unpopularity in France, he added to the fourth edition of Réflexions sur la violence a "plaidoyer pour Lénine" in which he hailed the Russian revolution as "the red dawn of a new epoch".

Before descending into the tomb [concluded the "plaidoyer"] may I see the humiliation of the arrogant bourgeois democracies, to-day so cynically triumphant.

Bolshevism was not yet prosperous enough to ignore its few distinguished friends, even if they were not wholly orthodox. After Sorel died the Communist International, the official journal of Comintern, opened its columns to a lengthy, if critical, appreciation of this "reactionary pettybourgeois Proudhonist and anarcho-syndicalist" who had rallied to the defence of the proletarian revolution.

Sorel [concluded the article] for all his mistakes has helped, and will continue to help, the development of the will to revolution, rightly understood, and of proletarian activity in the struggle for Communism.

The facts of Sorel's relations with Fascism are also beyond dispute. Italy always held a special place in his affections; in no other foreign country were his works so widely read, admired and translated. The shabby treatment of Italy by the peacemakers at Versailles had deepened his resentment at the triumph of bourgeois democracy. His writings teem with anticipations of Fascist doctrine. "What I am", said Mussolini himself, "I owe neither to Nietzsche nor to William James, but to Georges Sorel." Georges Valois, one of the Action Française group which collaborated with Sorel in 1910, called him admiringly the "intellectual father of Fascism"; and his first biographer was Lanzillo, the Italian Fascist. He praised the first achievements of Fascism. But when the Fascist revolution brought Mussolini to Rome, Sorel was already dead.

What Sorel would have thought of the Fascist regime in power is an unprofitable, though inevitable, speculation. When he praised the first Fascists in a letter to Croce it was because "their violence is an advantageous substitute for the might of the State"—a modern equivalent of the Mafia and the Camorra, whose extra-legal activities and organization had always fascinated him. He saw in Fascism a realization of the syndicalist dream of an administrative power independent of the State. The question which Sorel died without having to answer was that of his attitude to the totalitarian State. All his life he had been a strong, almost violent, individualist; all his life he had fought, not for the concentration of power but for its dispersal and decentralization to the very limit of anarchism. At the very end of his life he argued against any absolute religious belief on the ground that it could not be successfully propagated without restoring the Inquisition. It would have been disconcerting—to say the least—to find Sorel as a prophet of totalitarianism. But his thought contains too many inconsistencies, his career too many unexpected turns, for anyone to pronounce with assurance on this hypothetical question.

But the most interesting point raised by Sorel's career is that of the resemblances and differences between Bolshevism and Fascism. If Sorel stands on the common ground where Marx and Nietzsche meet, this is also the common ground from which Bloshevism and Fascism diverge. Marx and Nietzsche, Bolshevism and Fascism, both deny bourgeois democracy with its bourgeois interpretations of liberty and equality; both reject the bourgeois doctrines of persuasion and compromise; both (though this is where Sorel held aloof from both) proclaim absolutes which command the obedience of the individual at the cost of all else.

There was, however, an essential difference. The absolute of Nietzsche and of Fascism ends with the super-man or the super-nation or simply with power as a good in itself and for its own sake. Marx and Bolshevism propound a universal end in the form of the good of the proletariat of all countries, in which the whole of mankind is ultimately merged; and the ideal stands, whatever shortcomings may be encountered in the pursuit of it. Sorel, while clear enough about what he rejected, never committed himself on the positive side. That, among other reasons, is why he has left no school or party, even among the syndicalists whom he sought to serve and teach. He cannot be assigned either to Bolshevism or to Fascism (and still less to the Catholics). Sorel's thought is not a beacon—or even a candle—throwing a steady beam within a defined radius; it is rather a prism reflecting, fitfully but brilliantly, the most penetrating political insights of his day and of our own.