SOURCE: "The Function of Myth," and "The Function of Violence," in The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, The John Day Company, Inc., 1943, pp. 119-32.

[In the following excerpt, Burnham examines what he perceives as Sorel's contempt for political science.]

1. THE FUNCTION OF MYTH

Georges Sorel cannot be considered in all respects a Machiavellian. For one thing, he was a political extremist. Though Machiavellian principles are not committed to any single political program, they do not seem to accord naturally with extremism. Further, Sorel partly repudiates, or seems to repudiate, scientific method, and to grant, in certain connections, the legitimacy of intuition and of a metaphysics derived from the French philosopher, Henri Bergson. To the extent that he rejects science, Sorel is certainly outside the Machiavellian tradition.

However, Sorel's repudiation of scientific method is largely appearance. In reality, he attacks not science, but academic pseudo-science, which he calls the "little science," that pretends to tell us about the nature of society and politics, but in truth is merely seeking to justify this or that group of power-seekers. Sorel does indeed contend that genuine scientific doctrines are not enough to motivate mass political action; but this conclusion, far from being anti-scientific, is reached by a careful scientific analysis. Moreover, Sorel shares fully what I have called the "anti-formalism" of the Machiavellians, their refusal to take at face value the words and beliefs and ideals of men. In common with other Machiavellians he defines the subject-matter of politics as the struggle for social power; and he makes the same general analysis of the behavior of "political man," of men, that is to say, as they act in relation to the struggle for power.

Sorel also requires mention because of his influence on the other Machiavellian writers, Robert Michels and Vilfredo Pareto, with whom we shall be concerned. Pareto more than once gives tribute to Sorel. He writes, for example: "It was the surpassing merit of Georges Sorel that in Réflexions sur la violence he threw all such fatuities overboard to ascend to the altitudes of science. He was not adequately understood by people who went looking for derivations and were given logico-experimental reasonings instead. As for certain university professors who habitually mistake pedantry for science, and, given a theory, focus their microscopes on insignificant errors and other trifles, they are completely destitute of the intellectual capacities required for understanding the work of a scientist of Sorel's stature."¹ Sorel, both through his writings and through personal acquaintance, played a considerable part in the transformation of Michels into a Machiavellian, which occurred when Michels took up residence in Switzerland after an earlier career at a German university.

I propose to deal only with two points discussed by Sorel in his most famous work, Reflections on Violence.² However, to understand the treatment of these points, it is necessary to summarize briefly the context in which the book was written.

Sorel was at that time active, chiefly as a journalist and theoretician, in the French and to some extent the international revolutionary labor movement. The greater part of the politically organized labor movement adhered in those days to the various social-democratic parties of the Second International. The activities of these parties were reformist. The parties were large in size and institutional strength, and devoted themselves to winning economic concessions (higher wages, social insurance, and so on) for the workers, and parliamentary or governmental posts for the party leaders. Ostensibly, however, the party programs still professed the goals of revolutionary socialism: the overthrow of capitalism and the institution of a free, classless society.

Sorel spoke for the dissident revolutionary syndicalist wing of the labor movement. The syndicalists were opposed both to the state—not only to the existing state but to all states and governments—and to all political parties, including the professedly labor parties. They advocated the economic "self-organization" of the workers, in revolutionary syndicates (that is, unions), with no professional officials and absolute independence from the state and all political parties. The state, whether the existing state or any other, they considered to be merely a political instrument for the oppression of the masses. Political parties, socialist as well as all the rest, have as their object the attainment of state power. Consequently, political parties are part of the machinery of oppression. If the socialist party took over governmental power, this would not at all mean the introduction of socialism, of a free and classless society, but simply the substitution of a new élite as ruler over the masses.

This analysis, we may remark, coincides exactly with that made by the other Machiavellians. In the later discussion of Robert Michels, we shall see in detail how it applies to the parties of socialism.

In contradistinction to the allegedly "scientific socialism" of the official parties, to their elaborate programs of "immediate demands" and desired reforms, to their lengthy treatises on how socialism will be brought about and what it will be like and how it will work, Sorel insists that the entire revolutionary program must be expressed integrally as a single catastrophic myth: the myth, he maintains, of the "general strike." The myth of the general strike is formulated in absolute terms: the entire body of workers, of proletarians, ceases work; society is divided into two irrevocably marked camps—the strikers on one side, and all the rest of society on the other; all production wholly ceases; the entire structure of the existing society, and all its institutions, collapse; the workers march back to begin production again, no longer as proletarians, but as free and un-ruled producers; a completely new era of history begins.

Only such an all-embracing myth, Sorel believes, can arouse the masses to uncompromising revolutionary action. No detailed rationalistic program, no careful calculation of pros and cons, no estimate of results and consequences, can possibly be efficacious. Indeed, the effect of such programs is to paralyze the independent action of the workers and to place power in the hands of the leaders who devise and manipulate the programs.

It is not the specific myth of the general strike, as treated by Sorel, that particularly concerns us, but rather the more general problem of the positive role of myth in political action. What kind of construction is such a political myth? If we interpret it as a scientific hypothesis, as a prediction about the future, it must be regarded as absurd, fantastic, false. But this interpretation, Sorel thinks, would be irrelevant. Nor is the myth in the least like a Utopia, though at first there might seem to be a close resemblance. Like a scientific hypothesis, a Utopia is an "intellectual product; it is the work of theorists who, after observing and discussing the known facts, seek to establish a model to which they can compare existing society in order to estimate the amount of good and evil it contains. It is a combination of imaginary institutions having sufficient analogies to real institutions for the jurist to be able to reason about them. . . . Whilst contemporary myths lead men to prepare themselves for a combat which will destroy the existing state of things, the effect of Utopias has always been to direct men's minds towards reforms which can be brought about by patching up the existing system . . . " (Reflections on Violence, pp. 32-3.)

A myth, in contrast to hypotheses or utopias, is not either true or false. The facts can never prove it wrong. "A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalyzable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions." (P. 33.) "In the course of this study one thing has always been present in my mind, which seemed to me so evident that I did not think it worth while to lay much stress on it—that men who are participating in a great social movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph. These constructions, knowledge of which is so important for historians, I propose to call myths; the syndicalist 'general strike' and Marx's catastrophic revolution are such myths. As remarkable examples of such myths, I have given those which were constructed by primitive Christianity, by the Reformation, by the [French] Revolution and by the followers of Mazzini. I now wish to show that we should not attempt to analyze such groups of images in the way that we analyze a thing into its elements, but that they must be taken as a whole, as historical forces, and that we should be especially careful not to make any comparison between accomplished fact and the picture people had formed for themselves before action." (P. 22.)

"The myths," summing up, "are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act." (P. 32.)

"People who are living in this world of 'myths,' are secure from all refutation. .. . No failure proves anything against Socialism since the latter has become a work of preparation (for revolution); if they are checked, it merely proves that the apprenticeship has been insufficient; they must set to work again with more courage, persistence, and confidence than before . . . " (Pp. 35, 36.)

Though the myth is not a scientific theory and is therefore not required to conform to the facts, it is nevertheless not at all arbitrary. Not just any myth will do. A myth that serves to weld together a social group—nation, people, or class—must be capable of arousing their most profound sentiments and must at the same time direct energies toward the solution of the real problems which the group faces in its actual environment. "Use must be made of a body of images which, by intuition alone, and before any considered 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." (Pp. 130-1.) "It is a question of knowing what are the ideas which most powerfully move [active revolutionists] and their comrades, which most appeal to them as being identical with their socialistic conceptions, and thanks to which their reason, their hopes, and their way of looking at particular facts seem to make but one indivisible unity." (P. 137.)

The myth, though it is not fundamentally a utopia—that is, the picture of an ideal world to come in the future—does ordinarily contain Utopian elements which suggest such an ideal world. Is there any probability that the ideal will be achieved? "The myth," Sorel replies, "must be judged as a means of acting on the present; any attempt to discuss how far it can be taken literally as future history is devoid of sense." (Pp. 135-6.) If we should nevertheless put the question, it is plain that the ideal will in truth never be achieved or even approximated. This in no way detracts from the power of the myth, nor does it alter the fact that only these myths can inspire social groups to actions which, though they never gain the formal ideal, yet do bring about great social transformations. "Without leaving the present, without reasoning about this future, which seems for ever condemned to escape our reason, we should be unable to act at all. . . . The first Christians expected the return of Christ and the total ruin of the pagan world, with the inauguration of the kingdom of the saints, at the end of the first generation. The catastrophe did not come to pass, but the Christian thought profited so greatly from the apocalyptic myth that certain contemporary scholars maintain that the whole preaching of Christ referred solely to this one point. The hopes which Luther and Calvin had formed of the religious exaltation of Europe were by no means realized. . . . Must we for that reason deny the immense result which came from the dreams of Christian renovation? It must be admitted that the real developments of the [French] Revolution did not in any way resemble the enchanting pictures which created the enthusiasm of its first adepts; but without those pictures would the Revolution have been victorious? . . . These Utopias came to nothing; but it may be asked whether the Revolution was not a much more profound transformation than those dreamed of by the people who in the eighteenth century had invented social Utopias." (Pp. 133-5.)

2. THE FUNCTION OF VIOLENCE

A great myth makes a social movement serious, formidable, and heroic. But this it would not do unless the myth inspired, and was in turn sustained by, violence. In his analysis of violence—the most notorious and attacked part of Sorel's work—Sorel begins, as in the case of myth, with the narrowed problem of violence as related to the proletarian revolutionary movement. He is, however, seeking conclusions that will hold generally for all great social movements.

Sorel was writing, some years prior to the first World War, at a time when humanitarian and pacifist ideas were almost universally professed by the leaders of official opinion. International war was going to be stopped by treaties and arbitration; class war, by reforms and the internal policy of "social peace"; violence was a relic of barbarism, soon to disappear altogether. Ironically enough, in spite of the two world wars, these notions retain their hold in many quarters, and are always prominent in the dreams of what the world is going to be like after the current war. In the face of these official opinions, Sorel presents a defense of violence. However, we must exercise care in determining just what he is defending, and why.

Sorel does not take the ideas of humanitarianism and pacifism at face value. As in the case of any other ideas," he relates them to the historical environment in which they function. Their prominence does not mean that force has been eliminated from social relations: force is always a main factor regulating society. But, under advanced capitalism, much of the force is exercised as it were automatically and impersonally. The whole weight of the capitalist mode of production bears down upon the workers, keeping them in economic, political, and social subjection. From one point of view, the humanitarian chatter serves to obscure the social realities. Still more important, the moral denunciation of violence helps to keep the workers quiet and to prevent them from using their own violent methods in strikes and for the revolution.

It is true that overt acts of violence have become less frequent than in many former ages. Is this in all respects an improvement? It is, to the extent that "brutality"—such as used by robbers and brigands in earlier times, or by the state in the punishment of criminals—has become rarer. Sorel is careful to explain that by "violence" he does not mean brutality of this sort. From another point of view, the lessening of overt acts of violence in social relations is merely the correlative of an increase in fraud and corruption. Fraud, rather than violence, has become the more usual road to success and privilege. Naturally, therefore, those who are more adept at fraud than at force take kindly to humanitarian ideals. Crimes of fraud excite no such moral horror as acts of violence: "We have finally come to believe that it would be extremely unjust to condemn bankrupt merchants and lawyers who retire ruined after moderate catastrophes, while the princes of financial swindling continue to lead gay lives. Gradually the new industrial system has created a new and extraordinary indulgence for all crimes of fraud in the great capitalist countries." (P. 222.)

Similarly in the case of the modern working class when under the control of reformists and politicians. The frank acceptance of the method of proletarian violence would threaten all the existing institutions of society. Consequently, violence is deplored by all those who have a stake in existing society. Cunning, in the form of doctrines of "social peace," "co-operation," and "arbitration," is in favor. An occasional act of violence by the workers is comfortably overlooked, because it can be used by the labor bureaucrats—or a government allied with the bureaucrats—to scare the employers, to win concessions for themselves, and to prove their indispensable role in controlling proletarian violence. "In order that this system may work properly, a certain moderation in the conduct of the workmen is necessary. .. . If financiers are almost always obliged to have recourse to the services of specialists, there is all the more reason why the workmen, who are quite unaccustomed to the customs of this world, must need intermediaries to fix the sum which they can exact from their employers without exceeding reasonable limits.

"We are thus led to consider arbitration in an entirely new light and to understand it in a really scientific manner. . . . It would be evidently absurd to go into a pork butcher's shop, order him to sell us a ham at less than the marked price, and then ask him to submit the question to arbitration; but it is not absurd to promise to a group of employers the advantages to be derived from the fixity of wages for several years, and to ask the specialists what remuneration this guarantee is worth; this remuneration may be considerable if business is expected to be good during that time. Instead of bribing some influential person, the employers raise their workmen's wages; from their point of view there is no difference. As for the Government, it becomes the benefactor of the people, and hopes that it will do well in the elections . . . " (Pp. 235-6.)

"In the opinion of many well-informed people, the transition from violence to cunning which shows itself in contemporary strikes in England cannot be too much admired. The great object of the Trades Unions is to obtain a recognition of the right to employ threats disguised in diplomatic formulas; they desire that their delegates should not be interfered with when going the round of the workshops charged with the mission of bringing those workmen who wish to work to understand that it would be to their interests to follow the directions of the Trades Unions." (Pp. 247-8.)

Furthermore, the growth of the humanitarian and pacifist ideologies, this effort to hide the force that nevertheless continues operating in vicious and distorted ways, to place reliance for rule upon cunning and fraud and bribery and corruption, rather than frankly used violence, is the mark of a social degeneration. It is not only the masses who are lulled and degraded. The rulers, too, decay. The rulers rule hypocritically, by cheating, without facing the meaning of rule, and a general economic and cultural decline, a social softening, is indicated. "When the governing classes, no longer daring to govern, are ashamed of their privileged situation, are eager to make advances to their enemies, and proclaim their horror of all cleavage in society" (p. 213), they are acting like cowards and humbugs, not saints. "Let us therefore do more and more every day for the disinherited, say these [worthy liberals]; let us show ourselves more Christian, more philanthropic, or more democratic (according to the temperament of each); let us unite for the accomplishment of social duty. We shall thus get the better of these dreadful Socialists, who think it possible to destroy the prestige of the Intellectuals now that the Intellectuals have destroyed that of the Church. As a matter of fact, these cunning moral combinations have failed; it is not difficult to see why. The specious reasoning of these gentlemen—the pontiffs of 'social duty'—supposes that violence cannot increase, and may even diminish in proportion as the Intellectuals unbend to the masses and make platitudes and grimaces in honor of the union of the classes. Unfortunately for these great thinkers, things do not happen in this way; violence does not diminish in the proportion that it should diminish according to the principles of advanced sociology." (Pp. 213-4.)

An open recognition of the necessity of violence can reverse the social degeneration. Violence, however, can serve this function, can be kept free from brutality and from mere vengeful force, only if it is linked to a great myth. Myth and violence, reciprocally acting on each other, produce not senseless cruelty and suffering, but sacrifice and heroism.³

But, by what is only superficially a paradox, the open acceptance of violence, when linked with a great myth, in practice decreases the total amount of actual violence in society. As in the case of the early Christian martyrdoms, which research has shown to have been surprisingly few and minor, the absolute quality of the myth gives a heightened significance to what violence does take place, and at the same time guards against an endless repetition of vulgar brutalities. "It is possible, therefore, to conceive Socialism as being perfectly revolutionary, although there may only be a few short conflicts, provided that these have strength enough to evoke the idea of the general strike: all the events of the conflict will then appear under a magnified form, and the idea of catastrophe being maintained, the cleavage will be perfect. Thus one objection often urged against revolutionary Socialism may be set aside—there is no danger of civilization succumbing under the consequences of a development of brutality, since the idea of the general strike may foster the notion of the class war by means of incidents which would appear to middle-class historians as of small importance." (Pp. 212-3.)

This seeming paradox, that the frank recognition of the function of violence in social conflicts may have as a consequence a reduction in the actual amount of violence, is a great mystery to all those whose approach to society is formalistic. If men believe and say that they are against violence, if they express humanitarian and pacifist ideals, it must follow, so formalists think, that there will be less violence in the world than when men openly admit the necessity of violence. Historical experience does not, however, bear out this hope, as all the Machiavellians understand. The humanitarian ideals of much of the French aristocracy in the 18th century did not in the least mitigate the enormous bloodshed of the Revolution and may indeed have greatly contributed to its excess. It cannot be shown that humanitarian conceptions of criminal punishment, such as have flourished during the past century or more, have decreased crimes of violence. Pacifist, "anti-war" movements are a prominent feature of modern life. They have not at all served to stop the most gigantic wars of history. They have, rather, in those countries where they were most influential, brought about a situation in which many more men have been killed than would have been if political policy had based itself on the fact that wars are a natural phase of the historical process. Countless experiences have proved that a firm blow now may forestall a thousand given and suffered tomorrow. A doctor who denied the reality of germs would not thereby lessen the destructive effect of germs on the human body. In politics those magical attitudes which medicine has left behind still prevail. It is still firmly believed that by denying the social role of violence, violence is thus somehow overcome.

Sorel's attitude toward violence is part of a more general social attitude which he does not hesitate to call "pessimism." He is quite prepared to defend the ethics of pessimism. "The optimist in politics," he writes, "is an inconstant and even dangerous man, because he takes no account of the great difficulties presented by his projects. .. . If he possesses an exalted temperament, and if unhappily he finds himself armed with great power, permitting him to realize the ideal he has fashioned, the optimist may lead his country into the worst disasters. He is not long in finding out that social transformations are not brought about with the ease that he had counted; he then supposes that this is the fault of his contemporaries, instead of explaining what actually happens by historical necessities; he is tempted to get rid of people whose obstinacy seems to him to be so dangerous to the happiness of all. During the Terror, the men who spilt most blood were precisely those who had the greatest desire to let their equals enjoy the golden age they had dreamt of, and who had the most sympathy with human wretchedness: optimists, idealists, and sensitive men, the greater desire they had for universal happiness the more inexorable they showed themselves.

"Pessimism . . . considers the march towards deliverance as narrowly conditioned, on the one hand, by the experimental knowledge that we have acquired from the obstacles which oppose themselves to the satisfcation of our imaginations (or, if we like, by the feeling of social determinism), and, on the other, by a profound conviction of our natural weakness. .. . If this theory is admitted, it then becomes absurd to make certain wicked men responsible for the evils from which society suffers; the pessimist is not subject to the sanguinary follies of the optimist, infatuated by the unexpected obstacles that his projects meet with; he does not dream of bringing about the happiness of future generations by slaughtering existing egoists." (Pp. 9-11.)

¹Mind and Society, footnote 2 to 2193, p. 1535, Vol. IV.

² The English translation, by T. E. Hulme, of Réflexions sur la violence. Originally issued in New York by B. W. Huebsch, this was re-published by Peter Smith, in 1941.

The French text first appeared in 1906. Georges Sorel lived from 1847-1922.

³ By the romantic moral overtone of this view, Sorel steps abruptly away from Machiavellism—though he is probably quite conscious of what he is doing.