SOURCE: "Disciples and Dissenters," in the South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. XLIX, No. 2, April, 1950, pp. 159-74.

[In the following excerpt, Meisel examines how Sorel' s contemporaries reacted positively and negatively to his theories.]

There are the honorable titans of the spirit, the good masters who hold our admiration, whose every word we endorse and file away for reference because it is the truth. But, as the years go by, we find that something has been happening to us. Our esteem of the masters has not changed; we would not dream of casting doubt upon their findings; only, we no longer care. Our integral assent has come embarrassingly close to boredom, whereas lesser figures who are neither sound nor honorable and in no way titans prove to be a lasting source of inspiration. They irritate us, they infuriate us, but they keep us interested. Their premises are unconvincing, their logical transactions dubious, their conclusions impossible. And yet what was at first merely entertaining, keeping us indignantly amused, finally becomes a challenge, serious business. We have a sense of shame, of having sinned because a second-rate mind has gained such a strong hold on us. But there it is; and the inferior and objectionable may yet prove to be the inspiration for a major truth.

Such is perhaps the case of the French thinker, Georges Sorel. The case is complicated further by the fact that he seems to fall between the solid-but-dull thinkers on the one hand and the intellectual gypsies on the other. Both as a person and as a thinker, Sorel is at once intensely honorable and deceptive, elusive and candid, pedestrian and fanciful. If, however, his stature be measured exclusively by the amount of antagonism he aroused in his lifetime and afterwards, Georges Sorel merits the title of greatness.

This is not to say that he lacked ardent friends: if the number of loving disciples that rallied around the "hermit of Boulogne sur Seine" never amounted to more than a small clique, their quality was truly remarkable. Men of the first order such as Benedetto Croce, Vilfredo Pareto, and Henri Bergson treated Sorel as their intellectual equal; and the contemporaries who, calling him their master, were yet distinctly figures in their own right make an impressive list. Although history will likely never rank Sorel among the Prime Movers, he nevertheless belongs to that select circle of provocative thinkers who do not themselves create a system but assemble the materials for one or even for more than one philosophy. Such men are the indefatigable explorers of the area which is both the meeting place of all the intellectual currents of the time and their Great Divide. No wonder that Sorel, who disliked Socrates, played in his disputations a Socratic role, evoking either love or hatred, but never indifference.

But the study of "reactions to Sorel" is not merely a study in extremes, violent adulation or vitriolic abhorrence; rather it is a study in ambivalence. The enthusiasm of some has an almost hysterical pitch, revealing symptoms of overcompensation or of resentment overcome by a successful effort to love; the opposition to Sorel is often suggestive of a suppressed, frustrated affection that would have preferred to worship but was not quite strong enough to follow the master on his endless and uncertain quest. This intriguing blend of love-hate or hate-love is merely characteristic of the past and current estimation of Sorel's work and reveals something in Sorel's own make-up: a contradiction at work in his mental processes. Not that his failure to co-ordinate his thought into a comprehensive system needs to be ascribed to a lack of integrating power. It may be that his refusal to sum up his work was a deliberate act of selflimitation, an abstention reflecting integrity of mind and the modesty of a scholar content to be a sensitive recorder of historic trends. Sorel's questions may be of greater help toward the clarification of contemporary issues than all the answers given by the systematic thinkers. The Sorelian whirlpool of ideas in which idealistic and materialistic currents mingle curiously, in which the diversity of forces obstructs any unity and yet implies it, seems at least well worth exploring.

No one has done more for Sorel's reputation than his disciple, Edouard Berth, though Berth's voice had a tendency to magnify the master's virtues as well as his shortcomings with all the force of a good amplifier. But to call this most authentic of all the Sorelians a mere epigonus would not be fair. He was not Sorel's equal, but neither was he insignificant. If he did not succeed and supersede his tutor as Enfantin eclipsed Henri de St. Simon, he nevertheless had one major advantage over his spiritual father: he was the better, or, at any rate, the more eloquent writer. His work is one long peroration, exhortation, plaidoyer. Berth's supercharged style tells all about Berth and not a little about his master; there was at work behind Sorel's jolly countenance a palpitating passion, which showed only in his conversation and his correspondence. When he wrote for publication, his style, as is often the case with people who speak well, became selfconscious, cramped. Berth is Sorel relaxed and often dangerously uninhibited. Where Sorel hesitates and ponders, Berth declaims and lectures with a high, shrill voice. While Sorel for a brief period toyed with the idea of National Syndicalism, only to retract soon after and to reject firmly the amalgam later known as Fascism, Berth fell for it hook, line, and sinker, and by vociferously synthesizing Sorel and Maurras did more to incriminate his old friend as a "premature Mussolini" than all the enemies of Sorel put together.

The record shows that Berth was leading Sorel on rather than following his lead in the embarrassing episode during which Sorel permitted himself to become the darling of French monarchists, actively contributing to their journals though not giving up the essence of his earlier convictions. The active role was played by Berth, but he could play it only because Sorel wanted to be led. There is in all creative natures the yearning to be understood without so many words. It is a hide-and-seek game which remains a pleasure as long as the junior partner understands his duty: he must not incriminate the leader. He is expected to be an interpreter and nothing more. But all interpreters have an urge to overstep that line, to emerge from the anonymity of service and to rule the master.

Berth was not small enough to submerge his own personality in that of the greater man nor independent enough to break with him as other disciples did; he remained instead transfixed in an intermediate position. He sacrificed his intellectual autonomy, but for a consideration: he attempted to be another Sorel, the true Sorel, a better Sorel. He did not do this consciously. His assertions of indebtedness, of humble gratitude, abound in dedications, introduction to, and innumerable quotations from Sorel's work; but the impression remains that the temptation of stepping into the shoes of "Papa Sorel" was too strong to be resisted. The right of the interpreter seems to include the duty of succession, of fulfilling the unfinished task in Sorel's name. Always in his name. Yet devotion cannot help becoming arrogation; self-effacement turns into substitution of Berth for Sorel. It is the human tragedy of the second prophet following the initiator: Elisha coming after Elijah, the titanic trailblazer for God, the worker of unprecedented miracles. After him, even the most magnificent magic feat cannot be anything but repetitious.

Sorel knew how fortunate he was in having at his side a friend of Berth's unflinching loyalty. Had he ever found him unbearable, he would have told him so, for the old man was as rigorous with his friends as he could be kind and considerate, and eventually he quarreled and broke with most of them. We may wonder at the tolerance with which Sorel watched the process of mimicry in Berth's work; we may ask whether the old man ever felt any uneasiness about the streamlined, monotonously highstrung Sorel as he appears in the writings of Edouard Berth, whether he was not at times a whit nervous about that terrifying loyalty of the disciple who knew him better than he knew himself. It is perhaps no accident that the controversial figure of the Paris Socrates never quite comes to life in Berth's work of possessive devotion. Perhaps we can learn more of Georges Sorel from his detractors.

There is a type of writer who loathes and despises Georges Sorel and yet lives from him. The only question in his mind is whether he ought merely to write Sorel off as scurrilous or expose his viciousness. In most instances he decides that the author of the Reflections on Violence is a dangerous character, but also harmless, since the fallacies of his argument are blatantly evident. There is thus no reason to get excited about Sorel; in fact, the reasons why Sorel is wrong will easily fill a book.

Wyndham Lewis, no mean author, wrote such a book. It purports to deal with the predicament of society between the two great wars. Our system is on trial, and a great number of intellectual representatives are called upon to testify. The lines between prosecution and defense are so fluid that the same figures may find themselves both on the witness stand and in the dock. From Plato to Shaw, from Swift to Joyce and Bertrand Russell, Rousseau, Proudhon, and, of course, Marx, the panel is illustrious. Sorel is mentioned only twice in the table of contents, but he appears for the first time on page 1 and remains the hero-villain throughout the entire book of 434 pages. Sorel, it seems, is a good man to call upon for definitions. For instance, he "defines so happily the true nature of revolution that I cannot do better than quote him rather fully." Mr. Lewis proceeds to quote almost two pages from The Dreyfus Revolution. Soon afterwards, the problem of progress presents itself, and the author finds the "ideology of progress . . . so admirably exposed by Georges Sorel" that he cites from his Illusions of Progress twice and at considerable length. He even uses Sorel instead of consulting the original when he wants to quote somebody else. This is not simply the case of an author pleased to find his views corroborated—Mr. Lewis does not merely end up, he starts with Sorel and, be it added, with Edouard Berth. The whole "intellectual topography" of The Art of Being Ruled is extremely familiar to anyone acquainted with the Sorelian and Berthian preoccupation with Marx and, especially, with Proudhon.

Wyndham Lewis, then, may be put down as one who knows his Sorel well and not merely from hearsay—something that cannot be said of many Anglo-Saxon writers in the 1920's. Nor does he fail to acknowledge his debt. Not even Edouard Berth dared to claim, as Mr. Lewis does, that "Georges Sorel is the key to all contemporary political thought." To be exact, he qualifies this judgment by saying that "Sorel is, or was, a highly unstable and equivocal figure," and he defines the Sorelian puzzle with great acuteness: "He seems composed of a crowd of warring personalities, sometimes one being in the ascendant, sometimes another, and which in any case he has not been able, or has not cared, to control." The blend of detachment and passion in conjunction with his unquestionable sincerity makes Sorel "a sensitive plate for the confused ideology of his time."

It does not take long, however, to discover that Wyndham Lewis is not only using Georges Sorel for his own ends, which is his good right; he also puts Sorel on a high pedestal merely to tear him down again with great ferocity. Sorel, we learn, appeals to the worst instincts of the mob, the poor (the same Sorel who actually said that he was interested, not in the perennial, futile rebellion of the slaves against their masters, but in the struggle of the producers against the parasitism of the intelligentsia and the ruling bourgeoisie). Sorel, Mr. Lewis announces, longs for a new caste system (caste is a "bad" word!), and not, as we thought, for a free and self-sufficient proletariat minding its own business and letting the capitalists manage capitalism. Mr. Lewis is occasionally conscious of what he is doing, as when he remarks: "This [the notion of a caste system] is not explicit in the syndicalist doctrine: nor is, I had better add, much of the interpretation I am about to provide." But then he goes on to attribute to the theorist of syndicalism the notion that "the bootmaker must have only bootmaking thoughts. No godlike, éclairé, gentlemanly thoughts must interfere with his pure, sutorial onesidedness." One who has not read Sorel could never guess from that sentence that Sorel wanted the proletariat to develop its own institutions and disregard everything else for the very purpose of living down the curse of modern specialization. Out of their work—Sorel hoped not quite unnobly—would rise not only the particular morality of the producers but also one which would enclose the broader beliefs of a true community which our civilization has destroyed. If this hope proved to be an illusion, it was at any rate the precise opposite of what Wyndham Lewis made it to appear.

Why all this legerdemain? One of the two chapters of The Art of Being Ruled, officially dedicated to Sorel, provides the clue. In this chapter the author strikes terror into the heart of the law-abiding citizen by exposing in bloodcurdling words Sorel's philosophy of violence. It is not, as the reader of the Reflections is asked to believe, the only effective weapon that enables the proletariat to save its class identity from being swallowed up by Leviathan. Sorel's violence is that thing most contemptible in the opinion of a writer; it is literature: "All the emotional and 'heroic' section of Sorel is deeply romantic, . . . and by that I understand untrue." Sorel, who called himself the "disinterested servant of the proletariat," is in truth the very prototype of the demagogue, whom he fought all his life: "This crowd-master . . . takes his revolutionary blessings to them 'whip in hand,' with a girding pedagogic intolerance. Coriolanus could not be more contemptuous asking for their 'voices.' .. . He approaches his proletariat with the airs of a missionary among 'natives.'" A quotation from Sorel is used to prove that he actually despised the proletariat. But that passage obviously is a critique, not of the working class, but of its Marxist leaders, who failed to realize the historic fact that "our nature always tries to escape into decadence" and that mankind will surmount the "law of regression" only under energetic pressure. The point is that Sorel has no faith in a leadership coming from without, from the intellectual class; he set his hopes in a proletarian élite that would be "masterless."

If Wyndham Lewis has no use for such rectifications, it is not because he is separated from Sorel by an abyss. On the contrary, he does not want it to be known, or does not want to admit to himself, how much he owes to the authentic Georges Sorel. Because he wants to use Sorel's pro-labor argument for something else, he has to discredit Sorel as a proletarian thinker; because he wants to impress us with the superiority of his own esoteric creed, he has to depict Sorel as a "vulgarizer of aristocracy," who took his cue from that other vulgarizer, the "vociferous showman," Nietzsche. It is, however, a vulgarized Nietzsche and a vulgarized Sorel who provide the materials for Wyndham Lewis's brand of gentleman authoritarianism. Hence his fury against the original Sorel and the original Nietzsche. We resent nothing so much as to owe the thing we wish to own. Rather than to return a property to the rightful owner, we will turn it upside down and change the paint, hoping prayerfully that we may not be found out.

The situation that confronts us in The Art of Being Ruled is (to paraphrase the famous witticism about the Hapsburg monarchy) desperate, but not serious. It is not the Wyndham Lewises that Sorel has to fear, for they share most of his likes and dislikes, rejecting merely his particular conclusions. Their resentment is more that of a competitor than of a genuine opponent. Sharing Sorel's antidemocratic bias, they are unable to dislodge him from his main position. It is quite another thing when a man of the convictions and abilities of Guido de Ruggiero joins the camp of Sorel's critics. His attack, the counterattack of a liberal, commands not only the attention due to the prestige of the author but respect for a feat of great moral courage, since Professor de Ruggiero published his remarks under circumstances which made discretion absolutely imperative.

Another interesting aspect is the place of publication: the essay's appearance in Benedetto Croce's own review. The great historian and philosopher had been linked to Georges Sorel by a friendship lasting more than twenty years. Croce had been instrumental in making the French autodidact well known in Italy. His sponsorship of what must be considered one of the severest judgments ever passed on Sorel's work is awkward, but it should not be misinterpreted as a change of mind on the part of the editor toward his late friend. It is more likely that there had always been room for ambivalence in Croce's mind, a last reserve at least against some of Sorel's more extravagant speculations. Even if this were not so, if de Ruggiero's article came to him as a shock, Benedetto Croce must have been pleased with it, nevertheless, for a reason which will become evident in a moment.

In taking as his text and pretext Pierre Lasserre's important study of Sorel's significance, de Ruggiero tones down moderately the angry, bitter tension that pervades that book, while at the same time going far beyond his source in the intransigence of his conclusions. Both the Italian and the Frenchmen are agreed on the historic importance of Sorel as a sincere moralist incapable of any Machiavellian "double-talk." Because he was a fundamentally honest thinker, his final nationalism must have been based on something more than intellectual curiosity; it must have been a genuine sympathy.

It seems that this particular assertion is to remain a fixture of what may be called "the myth of Sorel," and since a myth, in Sorel's own definition, is the vision of a goal that cannot be refuted by rational argument, the attempt to set Sorel's ideological record straight might well be given up as hopeless. The tradition which has Sorel end his life as a "premature Fascist," and at the same time become a convert to Bolshevism, seems firmly established. We read, in an article written for the centennial of Sorel's birth: "Characteristically, he turned at the end to Charles Maurras and the Action Française." The fact is, that for the last ten years of his life Georges Sorel, having repudiated all relations to that group, firmly reasserted his old faith in the proletariat and died as a leftist, convinced that his syndicalist hopes had come true in Lenin's Russia.

And what are we to think of M. Lasserre, who, reputable scholar that he is, informs us in all seriousness that Sorel preached the lévee en masse to the workers, who, once victoriously installed in the strong points of the old ruling class, would "impose their will in imperial fashion." Out of that conquest of power were to issue all the juridical and legal institutions of the working class. "It has been said that our epoch is the epoch of imperialism. Sorel has invented proletarian imperialism." Sorel did nothing of the sort. He wrote many hundreds of pages precisely to combat the Marxist thesis of the proletarian dictatorship. Sorel rejected the idea of the "workers' state" even as a transitory necessity. Neither did he believe that the pattern of a new morality and its institutional framework would be set by a victorious revolution; on the contrary, the new morality was, in Sorel's view, the indispensable prerequisite of ultimate "deliverance." Institutions are not the creation of a revolutionary "fiat" (which he called "arbitrary") but the result of the "struggle for rights," the road posts marking the advance toward the "possession of morality." The revolution, if any, only "recognizes" what is an accomplished ethical and social fact.

Lasserre knew all that, of course. Why, then, did he falsify the record? Merely in order to coin a fetching phrase that would provide him with a forceful title for his book? Or was he simply baffled by the almost perverse reticence of a theorist who advocated violence while simultaneously pronouncing a Gran Rifiuto of the Will to Power? Lasserre and de Ruggiero decide to reconcile the "nationalist" with the socialist Sorel as well as the man of violence with the man of reflection by discovering Sorel the theorist of the conservative revolution. Thus understood, the use of warlike methods by the working class was to bring about the regeneration of a decadent mankind. This conceptual achievement, the critics say, imposed a heavy strain on Sorel's critical faculty. To build up the proletariat into an "aristocratic élite" which would preserve by violent means the "ancient heroisms" was not possible without romanticizing and falsifying the character of a movement which, the historian de Ruggiero insists, was bound up with its democratic and egalitarian origins. Sorel's antirationalism, his distaste for democracy are the denial of what is, to de Ruggiero, the essence of true socialism. No wonder "the philistine reality of the strike" had to undergo, in Sorel's laboratory, "a fantastic deformation" in order to become the myth of moral rebirth; no wonder the proletarians and their leaders refused to act out the sublime precept of the philosopher and continued to wallow in their democratic swamp. That would have been disastrous for Sorel had he started out from socialism; but since, according to Ruggiero, he had been a revolutionary first and was as much influenced by Nietzschean notions as by Marx, his conversion to nationalism was no self-betrayal.

We are here confronted with another "myth about Sorel." The intellectual fatherhood of Nietzsche is taken for granted by most students, but it is not borne out by the evidence. In questions involving intellectual paternity the well-known injunction of the Code Napoléon ought to be heeded. Nor is de Ruggiero on safer ground when he speaks of the revolutionary origins of Sorel's thought. It took the author of the Reflections many years to overcome his initial leanings toward reformism, the democratic socialism of the Eduard Bernstein variety. The evidence in Sorel's correspondence with Croce, if not in Sorel's published early works, should have forewarned de Ruggiero. At least he does not hold Sorel responsible for fascism. His death came at a moment when the application of his doctrine to counterrevolutionary purposes was still in the experimental stage. Yet the conversion of Sorel's leftist, proletarian myth into the myth of the Italian nation must be called legitimate: "the revolutionary leaders of both right and left," Lenin as well as Mussolini, were "fighting Sorel's battle" against parliamentary liberalism.

But de Ruggiero is not yet through with his subject. What was it that transformed that kind and cautious scholar, Georges Sorel, into the raving enemy of the "intellectual"? Lasserre called Sorel "a revolutionary of the brain, not of the heart"; he compared him to Rousseau: both men were rebels against the dominant rationalist spirit of their time, both rose against the cold, arid conventionalism of the enlightenment. Rousseau's tempestuous protest was an isolated phenomenon, while Sorel's impatience with the "Illusions of Progress" not only betrayed its "pale, bookish" origin but also lacked originality. Sorel's voice was only one in a loud chorus of anti-intellectualism led by Henri Bergson and William James, who both influenced Sorel. The growing complexity of our civilization explains their yearning for a new innocence, which is to be found in "pure intuition": the growing depersonalization instils the sentiment for the decisive action, which will break the chain of logical, determined evolution and restore freedom.

At this point Professor de Ruggiero puts in a demurrer: the Bergsonian protest, even as interpreted by Sorel (and that means very freely), was not intended to provide a charter for barbaric instincts. Sorel never intended to go so far as that. His "violence" was the primitivism of a sophisticated mind suffering from intellectual indigestion: the denial of reason was the product of "rationalistic exasperation." But the best reasons and the best intentions of the world cannot prevent that words, once uttered, are misunderstood because they may mean more than they were meant to. Sorel himself knew that only too well. And so, if one is to believe Professor de Ruggiero, the gentle old man was in a way responsible for the return of the barbarians: "Sorel thought to evoke the sublime and unleashed the beast."

Fortunately, the doctrine of Sorel is neither derived from practice nor meant for it, but is a hothouse flower like Bergson's intuition. To be sure, it is possible to endow such aspects of experience as strikes, acts of violence, dictatorships with Sorelian significance, but the varnish dissolves in the fire of reality. "Contrary to all appearance, Sorelianism, Nietzscheanism, D'Annuncionism . . . are ideas of the past, ideas dated and depleted, and whatever seems to be enacted in their name, has quite another meaning and releases forces and ideals of a very different order." This enigmatic sentence everyone familiar with the crypto-language used by writers subject to totalitarian censorship will ponder with closest attention. It was impossible for de Ruggiero to list Fascism together with Sorelianism, Nietzscheanism, and D'Annuncionism, having attacked all three. On the other hand, he did not have to dot his i's; the Duce had publicly acknowledged his debt to both the Frenchman and the German, if not to the Duce of Fiume.

But even the Italian reader who preferred to take his de Ruggiero straight could still marvel at those unidentified forces of a "very different order" which had been released in Sorel's name. If it was the Fascist order of the day, Mussolini's censor could be pleased, since Fascism setting wrong Sorelianism right would appear justified. Or perhaps Fascism was merely Sorel's disastrous pipedream come true, bound to be defeated by the forces of outraged humanity. There is room for the suspicion that the target was not Sorel, but the dictator himself, by way of Sorel. His argument against Sorel should not be dismissed on that ground, however; it remains a formidable criticism. But it is still far from complete.

"At first sight, religion and rationalism seem to be contradictory. Still, a mind that has intelligence but no religion, is offensive to us, it will strike us as dry, harsh, opaque. In turn, a religious mind which does not endure well the yoke of rational discipline, will repel us as feeble. Both lack something, something human." M. Lasserre, continuing, has no doubt that the mark of a fully human intellect is the faculty of "reconciling the demands of reason and the religious sentiment." This reasonably sentimental man is the democratic liberal. Sorel's equation of democracy and abstract intellect leads him astray. As Professor Georges Guy-Grand puts it: "The hatred of abstraction, logic, intellectualism, translates itself for Sorel into hatred of democracy." Still worse, in Sorel's view, "democracy always seeks unity." It always tends "toward equality, toward assimilation, toward the fusion of all classes into a regime of abstract egalitarianism." Because he was convinced that the main reason for the degradation of the modern world was its penchant for unity, Sorel opposed to it his principle of "scission, " severance; to the "general will" of mass democracy he opposed the "precise will," or, as Rousseau would call it, the "corporate will" of one class, the proletariat, the only class not yet dissolved in the great democratic melting pot.

The comparison between Sorel and Rousseau breaks down at a crucial point. Yet Professor Guy-Grand remains undisturbed. Rousseau's sovereign community was not meant to obliterate individuality but, on the contrary, to free it from the intervening, petty tyrants of the feudal past. What Sorel confused was the democratic reconciliation of "the wills of all" with their nivellation and destruction. If there is in the present day some evidence of "democratic absolutism," this merely means that "the democratic mechanism is not fully functioning; it only proves that the idea of democracy has not yet become a fact." Democracy, therefore, is not, as Sorel believed, a monistic creed; rather, "the democratic rule of law, a law determined by all, is much less unitarian than are such regimes as absolute monarchies or unilateral dictatorships," which subordinate everything "to the will of one man or one class." Afraid that this allusion to Sorel's pro-Lenin stand might be lost on the reader, Guy-Grand proceeds: "What could be more absolute than Bolshevism, what more abstract than Internationalism, what more opposed to the spirit of Empiricism than a violent revolution?"

Considering Guy-Grand with Lasserre and de Ruggiero, the accusations against Georges Sorel narrow down to two contentions mutually exclusive: (1) that he severed what belongs together, arraigning the forces of instinct, intuition, class, diversity against intellect, democracy, and unity; and (2) that he is himself a rationalist, absolutist, doctrinarian, paying lip service to multiformity but actually meaning unity. But is it possible that one and the same man could be "a foe of progress through reform, and believe in progress through violence; be a foe of the democratic intellectual and exalt the revolutionary intellectual; be the enemy of superannuated notions about the State of Nature and praise the spontaneous virtue of the proletarian; a firebrand against aristocracy who was himself essentially aristocratic, one who denied the absolute but believed in the absolute of the myth. . . . "

The concept of the myth, first sketched in a work belonging to Sorel's prerevolutionary period, has likewise been subjected to a severe scrutiny by Guy-Grand. Sorel distinguishes between a social utopia, which is the description of a rational scheme of economic or political organization, and a social will, imaginative in origin and expressed in religious or poetical terms—a myth. The particular proletarian, or rather Sorelian myth of the general strike, symbolizes the faith in ultimate liberation, which was in Sorel's view the core of the Marxian doctrine, although Marx had done his best to bury it under an abstract structure far too heavy for the working class to carry. What keeps the proletarian movement alive, then, is the myth; not a blueprint of the socialist future, but an "activating image" readying the proletarian class for battle. The ultimate "napoleonic" finale may never come, and yet the myth will have fulfilled its purpose: to keep morale alive.

But, observes Guy-Grand, if the workers really go into battle without any concrete design, without a program, it is difficult to see why they should want to fight at all. "The movement is everything, the goal nothing"—there is, of course, some truth in Eduard Bernstein's saying, but like all generalizations, this one too exaggerates, for "if the goal were really of no account, the movement would not exist, or it would be mere stupid energy and savagery." What redeems the proletarian dream and makes it, to use Sorel's favorite expression, sublime, is precisely the aim pursued, the ardent vision of a better social order that makes the greatest sacrifices possible and understandable. An intelligent and intelligible plan of social change, blurred as it may be, must and will exist. A myth is, therefore, a utopia that has caught on, that has fired the passionate imagination of the mass mind into action. This sounds like common sense, and once again Sorel seems to be guilty of gross exaggeration. Instead of being content to point out the fallacious overestimation of the rational factor, he went into the opposite extreme of proclaiming irrational will as the sole creative force.

There remains the possibility that Georges Sorel knew what he was doing and that the extremism of his views was deliberate. He may reply to Guy-Grand that his myth concept alone explains why movements survive even when results are not forthcoming, that it helps to understand the heroic persistence of persistent losers. As an example of a myth sustaining a movement toward a receding goal, Sorel cites the early Christian faith in Christ's second coming. The rationalization of the ends is not the cause but merely a by-product of faith. We may, on the other hand, reject Sorel's notion of the myth altogether on the ground that it forces him to talk intelligently about the unintelligible. But if we do so, Sorel might answer us with Bernard Shaw: "You could not have Æsop's fables unless the animals talked." How are we to identify the manifestations of the irrational unless we apply to them the categories of rational description? Not able to explain the unexplainable, we may still interpret our awareness of it. In defining the symptoms of the instinct we should be conscious of our limitations, of our duty as intellectuals not to interfere but to remain, in all humility, observers or servants at best of the vital process.

While paying attention to all nonutilitarian drives, Sorel did not try to minimize the role of the material factor. He put Marx's methodology to good use without making a fetish out of historic materialism. "There is a force which always leads the mind toward idealism; one would do well to study the nature of that force and try to find out whether idealism has not a legitimate place in the intellectual process, but outside of economics and law. . . . " There are "three great aspects of human activity. . . . " One is that of "free spontaneity disregarding all material obstacles and replacing reality by the creations of its own imagination. . . . " This is the realm of mythology, of legend and, on a higher plane, all imaginary abstraction: "man retires into himself and saturates his conscience in the contemplation of the ideal." Another aspect is "of a social and political nature; it includes everything that pertains to association and protection"—here appears "the State, imposing peace by means of penal law." Sorel, it is plain, was no loyal Marxist, since he did not derive social morality from economics, which is something else again, "the world of distribution of exchange, amendable to external, abstract manipulation." It must be distinguished from production proper, the material realization of our creative urge. A society in which distribution ("abstract" intellectualism) dictates to production (Bergson's "intuition") will be a frustrated society.

Sorel has been called a relativist. But he said: "First of all, one ought to distinguish a very small and narrow portion of the human mind in which thought touches on the absolute; we may call it the domain of science . . . which reaches its perfection in physical mathematics. At the opposite pole of conscience, there is to be found another very small but equally important sector where we also reach the absolute. This is the corner in which we conceive ideas freely; we may call it the corner of morals and religion. Between these two narrow regions, there extends the immense domain which occupies almost the entire reach of our consciousness: here the operations of our daily life take place. Here, logic operates very poorly." Sorel's relativism was thus not absolute.

Sorel has been called a pluralist. But in his view diversity and unity were not exclusive:

Depending on the position we assume, we will have the right of conceiving society as a whole or as a multiplicity of antagonistic forces. There exists in many cases an approximation to economic and juridical uniformity. .. . On the other hand, there are many highly important questions which will not make sense unless we take the view that the activity of class war institutions is the preponderant influence. .. . A great number of organizations are more or less intimately integrated into the social ensemble, so whatever unity is required will follow automatically; other organizations, less numerous and sifted out by a severe selective process, conduct the class struggle; it is they who create the ideological unity necessary for the proletariat to accomplish its revolutionary task. . . .

If we want to sort out the confused mass of experience, we can do so only at the risk of breaking it up into segments and assigning to the detail full autonomy: "Social philosophy, in order to trace the most important happenings of history, is obliged to practice the method of disruption, to examine certain parts without regard for their connection with the whole, and to determine somehow the nature of their activity by pushing them toward independence. Once our understanding has reached an optimal point, it is no longer capable of restoring the disrupted unity." The part has become a whole; unjustly so, but the whole from which we broke it loose is not a constant either; it is history in motion. We can never know it until it has become the past, and likewise the philosophic observer "has no right to believe that he can give orders to the future."

This means that what at one time or another looks like unity exists only in the mind of the onlooker who takes his partial truth to be the whole. In reality, there is no such thing as a synthesis unless it be, for a fleeting second of history, the equilibrium resulting from the many pulls and hauls of all the social groups each trying to drag all the rest in their direction. What Sorel did was to bring the different group wills into sharper relief, even if that meant patent exaggeration. Not until we clear the ground and fight for our bourgeois or proletarian truths as absolutes, can "the" new truth emerge, and then it will contain whatever valor and validity these absolutes possess, no more, no less. The composite picture of our social world, as Sorel saw it, is at all times the product of a collective workshop in which everyone must exert himself as if he were the only artist. Finally:

It has been pointed out to me that I wrote without the least concern for any didactic order whatsoever. . . . Yet, I am convinced that the educational merit of these studies—and that is the only merit they have—would be greater if their primitive form remained unaltered: I am carrying on an intimate conversation with the reader; I submit to him ideas, and I force him to do his own thinking in turn, so that he may correct me and complete my work.