SOURCE: "Georges Sorel: Myth and Anarchy," in Politics and Opinion in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 1954, pp. 398-413.

[In the following excerpt, Bowie attempts to discredit Sorels by tracing an unflattering connection between Sorel's absorption of the theories of Marx and Nietzsche with the rise of Fascism. ]

When Pope Leo XIII restated Catholic political principles and Acton developed the idea of commonwealth as the expression of conscience, both were adapting traditional ideas to a new mass society. By the closing decades of the nineteenth century great urban industry and world-wide expansion had altered the scale of Western civilization and brought the mass of the people to the threshold of political and economic power. Only political ideas which took account of these facts remained relevant. Revolutionary theories, insignificant hitherto, now achieved greater influence. Ruling circles had either to come to terms with them or promote counter-revolution on a popular scale.

In the wealthier Western states, prospects of compromise were better than in the mid-century. In England liberal legislation had been influenced by T. H. Green and Bosanquet, Tory democracy had been devised by Disraeli, and growing prosperity had diminished discontent. The Fabian socialists began to extend the moralization of politics into the field of economics within the constitution, ultimately to absorb Liberalism into social democracy. In Germany, prosperity and nationalism distracted the masses from extremist programmes, and Bernstein revised Marx. In France, social democracy found expression in the writings and oratory of Jaurès. Though German social democrats were to be trampled under the heel of militarism, and the murder of Jaurès long crippled socialist leadership in France, the dominant trend of socialism in the West remained constitutional.

But this development had brutal enemies. Apart from the basic inadequacy of European institutions, still organized in competing sovereign states, the tide of class war and nihilism had been rising since the turn of the nineteenth century. Ideas taken from Marx and Nietzsche were to be combined by Sorel, a forerunner of Fascism. Before the main development of social democracy and its reinforcement by a new environmental and psychological sociology is examined, account must be taken of his ideas. Where the Fabians were to make their selection from Marxism, and Bernstein and Jaurès their revision of it, Georges Sorel gave a new twist to the Marxist revelation. He declared that the revisionists were traitors and blended the Marxist class war with a new Nietzschean Myth. He differs from Marx in being pessimistic, with a sombre view of life, akin sometimes to de Maistre's. Hence his contribution to Fascism. He preached anarchy because he held, with Bergson, that the tide of events is not susceptible to control; that the future could not, as Marxists held, be foreseen. History proceeds in a series of creative improvisations, each age being characterized by the Myth which reflects the interest of its dominant class. His thought derives from ideas which descend from Vico, Marxist determinism, Nietzsche and Bergson. The scepticism of this misguided moralist made his attitude ambivalent. He wavers between the improvisations of the Right and the Left. His principal effect on the twentieth century was upon Italian Fascism. He made a destructive perversion of a new psychological approach to politics, here discoloured, like the thought of Nietzsche, by moral and religious disillusion.

To the irrationalism of Nietzsche and Bergson and the class hatred of Marx, he added anarchist ideas taken from Proudhon. While he was devoid of immediate political judgment, his criticisms are striking. He is a gadfly of political philosophy. His ideas, if often pernicious, are astringent to humbug. He understood that what counted in politics were myths for which men would die. Like Nietzsche, Sorel was primarily a moralist. Along with a Bergsonian cult of will, he believed in the assertion of human dignity by Homo Faber, by a proletarian elite. Like his forerunner, Proudhon, he was a Puritan, compensating himself for the spectacle of ordinary human nature. A man whose lost faith made him observe life with sceptical gloom, who brought strange gleams of insight to deep problems, and the vulgarization of whose ideas affected the gutter-elites of whom Mussolini and Goebbels are representative. But all his work shows strong individuality. Like Pareto, he was an engineer, and his thought reflects the technician's desire for results.

Sorel's numerous writings are contradictory and confused. 'A self taught man,' he writes, 'exhibiting to other people the notebooks which have served for my own instruction . . . That is why the rules of the art of writing have never interested me very much.' But certain ideas are dominant. First, the assumption, common to Marx and Nietzsche, that liberal democratic society is doomed, and what he terms 'bourgeois' thought 'decadent'. It is doomed, not for the abstract considerations described by Nietzsche, but because modern industry demands a civilization of self governing producers, free from the interference of the state. Traditional culture has hitherto been parasitic. Sorel is determined to make all things new. 'For twenty years', he writes, 'I worked to deliver myself from what I retained of my education.' Next, he declares, the decisive events of history are influenced not by the leadership which liberal historians describe, but by myths created by the people independently of the surface rationalizations of intellectuals. These two ideas lead to a double attack on 'intellectuals' as such, and to the repudiation of any reformist constitutional programme. The workers, he believes, must keep themselves uncontaminated from bourgeois leadership and exploitation. The whole intellectual capital of civilization, the range of professional knowledge, the achievements of the arts, are labelled 'bourgeois culture' and repudiated.

But the most sinister creation of the old order is the state. As against Bernstein and Jaurès, Sorel thinks it superlatively corrupt. Far from the means of the gradual transmission and broadening down of civilization, the state is something that must be smashed. Hence a detestation of the Fabians and of Jaurès. They would merely substitute one set of corrupt politicians for another. To take over the machinery of the bourgeois state is not enough; it must be destroyed. Hence the error even of the Marxist conception of proletarian dictatorship.

The only way out is Anarcho-Syndicalist class war. This conflict must be inspired by the supreme myth of the age, the General Strike. Paradoxically, the destructive myth was to herald an age of untrammelled production. The 'Syndicat', which has more in common with the Soviet than with the Trade Union, is the 'cell' whereby the proletarian masses will be inspired to wreck bourgeois society and repudiate its leadership. Even, perhaps, to galvanize decadent capitalism into its old vitality, so that the Marxist scriptures may be fulfilled and the proletariat inherit a world in the full vigour of production. Out of the Syndicates will come not only a society of self-governing producers, but, Sorel's fourth master idea, a moral revolution. For Sorel, like Proudhon, was an idealist. He romanticized the elite technician—the pioneer of a cleaner world. Puritan in sexual morality, atheist in religious belief, here is another cult of man.

So the first two assumptions, the decadence of bourgeois culture and importance of myth, lead to total revolution and the discarding of the state. The Anarcho-Syndicalists must create their own future. It will be mysterious. Sorel, with his cult of will, cannot foretell the manifestations of the Life-Force, in themselves their own end. Influenced by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, by Bergsonian Creative Evolution, he saw in the destruction of the state an immediate and all-embracing goal. Yet he regards himself not so much as a prophet, as an observer of the doings of the Life Force through the proletariat. 'Gesta Vitae', as it were, 'per Populos'.

So from Sorel's works these major ideas emerge. The decadence of bourgeois civilization; the importance of myth; the need to destroy the state by Syndicalist class war inspired by the General Strike, and economic and moral redemption by the released creativeness of proletarian producers.

This gospel of destruction, akin sometimes to the ideas of Nietzsche, was wildly unsuited to the elaborate and precarious structure of modern civilization. Sorel is in fact careless of the actual interests of the proletariat. For this engineer of roads and bridges, the bogus mythology of the General Strike was the supreme tactic. He appears, too, singularly blind to the appalling evils of modern war and to the urgent necessity for international order. Impatient of all existing institutions, he looked first to Lenin (who regarded him with contempt) as the founder of the 'Rome of the proletariat'; then to Mussolini, of all people. An obsession with French politics—in particular with the dreary Dreyfus case and with the part subsequently played by Jaurès—gives him scope for a poisonous irony.

As an observer of society and a critic of thought, Sorel is more interesting. In the first of his main contributions, the attack on bourgeois civilization and leadership, his criticisms are trenchant. No one has better put the case against all the values in which liberal democrats have believed. To understand the twentieth century one must take account of Sorel. Like Nietzsche's, his criticisms can be answered: they cannot be ignored.

In the wide range of his works the early La Ruine du Monde Antique, Conception matérialiste de l'Histoire, compares the alleged dissolution of democratic society with the collapse of Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Sorel admired the hard pagan virtues, but he relates early Christianity to Sorelian socialism. The intellectuals of Antiquity, Sorel believes, undermined the civic and imperial myths which were its strength.

Yet the decline of Antiquity was different from the break up of the eighteenth-century order. The former marked a dead end—'véritable culbute idéologique'—one of the 'ricorsi' which Vico had seen in history. This social and economic decadence was only painfully restored by the barbarians, in spite of the handicap imposed on them by Christianity. The French Revolution, on the other hand, occurred in an expanding society. Far from marking a collapse, it was a great 'mutation of property'. It was due not to intellectual convictions but to a massive change in habits of life. Here the promise of a mass civilization of producers first appeared. Irrelevant liberal ideologists, who attempt, like the Christians, to impose their intolerance and misunderstanding on this vast social and economic change, must be brushed aside. They will interfere with production and rob it of its fruits. For these modern slaves to abstraction, these despicable secular clerics, are as incapable of directing great scale production as were the barbarians of using the broken-down institutions of the Graeco-Roman world. The Christian 'economy of asceticism' was parasitic: useless to the kind of progress (command of environment) in which Sorel believed. 'It contains no element which assures the passage to superior forms.' As for Christian literature, there was nothing original in that, either, except for the 'drama' of the religious life, which was confined to a few and 'unconstructive'. Christianity had merely taken over the pagan concept of the 'good life' for an idle minority and developed it in selfish and ascetic terms. 'In a society of idlers, of rich parasitic patricians, . . . what was there better than such wisdom?' 'Although, of course,' he adds characteristically, 'most will prefer debauchery.' Christian education, also, had nothing to contribute. It merely took over a pernicious system of literary culture and conserved it. This 'parasitism of literary talent' still deeply infects civilization. Sorel idealized the cult of manual work. This destructive intellectual set little store by the more strenuous enterprises of the mind.

Socrates, regarded by John Stuart Mill as a hero of intellectual liberty, has for Sorel, says Perrin, but one title to fame: he was the precursor of Dr. Pangloss. This attack already shows implacable hostility to the assumptions of liberal thought.

The onslaught is further worked out in the Les Illusions du Progrès, Sorel's most interesting work, where the influences of Marx and Bergson are equally apparent. Here he again insists on the need to penetrate to the roots of society. For its laws are mysterious. The obscurities of Marx more deeply reflect life and history than the artificial and shapely simplifications of liberal thought. The ideas or myths of an epoch are those of its dominant class, and since the most characteristic ideology of the middle class is the idea of progress, it should be carefully examined. For the historian must concentrate upon the outlook of the 'winners' in a given epoch.

Another typical bourgeois myth is the idea of the general Will. Inheriting the admiration of the old régime for strong government, social democrats have always demanded centralization. Hence the cult of popular Will, a new myth to justify the old state. Naturally, the idea is fantastic. With the social grades on such different levels of development, so that the leaders may be living intellectually several centuries before the majority, who trail in varying stages of political consciousness behind them, it is ridiculous even to imagine a general Will. Yet the myth has worked. Popular opinion is always subordinated in each epoch to the ideas of elites. Behind these ideas—'which nobody has and in which every one is supposed to participate'—are concealed the fundamental causes of human action. Just as the historian reconsiders historical persons, so myths and slogans should be reassessed. 'It is in democratic times, especially, that one can say that mankind is governed by the magic power of great words rather than by ideas, by formulae rather than by reason, by dogmas of which no one knows the origin, rather than by doctrines founded on observation.'

There is no better example of such dogma than the myth of progress. It should be historically analysed, in terms of class. Following the Marxists, Sorel regards 'bourgeois' ideology as repellent. It owes much, he thinks, to the 'neo-fetishism' of Comte, though his Religion of Humanity was little regarded, and his hierarchy of 'bourgeois saints laïques' is ridiculous. Middle-class thinkers, indeed, have never escaped from the assumptions of the eighteenth century. To destroy this outlook is not only 'a question of conscience but of immediate practical interest'. French 'Enlightenment', which set the tone for all Europe, was profoundly artificial, conditioned by the mentality of class. The great French tradition of clarity and elegance was regarded by this ruthless iconoclast as dangerous and misleading. Its very elegance masks the truth. Writers become good craftsmen, 'clever advocates', who establish an artificial orthodoxy. Here, he says, are to be found the origins of the doctrine of progress. It reflects the outlook of a class. 'In formulating his famous principle of methodical doubt', for example, Descartes was only 'applying to thought the habits of an aristocrat'. Such writers have little respect for tradition, and while Pascal yearned for the constant presence of God, Descartes, intoxicated with the prospects of new knowledge was, in effect, content with His absence.

Naturally this bold scepticism was attractive to people of quality, to the gens du monde. It justified their desire 'to talk with assurance on subjects imperfectly understood', relying on native wit, and reckless of middle-class caution. When the practical middle class came to predominance, this aristocratic desire for clarity was reinforced by the demand for a total explanation, by a confidence in reason, which reaches its climax in Herbert Spencer. 'Hence', says Sorel, 'the insensate confidence in the decisions of enlightened people which has remained the ideological basis of the superstition of the modern state. Hence, also, the illusions of liberal rationalism, with its view of history as the education of the human race. In that originally eighteenth-century outlook, the mysterious, complex and irrational process of history is reduced, with deceptive lucidity, to an intelligible and elegant compass. Such simplification was natural to writers who catered for a beau monde 'which turned everything into conversation'. If French literature lacks the depth of a Shakespeare or a Goethe—cherchez la femme. Reason, tolerance, humanity—they are the values of the salon. Modern democrats have never escaped from this stuffy, artificial, inheritance.

There is no reason', either, 'to think opinion made by the Press any better than that made in salons.' All attempts to assimilate the masses into bourgeois culture should be resisted. 'An education which aims to make the people participate in middle-class culture is useless to the proletariat.' The Welfare State is brushed aside. In English terms, W.E.A. activities, extra-mural studies—all are pernicious. Sorel turns to a vitriolic attack on both secular and classical education in France—the latter, he says, has descended to 'the level of fetishes'. Intellectuals, indeed, show for their abstractions the respect of savages for their hieroglyphs. Could there be a worse or more cruel government than that of 'mandarins'? The pretended century of enlightenment was the supreme age of humbug, of the 'bric-à-brac of the Encyclopedia'. Even Saint-Simon is tarred with this brush. As for the religion of Comte, 'one might as well worship the Bibliothèque Nationale'. Like de Maistre, Sorel holds that the healthy gloom of medieval Catholicism, the sombre dignity of Calvin's beliefs, more nearly reflect the realities of life. They were perverted into fatuous and delusive hope through the shallow optimism of ideologists. This rationalist nonsense reflects the class bias of parasitic minds. Actually it is emotion, not reason, that dominates mankind. All political life is an improvisation before fate.

The French, of course, will always accept anything sufficiently theoretical. Rousseau's sophistries are a notable example. His own countrymen knew better. The Contrat Social was regarded in Geneva as a seditious libel and burnt. But Rousseau was a supreme popularizer; he condensed ideas, largely taken from Locke, into a 'masterpiece of style which is wonderfully obscure'. He thus proved himself a master of myth, and altered the development of history. The power of this myth was extraordinary. It did not matter in the least that Rousseau was unintelligible. 'Enlightened people dare not admit that they cannot understand arguments that are presented in very sophisticated language by an illustrious writer.' The idea of the General Will and the Marxist theory of Value—notable and perennial torments for students of political thought—both prove, says Sorel, 'how important obscurity can be in giving force to a doctrine'. Of course it is quite beside the point to try to understand either.' But when, later, Rousseau's book came into the hands of the small bourgeoisie, it became a programme of immediate action. 'Everyone found in it what he wished.'¹⁰

Of course the idea of government by all is a fiction; yet it is the last word of democratic political thought. But the theory of the bourgeois state merely reflects a class myth. It is outdated. The whole ideology must be superseded by the proletariat, by the Syndicats, a 'powerful means of moralization'.¹¹ The objective is not to capture the bourgeois machine, but to deprive it of life.

Further, he again emphasizes, the whole middle-class outlook is vitiated by the cult of concentrated state power. It was inherited from the ancien régime; it is now unchecked by the Church, and backed by the myth of the General Will. What future can it have but tyranny? The danger of the omnipotent state was ever in Sorel's, as in Proudhon's, mind. Eight years before, he had written, in a society in which state, church and property exist, 'there is some chance of finding chinks without being completely crushed'¹² . . . But what can one do when the state will be 'alone, absolute in temporal and spiritual affairs, and more absolute than the Pope, because it will be represented by the expert—the man of science'? Here is the danger even of Saint-Simonean planning: the opportunity for demagogues to capture power and stultify the Revolution. Of this 'political clerisy', the intellectuals, the parasites who sell ideas, Jaurès—that Sorelian bugbear—is the representative. He has the mentality of a successful cattle merchant.

Along with the attack on democratic politicians, here is another denunciation of middle-class culture. This omnivorous reader, this self-taught beneficiary of organized knowledge, again had to undermine the intellectual capital of civilized society. History, as interpreted by liberals in terms of the leadership of individuals of genius and elites of talent, is unreal. He denies the creativeness, the decisive influence, of individuals. So-called great men are only the 'carriers of symbols' which the creative and irrational imagination of the masses have made. This is a process intellectuals cannot understand. He quotes Anatole France—'c'est toujours à l'insu des lettrés que les foules ignorantes créent des dieux'. The moving power of history is the proletariat; the 'individualist and aristocratic doctrine of talents' is false.¹³ Here Sorel's sceptical view of elites and masses reinforces his political programme.

In his most notorious, though not his most able, book he worked this programme out. In the Reflections on Violence anarcho-syndicalism is interpreted in terms of the synthetic myth of the General Strike. Reiterating ideas previously formulated, it is primarily a call to misguided action. The introductory 'Letter to Halévy' contains some of Sorel's most striking phrases. 'But philosophy', he says, 'is perhaps, after all, only the recognition of the abysses which lie on each side of the footpath that the vulgar follow with the serenity of somnambulists—Profound understanding of life, he argues darkly, produces pessimism, for conventional philosophy and industrial civilization have created false hopes. The prosperous urban Greeks of Antiquity were shallow, regarding the world with a trader's mentality as 'an immense shop full of excellent things'. The concept of Natural Law is equally empty, a mere projection of the mind. He quotes Pascal: 'three degrees of latitude nearer the Pole reverse all jurisprudence, a meridian decides what is truth'.¹⁵ It is impossible, he says, to reason about justice, a relative term. International arbitration, with its appeal to abstract right—that decrepit Rosinante—merely evokes a secularized mythology. There can be no justice in politics.

With the rise of Calvinism, the shallow and vulgar optimism of the Renaissance gave place to a juster estimate of life. But Protestantism soon became 'soft' and degenerated into 'mere lax Christianity'. Then 'the immense success of industrial civilization . . . created the belief that, in the near future, happiness would be produced automatically for everybody'. All this reformist optimism is nonsense. The syndicalists will have a tougher outlook, both in theory and politics. With the destruction of bourgeois ideology, 'the parliamentary régime, so dear to intellectuals, will be finished with—it is the abomination of desolation'! The kind of social democracy which says 'do what you like, but don't kill the goose', [the bourgeois state] must give place to a militant, destructive creed. For in a crisis the fanatics, the extremists, win. The early Christians, as he had said in the Illusions of Progress, who really counted were the Tertullians—the men who refused compromise. Bruno, who was burnt for his 'convictions', is more important than Galileo, who was merely 'certain—with that particular kind of certitude about the accepted theories of science which instruction ultimately produces'. The idea of a dynamic myth, of a Holy Army, is the contribution to political theory which we draw from Bergson. He was concerned with the inner self, constantly creative in Duration, not Time. This creative consciousness, whereby we invent our world, must be applied to the eternal improvisations of politics. It must be expressed in a mythology accepted by the masses, not as description 'of things', but as means of action. For action is what counts.

And myth is a redoubtable weapon. 'People who are living in this world of "myths" are secure from all refutation'. It was a queer gospel for the increasingly precarious, interdependent, world of the twentieth century. Sorel glories in this dark thinking with the blood. He repudiates a constructive programme. 'We on the contrary have invented nothing at all, and even assert that nothing can be invented.' He has merely asserted that 'a new culture might spring from the struggle of the revolutionary trade unions against the employers and the State'. He is original, he declares again, only in repudiating the leadership of intellectuals. He has no wish at all to direct the great surge of proletarian vitality; only to put the workers on guard against 'bourgeois' thought. 'The proletariat must be preserved from the experience of the Germans who conquered the Roman Empire: the latter were ashamed of being barbarians, and put themselves to school with the rhetoricians of the Latin decadence; they had no reason to congratulate themselves upon having wished to be civilized.'¹⁹ 'I do not believe . . . that I am labouring in vain,' he continues, 'for in this way I help to ruin the prestige of middle-class culture, a prestige which up till now has been opposed to the complete development of the principle of the "class war".' The heady vintage of Bergsonian intuition is mixed with the muddy brew of Marxist determinism.

From this theoretical background emerges the full myth of the General Strike. Sorel apparently believed that it was already 'established in the minds of the workers'. The myth was to spread through the Syndicalist cells; the infecting of the syndicates by anarchism is one of the outstanding events of the early twentieth century.

The great surge of proletarian violence, even if unsuccessful, creates a revolutionary state of mind. In pursuit of his new proletarian culture, cut off from the past, he denounces all attempts to avoid class war. 'Social duty', he writes, 'no more exists than international duty.' Sorel pours vitriolic contempt on the 'cowardice' of the middle class, who 'continue to pursue the chimera of the social peace'.²² The natural bellicosity of the French, which subdued most of the continent under Napoleon, must be turned inwards.

It is essential, he insists, to keep the bourgeois on the run. A watered-down Capitalism would merge into a dreary sub-bourgeois state. So the class war must be kept going; the capitalists driven to fight. Proletarian violence is 'the only means by which the European nations, at present stupefied by humanitarianism, can recover their former energy'. Sorel need not have worried on that score.

He recurs to the contrast between the creative French Revolution, coming in a time of prosperity, and the Christian revolution which took over a bankrupt and decadent world. He proceeds to a glorification of Napoleon, to quotations from de Tocqueville on the dangers of democratic centralization, and to the assertion that the General Strike is not illegal since it ranks as an operation of war. But he pays the English a fine compliment. They 'are distinguished', he says, 'by an extraordinary lack of understanding of the class war'. Sidney Webb he finds peculiarly contemptible. He 'enjoys a reputation for competence that is very much exaggerated: all that can be put to his credit is that he has waded through uninteresting blue books and has had the patience to compose an extremely indigestible compilation on the history of trade unionism; he has a mind of the narrowest description'. Sorel, as one might expect, underestimates that formidable political influence.

This miscalculation was due in part to his insularity. To his obsession with French political intrigue, to the constant harping on the Dreyfus case and its consequences, to the dreary feud with Jaurès which runs with a certain gross humour, a kind of bass accompaniment, throughout the books. He labours the comparison between the corrupt demagogues of social democracy, blackmailing the rich, imposing their own will on the masses in the guise of constitutional government, and the clean Proudhonian enterprise of the Syndicalist elite.

To keep the myth alive there must be unremitting agitation. 'Consider', he says, 'the ethics of violence'.

Consider how few were the Christian martyrs, yet what a resounding legend they made! One need not necessarily achieve violence on a scale so large as to wreck society: 'there is no danger of civilization succumbing under the consequences of the development of brutality'. The myth of the General Strike—the widespread revolutionary state of mind—may indeed, foster the class war 'by means of incidents which would appear to middle-class historians of small importance, as the execution of a few Christians seemed insignificant to established opinion in Rome'.²⁴ There is even a 'good chance' of a Syndicalist revolution succeeding without resort to the centralized terror of bourgeois intellectual fanatics.²⁵ Good clean violence in factory and shipyard, railroad and power station—that Sorel admires. When this violence is sidetracked into 'cunning', into bargaining, as in the English trade unions, then there is spiritual death. Blows, on the contrary, beget heroism. Here, already, is part of the mythology of Fascism.

He becomes more interesting when he leaves his programme of action. Discussing the 'Ethics of Producers', he resumes a fruitful theme. What, he asks, with Renan, will replace the old myths? ' "On what will those who come after us live?" '²⁶ This is the great problem. We need, he insists, a new morality of producers, broadbased on the creative impulse of the people. He quotes, with approval, the notorious remarks of Nietzsche about the blond beast, and asserts that this kind of master type still exists in the United States. Had Nietzsche lived to see the gathering tide of American prosperity, 'he would have been struck by the singular analogies which exist between the Yankee . . . and the ancient Greek sailor, . . . sometimes a pirate'.²⁷ After this unexpected compliment to capitalists in their wild state, he turns to rend Aristotle and the Catholics, with their 'consumer mentality', their contemptible ideas of stability and order. But for the 'free producers of tomorrow, working in factories, there are no masters'. They must show an heroic, an Homeric, élan. The incredible victories of the revolution were due to French individualism, 'to intelligent bayonets'. 'The same spirit is found in the working-class groups . . . eager for the general strike', that 'manifestation of individualistic force in the revolted masses'.²⁸ Ingenious artisans, working like creative artists, are inspired by Syndicalist cells. They will develop their missionary, and spontaneous, idea. What a prospect for all-out production! Here is no 'Welfare' State, ridden by conservative bureaucrats, exploited by a clerisy, infested with the corruption of politicians. Here is a new, a healthy society, driven by its proper myth, fulfilling its own phase of a Vicoesque 'course' of history. The Holy Army is restored. This time it is not Satan who is the enemy: it is the bourgeoisie.

These ideas are further elaborated in the later Materials for a Theory of the Proletariat, a collection of early essays which was Sorel's penultimate work. Here, again, the intellectuals are attacked. Sorel denounces their superstititious respect for the expert, the parasitism of 'democrats' and 'Mandarins', the glorification of the 'pontiffs of science'. The world of dreary abstractions, of tedious and artificial classification, in which this clerisy has its being, he finds most suitable for the mentality of women, such 'research fitting the female mind'. But the shrewder bourgeois realize that once women are let in, the prestige and rewards of their calling will be diminished. Hence their anxiety to exclude them from such suitable occupations. As science progresses, the workers can actually do without the so-called experts, who will dwindle into an intellectual proletariat. Sorel remarks, foolishly enough, that in medicine 'the progress of science and the better organization of assistance has already diminished the numbers of doctors used'. Further, the managerial class is superfluous. Executive capacity is not rare.' The workers can soon provide their own self-governing institutions. 'The socialization of the means of production will translate itself into a prodigious lockout of intellectuals.' Their natural and meretricious role as exploiting politicians will no longer have any scope. 'Mort aux intellectuels!' cries this renegade of the École Polytechnique. For the collective soul is profoundly mysterious, and the tides of history are determined not by the puny laws of man's mind but by the purpose, or Bergsonian lack of it, of creative Life.

The habits of this new proletarian age will be chaste. There is 'a psycho-erotic "law" ' which demands the conservation of energy. Fourier's 'penchant for perverse debauchery' is quite out of order. Sorel, indeed, makes a cult of the family. But the proletarian family will extend to 'free unions'. As in so many French writers, the ideal of the 'femme forte' is glorified. The proletarian woman is to be a 'compagnon sévère et intelligente'.

Within their self-governing factories, meanwhile, the workers will develop their creative tasks. The cult of the General Strike will pass into the cult of work. Like 'skilled vine dressers', absorbed in their art, they will feel like a gardener about his dahlias. Accustomed to exploits of sabotage, habituated to violence and destruction, the Syndicalist elites, Sorel assumes, will quickly revert to the routine and responsibility of modern industry. For here is 'an economic epic'. 'Rejuvenated by the feelings roused by proletarian violence', they will be inspired by Sorelian myth to an 'entirely epic state of mind'. Here is the answer to the supreme question of the age—by what shall we live? An ideology for the new civilization of the people. 'It is to violence,' Sorel concludes, 'that socialism owes the high ethical values by means of which it brings salvation to the modern world.'

And why, the reader may ask, is Sorel held to be important? He had, indeed, little influence in his own country in his own time. He was destructive, immediately irresponsible. His ideas were part of the wave of irrationalism promoted by Bergson. But he is a writer, like de Maistre, who raises profound problems. He was in tune with two most formidable facts of his age. The growing political and economic power of the masses, and the new psychological interpretation of politics. He combines Marx's belief in the class war with a Nietzschean understanding of myth, and a new understanding of the subconscious mind. Above all, he brings a profound pessimism to bear on politics. His view of life was sombre, and his morality puritan. In history he saw no plan and little progress: in politics only improvisation: in ideas only myth. This dark revolutionary sceptic was to provide Fascism with a much needed political philosophy. He was to make a major contribution to the disasters of the twentieth century.

NOTES

¹Reflections on Violence, translated by T. E. Hulme. Allen & Unwin, 1915 (Letter to Halèvy), p. 3.

²La Ruine, p. 311.

³ p. 320.

⁴ p. 105.

⁵ p. 67.

⁶Illusions, p. 45.

⁷ p. 50.

⁸ p. 59.

⁹ p. 107.

¹⁰ ibidem.

¹¹ p. 332.

¹²La Ruine, p. 319.

¹³ p. 235.

¹⁴Reflections (Letter), p. 12.

¹⁵ p. 17 (Fragment 294, Braunschweig Edition quoted).

¹⁶ p. 19.

¹⁷ p. 26.

¹⁸ p. 32.

¹⁹ p. 38.

²⁰ p. 39.

²¹ p. 35.

²²Reflections, p. 71.

²³ p. 132.

²⁴ p. 213.

²⁵La Ruine, p. 315.

²⁶ p. 269.

²⁷ p. 272.

²⁸ pp. 284-5.

²⁹Matériaux, p. 91.