SOURCE: An introduction to "Social Foundations of Contemporary Economics", by Georges Sorel, translated by John L. Stanley, Transaction Books, 1984, pp. 1-34.

[In the following excerpt, Stanley examines the influence of the writings of Henri Bergson, William James, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon on the writings of Sorel. ]

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Georges Sorel's political and social thought is the difficulty one has in attempting to classify it. Just when we think we have Sorel conveniently pigeonholed into some tidy little category (protofascist being a recent favorite), he fools us by putting forth ideas which at first seem to be in complete contradition to all our preconceptions.

This elusiveness is partly responsible for the allegations of "shocking inconsistency" and negativism leveled against Sorel. These allegations have some truth. Anyone like Sorel born in France in the middle of the nineteenth century had numerous political traditions from which to choose, and it appears that he sampled a good many of them. As a young engineering student at the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique, Sorel expressed a sympathy with royalism and was a partisan of the Comte de Chambord in 1867. After his early retirement from the Department of Highways in 1892, he moved toward social democracy, but this attachment to a revised Marxism soon changed into a sympathy for antistatist syndicalism from about 1902 until about 1908. This was the period in which the present volume as well as Reflections on Violence and the Illusions of Progress¹ were written. After 1908, Sorel regarded the snydicalist movement as a failure and flirted once more with royalism. After 1917, he embraced Lenin's Bolshevism and even occasionally made favorable remarks about Mussolini.

This seemingly bizarre series of changes is better understood if we keep in mind the historical backdrop of Sorel's youth: France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 profoundly demoralized French society. The political thought of the next decade and the parliamentary immobilism of the Third Republic reflected this malaise. The inertia of liberal institutions after 1871 had provoked a challenge from the Right in which Royalists and Bonapartists formed a coalition in support of Minister of War Boulanger in his demand for a reformed constitution and a more spirited foreign policy—an attempt which came to naught. Its failure helped to solidify the multiple stalemate between the forces of radicalism and conservatism. "France is dying," proclaimed Ernest Renan in 1882, and these words from the great religious scholar come close to summing up Sorel's own feeling about the period. Renan was moved by the French defeat to call for a reform of the educational system to teach the heroism of classical times and to synthesize French and German virtues. These sentiments were found in Sorel's first important work, Le Procès de Socrate (1889).² There Sorel drew an implicit analogy between the decline of heroic Athens at the hand of philosophers and the decline of France under Louis Napoleon and under the Third Republic. In its pages Sorel appears much more reactionary than the liberal Renan. We find a deeply pessimistic Sorel, hostile to the Enlightenment, a bitter critic of "the illusions of progress."

But appearances here are deceiving. Sorel was not a reactionary in any vulgar sense, but was espousing a new moral order that was sometimes profoundly hostile to the prevailing system of values. To Sorel, the malaise of contemporary European civilization was a moral one. But unlike Renan, he was not content to preach morality or to put forth small palliatives. He sought a genealogy of morals or what I have called a "sociology of virtue,"³ which attempted to examine the historical and psychological roots of the moral basis of a social order and its decomposition. It was the search for the historical genesis of morals that Sorel said was "the great concern of my entire life."⁴

Le Procès de Socrate was a general indictment of philosophical teachers in ancient Athens, not merely an attack on Socrates. To Sorel, Athenian philosophers, with Socrates at their head, had replaced the preachments of intellectuals for the heroic teachings of the Greek mythic poets. In Sorel's view, such new teachings were largely ineffectual except in a negative sense, serving only to undermine the moral strength of the old institutions. (1) Philosophy had preached an abstract brotherhood of man instead of solid family institutions and Platonic instead of erotic love. The family life on which all other stable social institutions are based was thus undermined. (2) Philosophers preached the rule of experts instead of the rule of warriors and fighters. The military virtues on which Greek citizenship was based were weakened. (3) Philosophers emphasized the leisure necessary for philosophical and political activity; the ethic of productivity and energy was replaced by a morality of the weak based on consumption. It is the last two themes, the morality of struggle and of productivity, which stand as the major inspiration of the present work, Insegnamenti sociali della economia contemporanea.

Sorel derived this sociology of morals mainly from the work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who had criticized his own social milieu on roughly these same bases. On the other hand, it was Proudhon who had emphasized the futility of war in modern society and who, instead of calling for battle, assimilated the heroism of war to the dayto-day struggles of the worker in production. The modern proletariat had replaced the Greco-Roman citizen farmer.

After publication of Le Procès de Socrate Sorel discovered the writings of Vico and Marx. To Sorel, Vico revealed the recurrent nature of the heroic virtues he had longed for. Vico argued that the natural cycles of history, of greatness and decline among peoples, always contained periods characterized by the heroic barbarism expressed in Homeric poetry or the medieval epics. Such recurrences, or ricorsi, the beginnings of new civilizations, are accompanied by a transvaluation of values, an upheaval that annihilates the old, decadent civilization with a moral catastrophe far greater than any material one; in such times, "the logic of imagination replaces the logic of philosophy."⁵ The ricorsi embody new dynamisms, new vitalities and energies.

From Marx, Sorel discovered how he could apply the heroism of the Homeric epics to new conditions, through the class struggle. Marx's notion of absolute class separation, of the proletariat isolating itself from the mentality of bourgeois civilization, proved the key to Sorel's search for new beginnings. He embraced Marx as the one philosopher outside Proudhon who revealed a way in which a true Vicoian ricorso would occur in modern times. A combination of Proudhonian heroism and Marxian class struggle would pave the way for a rebirth of contemporary civilization.

Two more theorists contributed to Sorel's philosophy. From Henri Bergson, Sorel derived a psychology which revealed the nature of the heroic leaps of imagination that invariably accompany a ricorso. Bergson explained how such leaps could go beyond the scientific universe, whose routines threatened the vital life force, the very expression of which was necessary for moral renaissance.

In William James, Sorel found a philosophical expression of what he had always viewed as axiomatic: that the "success" of a doctrine is more important than its inner coherence. Once we keep in mind the instrumental nature of political and economic doctrines espoused by James, Sorel's continuing change of allegiances becomes more explicable. For Sorel embraced a doctrine only insofar as it revealed a potential for a ricorso and he rejected it if it was shown to be ineffectual. For example, he explained his most notorious switch, from syndicalism to royalism in 1909-10, when he said: "I do not know if Maurras will bring back the king of France and that is not what interests me in his thought; what I am concerned with is that he confront the dull and reactionary bourgeoisie in making it ashamed of being defeated."⁶ As he later stated it, he had always been a traditionalist in a sense: "One can call me a traditionalist as one can call me a pragmatist, because in the critique of knowledge I attach a major importance to historical development. When I sided with Vico .. . I was in a certain sense a traditionalist."⁷ Sorel's "monarchism" is a means by which he can envision a sharpened social struggle that makes possible the unfolding of virtue—that he defines in terms of the warrior ethos of courage and self-sacrifice. Each ideology is viewed in terms of its potential to uphold the élan of such a struggle. When it does not live up to these hopes, it is abandoned even more quickly than it was adopted.

The pragmatic nature of Sorel's use of Vico is further emphasized when we keep in mind Sorel's view that, in the realm of ideas as well as in social action, there is a "heterogeneity between the ends realized and the ends given."⁸ For Sorel reality differs greatly from the ideas that we had of it before acting. Sorel's distinction between the psychological basis of the royalist actors themselves and the psychology of the observers of the royalists is similar to William James's distinction between the "religious propensities" of believers and the "philosophical significance" of those beliefs.⁹ In modern sociological terms, beliefs have "latent functions," the most important of which is the role they play in struggle and economic productivity.

The pluralism between intention and result in pragmatic thought extends to historical pluralism as well. Despite Sorel's attraction to Vico, he was critical of his simplistic account of the relationships between psychological states and society.¹⁰ Vico looked upon history almost as an organic growth in which thought and activity are brought together in an indissoluble whole: he treated phenomena en bloc. But to Sorel, if history developed in this fashion, there would be few chances for a durable renaissance. Ricorsi are produced when a body within society declares itself separate from the prevailing civilization; Vico's holistic approach to change obscures the importance of this separation; it hides the need for ideologies to coexist and compete with one another for supremacy. It is this competition which makes movements struggle in order to triumph, and it is the struggle itself, more than the outcome, which produces virtue in the hearts of the participants.

This doctrine of struggle stands at the basis of Sorel's treatment of various ideologies. One of the best illustrations of Sorel's position is found here in the Insegnamenti where he deals with the ideologies of liberal capitalism and socialism. In reading this work, we come to understand that Sorel admired each of these ideologies most insofar as it stood in resistance to (or at least in isolation from) the opposing ideology. The more an ideology represents struggle and the overcoming of resistance, the more it possesses dynamic elements, elements of creativity and mastery in which it represents the fight against decadence. The less an ideology embodies the ethos of struggle, the more it embodies degeneration and laxity. Each ideology contains both regenerative and degenerative components.

This striking parallelism between liberal and socialist degeneration and regeneration stands at the core of the Insegnamenti sociali della economia contemporanea. This work was completed in 1903-05 when Sorel had written off liberalism in France as a lost cause and had become fully disillusioned with the "official socialism" of the German and French Marxist parties. By then Sorel had turned to antipolitical syndicalism, and the Insegnamenti is especially interesting when viewed as a sort of Grundrisse or draft for his most renowned work (written the following year), Reflections on Violence.

While Reflections is Sorel's clearest statement of syndicalist action and the social myths which sustain it, in the Insegnamenti we find the clearest theory of the idea of class separation as a function of the rise of syndicalism. In> the Insegnamenti we also find the most detailed analysis of the role class separation had performed in the great periods of liberalism and socialism; and it is here that we find the most profound condemnation of what Sorel calls "social solidarity" (or social unity) and the role it has played in the degeneration of the two great European ideologies.

The work is doubly interesting because not only does Sorel discuss these ideologies, but he actually uses them as tools for analyzing these very ideologies. As Sorel expresses it: "The true method to follow to know the defects, inadequacies, and errors of a powerful philosophy is to criticize it by means of its own principles."¹¹ Thus he announces at the beginning of the Insegnamenti that he will use, as much as possible, the principles of historical materialism.

In this work Sorel is not only analyzing socialism according to its own system of historical materialism; he is also examining the ideologies of liberal capitalism. Yet there is no explicit reference here to a theory corresponding to capitalism that Sorel found useful as a means of analysis, though such a theory did exist at the time and was implicit in Sorel's analytical approach. That theory is pragmatism, one of the main philosophical progeny of liberalism. Since it is through pragmatic as much as Marxist criteria that Sorel evaluates the various European ideologies, and since it is more through pragmatic criteria that he pledges allegiance to so many of them at various times, not only does Sorel view Marxism using Marxian categories and liberalism in terms of its own pragmatic norms, but each of these ideologies is (here or in later writings) examined with the other's philosophical weaponry as well.

In the present volume Sorel is explicit about using historical materialism and says nothing about pragmatism because, at the time of writing (1904-05), Sorel had gravitated to pragmatism only by instinct. It was not until four or five years later in 1909 that Sorel would discover the writing of William James, and only long after 1909 would he extoll "the utility of pragmatism." Yet this still unarticulated pragmatic thought is at least as important as Marxism in Sorel's thinking; perhaps more so. Marxism was important to Sorel chiefly because of the role it played in analyzing the historical and economic roots of social phenomena. Sorel's pragmatism is important because it provided him with an expression of the plural nature of reality and of the necessarily partial and tentative nature of all explanatory theories. Marxism is important because it emphasizes man's interchange with nature as the basis of knowledge. Pragmatism will be imporatnt to Sorel because it, more than Marxism, emphasizes that nature cannot be viewed successfully as a totality.

Liberal capitalism and socialism, as dealt with in the Insegnamenti, are, among other things, also philosophies of man's relationship to nature, and Sorel's own pragmatic theory of nature is important in understanding the present work. Sorel developed this natural theory quite early, long before his formal discovery of pragmatism, and it informs his entire philosophy as few other aspects of his thought do. In no small measure, this philosophy is the basis of Sorel's method of looking at all social as well as scientific phenomena. Thus, before turning to an analysis of the Insegnamenti, this pragmatic methodology should be discussed in detail. It is the implicit method he employs (coupled with Marxism) throughout this work.

In Sorel's eyes, the examination of ideological phenomena, like the experimental controls involved in scientific questions, is necessarily limited to partial views of phenomena. The ideology of liberalism, for example, can be seen most effectively if we look at it from a single angle, say its period of decline. We can look at other stages of the ideology at other discrete moments. This method results in a series of representations roughly analogous to single frames of a motion picture which might give a closer and more detailed view of an otherwise confused action. On the other hand, this "still frame" cannot help but distort the full portrayal of the movement by virtue of its partial nature.

Sorel asserts that knowledge of the full social or ideological "newsreel" is impossible. Methodologically, Sorel attempts to deal with the problem of totality by using what in his early writings he called an "expressive support" and later called diremption. The term diremption is defined as "a forcible separation or severance."¹² As Sorel stated it: "In order to study the most important philosophy of history, social philosophy is obliged to proceed to a diremption, to examine certain parts without taking into consideration all their connections with the whole; to determine, in some way, the nature of their activity by isolating them. When it has attained the most perfect knowledge in this way, social philosophy can no longer try to reconstruct the broken unity."¹³

We can elaborate on the concept of diremption in a number of ways, and there is an anticipation here of Max Weber's "ideal types." It is a method of analysis which abstracts a phenomenon from social reality for the purpose of clarification. We know, however, that the process of abstraction, by its very isolation, distorts or blurs the totality from which it is derived, and that the diremptions themselves have been changed in the process of being isolated.

Sorel is aware that, to some extent, every social philosophy or political theory must use diremption, and he seems to argue that these theories are themselves diremptions. Yet to Sorel, most social and political theorists are only half conscious of the consequences of making these abstractions. Sorel insists that we shall gain insights from diremption, that is, from abstract social theories, but we must never forget what a diremption is; although diremptions must be used, we must be careful not to abuse them. According to Sorel, most of the errors of social philosophy stem from such abuses.

At the root of the problem of social analysis is the displacement of an empiricually based theory with rationalist theories. This hostility to the rationalist tradition is partly responsible for Sorel's attack on the rule of philosophers and social scientists. Rationalism places the objecs of diremption in an extreme degree of isolation from the total milieu; it produces conclusions giving an appearance of logic, reasonableness, and necessity, but which are at complete odds with other diremptions derived partly from the same milieu which seem equally logical, reasonable, and necessary. When diremptions have been "pushed far enough along the path of such antinomies, it is easy to forget the historical and economic roots from which they derive." When diremption becomes rationalized, it undergoes a process of reification; diremption becomes, in Sorel's words, "without an object," that is, it floats free and "comes into conditions that are irreconcilable with the nature of their formation";¹⁴ then we obtain distortions that are even further removed from reality than the original diremption. The insights and clarification derived from the original procedure have given way to sophistry, arbitrariness, and vagueness. In other words, by forgetting the historical and theoretical genesis of a diremption, a theorist makes the error or thinking that he can bring it back to social totality without causing further distortions. The reimmersion into the totality both results from, and in turn causes, an illusion of wholeness, a false consciousness of universality. Social diremption, like social philosophy itself, is a phenomenon that must be treated "diremptively."

Perhaps the best example of a misused diremption, in Sorel's view, is one that recurs throughout this work: the concept of economic man perfected by British political economy in the nineteenth century. For Sorel, the analytical utility of the concept of a calculating market bargainer is undeniable, but it is a great misuse of diremption to extend that concept to cover areas for which it was not intended. Nonetheless "subtle writers even worked to create a science which considered the relations of buyerseller, capitalist-employee, lender-debtor in a market that no government penetrated." Hence a useful symbolic device was transformed into a utopia governed by the "natural harmony of mutual interests." Such utopias are wholly misguided because the "petty concerns of homo economicas" in no way can represent the totality of social relations. The adherents of the utopia "did not seriously examine the legitimacy of the diremption."¹⁵

But at what point do we know that such a diremption has been abused? Sorel's method of diremption is a pragmatic, trial-and-error method that makes each diremption a hypothesis to be tested against social reality. In this testing process Sorel comes close to replicating in social theory the philosophy of science he had developed in the early 1890s. The analogies Sorel had observed between the practices of science and those of laboring not only inspired his theory of diremption, but also affected his thoroughly pragmatic revision of Marxism.

To Sorel, as to Vico and Marx, man's knowledge of the world is derived from the act of making or manufacturing—either in the realm of ideas or in man's interaction with nature. Similarly, construction of laboratory models, in Sorel's view, effects an isolation—a diremption—from the world in the very process of our getting to understand the world through changing it. On these grounds, Sorel argues that the milieux of the scientist and of the worker become increasingly similar as science and productivity become more intense; and the more intense they become, the more they separate themselves from the realm of nature. The laboratory is "a small workshop where instruments are used that are more precise than those in manufacturing, but there is no essential difference between the two types of establishments."¹⁶

In other writings, Sorel calls this separation or diremption from nature "artificial nature," which he juxtaposes to "natural nature" or nature in its undisturbed or "pure" state.¹⁷ The Insegnamenti does not contain specific discussion of these two natures, but the argument presumes this distinction as we shall see. Sorel argues that there is always plurality in these two realms in the industrial world. Thus the two natures represent a plural—hence pragmatic—view of understanding reality. On the one hand, the more a phenomenon is removed from nature, that is, the more nature is "artificial," the more precisely we can predict the results of our experiments. On the other hand, most natural nature, still immersed in the totality, remains comparatively vague. The physicist is thus dealing with a more "artificial" realm than the meteorologist. The result is a dilemma regarding the apprehension of totality: in natural nature the scope of our investigation is much wider, but the precision of our knowledge and the accuracy of our predictions is blurred, while in artificial nature, the scope of our understanding is more limited as our precision increases. Our knowledge of nature will thus never become total in the sense of an equally precise knowledge of all its parts. There is an uncertainty principle here which cannot be overcome. The unity of science and nature that had for Marx been alienated under capitalism, Sorel regarded as being shattered by the very process of manufacturing. Whereas Marx, and especially Engels, would overcome alienation through the establishment of an all-encompassing socialist laboratory-workshop and a unified science, Sorel insisted that, whatever the economic system, scientific and industrial production in the modern world cannot avoid being alienated from the rest of nature either through the actions of homo faber or through those of the laboratory scientist in the creation of experiments and controls. Knowledge of that nature cannot help but become alienated. Scientific knowledge is diremption, the analytic counterpart of artificial nature.

This alienated condition of modern industry is presented in another way by Sorel. The world of "artificial nature," the world in which nature is transformed through science and industry, is determined and predictable. But Sorel insists that this predictability and precision are insufficient to perpetuate a world of artificial nature. Left to itself, artificial nature reverts all too easily back to the world of natural nature. It "coasts" by sinking from the empirical world into the abstractions of rationalism. A perfectly predictable world is not sufficient to produce new science but invites stagnation in science as well as in society; it returns to the passive terrain of natural nature, because, in Bergson's terms, we become "enclosed in the circle of the given." Insofar as it is purely intellectual, "scientific knowledge presents itself as something alien to our person. . . . We attribute to it a dominant force on our will and we submit weakly to its tyranny."¹⁸ Thus scientific determinism is self-negating; it becomes an adversary to continued scientific research because it affirms the "powerlessness of our creative forces; we then have science only to the extent that we have the force to govern the world."¹⁹

To continue our practices in the realm of artificial nature, some motive force must make us "interfere" in nature; something must make us come to this nature, as it were, "from the outside"; intention must break this circle of determinism. This break comes only by bringing in a poetic dimension to the productive or scientific process. "Poetic fictions are stronger than scientific ones," Sorel says. They represent "the ability to substitute an imaginary world for scientific truths which we populate with plastic creations and which we perceive with much greater clarity than the material world. It is these idols that permeate our will and are the sisters of our soul."²⁰ The vision that inspires the syndicalist myth of the general strike, or assures the Marxist that his cause is certain to triumph, exists outside of science; it lives in the world of intuition, of instinct, of imagination, in a word, of creativity. It is these poetic visions that convince the inventor or producer of the moral certitude of his task. "If man loses something of his confidence in scientific certitude, he loses much of his moral certitude at the same time."²¹ It is not science that gives men certitude; it is moral certitude that gives man the inner strength to wage constant war against the passive terrain of natural nature. Artificial nature, once established, requires constant struggle merely to keep even with natural nature. Artificial nature, sustained by poetic myths, means a twofold battle against the material on which we work as well as our own "natural nature"—the tendency to relaxation, sloth, and leisure. Because they are the very embodiment of such a struggle, Sorel can assimilate science and labor and assert that their successes constitute a rough measure of the virtue of a given culture. Artificial nature represents the triumph of self-overcoming as well as the triumph over external nature; natural nature represents the failure of self-overcoming; it is the terrain of surrender to our own worst inclinations and passions; natural nature is the realm of unity while artificial nature destroys that unity.

We can now see more fully why Sorel's pragmatic break with Marx alters so radically the conclusions of humanist Marxists. By dint of the necessity for continued struggle with natural nature, neither laboring man nor scientific man will ever triumph fully, never bridge the gap between man and the world around him. "We will never be able completely to subject phenomena to mathematical laws. . . . Nature never ceases working with crafty slowness for the ruination of all our works. We buy the power of commanding artificial nature by incessant labor." This command does not come easily. Marx was mistaken insofar as he believed that a utopia of abundance and leisure would ever be achieved: "The more scientific our production becomes, the better we understand that our destiny is to labor without a truce and thus to annihilate the dreams of paradisiacal happiness that the old socialists had taken as legitimate anticipation."²²

Readers of the Insegnamenti will be struck by the importance the work ethic plays in Sorel's analysis of economic ideologies. Artificial nature, as the struggle against natural nature, means a world of production. In natural nature we are no longer in the realm of production and invention, but are instead in the realm of consumption and leisure. Sorel's judgments about the "success" of a given civilization are based on this overcoming process sustained by work, and the same criteria are applied to the economic ideologies which emerge from these civilizations. In the Insegnamenti Sorel favors Marxism when it represents the struggle of the laborer or scientist, the triumph of animal laborans and the overcoming of Feuerbachian naturalism; he scorns Marxism when it becomes ossified into the platforms of "official" political parties which promise that a "land of milk and honey" will be delivered on the silver platter of progress.

Sorel can be for liberalism when it embodies these same "Protestant" virtues of enterprise, productivity, and the conquest of new frontiers. He scorns liberalism when it becomes "democratic," that is, when "petty philosophers devoured by ambition to become great men" transform the productive aspects of liberalism into rationalist utopias in which parasitic politicians and financiers devour the natural wealth through usury and the chicanery of legislative logrolling. In the Insegnamenti Sorel evaluates socialism and liberal capitalism in this manner. Each of the two views has its dynamic side in which it represents a partial ricorso; each has fallen into decay. The twofold nature of these ideologies constitutes the theme of this book whose contents we shall now analyze in detail.

Sorel divides the Insegnamenti into four parts (an introduction and three parts). While many themes in each part overlap with those in other sections, the attentive reader can discern a basic theme in each part as well as a general theme for the whole book. The introductory segment announces the overall theme of the work, and it is interesting to note that a book on economic doctrine should have an especially political thesis. The Insegnamenti is, first and foremost, an attack on the time-honored notion of community solidarity whose Platonic and Aristotelian versions are expressed in the formulations of natural sociability and social obligation and which found its most enduring historical example in the church, "the most perfect example" of a completely duty-bound society "whose mission is to preach to the ruling classes their obligations toward the poor."²³

Sorel stresses the great similarities found in the justifications for social unity in both the old and new political theories. Despite vast differences among various theories of sociability, the classical political theories resemble the modern Fourierian and Saint-Simonian utopias as well as Kantian ideas in regard to the permanence of the laws of nature. In much the same way as Plato attempted to apply to society the Greek philosophy of science—a science based on the need to rationalize everything by replacing the changing phenomenal world with the immutable laws of mathematics—so the nineteenth-century Utopian socialists attempted to eliminate chance from human affairs. In Sorel's view, Kant too based his theories of social duty on the absolute harmony between the exigencies of reason and the methods of Newtonian physics. The Fourierian and positivist utopias were constructed in the same way as were philosophical explanations of matter. Fourier even aspired to the planetary regularity of Laplacean astronomy.²⁴

The failure to recognize the difference between physical and social science, and more importantly, between natural and artificial nature within the physical sciences, meant, in Sorel's view, that naturalistic social theories would establish a social unity that would correspond to the one that supposedly existed in the physical world. Despite the great differences between physical and social sciences, Sorel regarded theories of social unity and community as corresponding to "natural nature" in the physical world.

For Sorel, this meant that Utopian socialism was little different from the other social theories used to justify decadent societies. Most political and ethical theories, as Sorel later made clear, "take as their starting point . . . books written for declining societies; when Aristotle wrote the Nichomachean Ethics, Greece had already lost her own reasons for morality." The moral principles set forth in this work and in classical political philosophy, generally reflected "the habits which a young Greek had to take up by frequenting cultivated society. Here we are in the realm of consumer morality. . . . War and production had ceased to concern the most distinguished people in the towns."²⁵

What is true for classical political philosophy, in Sorel's view, is even more true in the modern setting. Despite their pretensions to philosophical precision and abstraction, modern ethical and political utopias are characterized by the ease with which their Utopian elements are carried over into programs for improving the existing order. The Saint-Simonian ideas on administration corresponded to the Napoleonic ideas of bureaucracy and social hierarchy; duty is expressed in the Prussian land law of 1794. Ninety years later, Bismarck proclaimed to the Reichstag that he intended to imbue his social legislation with the principles found in that law and stated that "it is a state concern to care for the maintenance of the citizenry who are unable to procure those same means of subsistence."²⁶ To Sorel, such proposals, and similar ones contained in socialist programs, demonstrated an almost uncanny continuity between the ancient and medieval philosophies of charity and social duty and the modern notions of welfare and economic right; between the paternalism of the lord of the manor who justified his social position on the basis of "natural law" and the dirigisme of the modern welfare state bureaucrat who justifies his power on the "right" of citizens to subsistence. The modern social welfare state, whose development Sorel foresees in this work, will be, in his view, deeply reactionary.

Not only is there a certain continuity in social policy in the old and new regimes as well as in the declining cities of antiquity, but the elite of the old regime shares many characteristics with those of the new ruling classes. Not only is the authoritarianism of the old court bureaucrats reproduced in the new society, but both elites are in decline, separated from war and productivity and become fundamentally urban in both their social attraction to the beau monde of salons or wealthy artistic patrons and in the consumer habits fostered by the urban environment.

Sorel concludes the introduction with a fascinating discussion of the effects of urbanism on moral decadence—its resistance to productivity in virtually all branches of industry save those devoted to luxury items consumed by tourists and courtesans.

The extraordinary pessimism shown by Sorel regarding moral theories and utopias does, not extend to all philosophers and theories. In part I of the Insegnamenti Sorel deals with the economic, social, and psychological conditions which give rise to social theories which avoid the decadent quality of the ancient viewpoints. Since decadent theories embodied the spirit and the letter of social solidarity, Sorel argues that theories take on dynamic qualities when they partake of what he variously calls the "spirit of separation" or "the organization of revolt," clearly manifested in the Marxian view of the class struggle and in revolutionary syndicalism.²⁷ Here we find Sorel arguing that socialist ideas, like those of liberalism, have achieved their highest degree of vitality when they have attained the highest degree of independence from the notion of social totality; that is, when they have attained their most refined diremption. At this point a theory's explanatory power is most complete.

Sorel regarded ideas as being far more important than the epiphenomena depicted by vulgar Marxists. As he states it in the first chapter of this section, ideas rely more on antecedent theoretical formations, historical knowledge, and (especially) memories of past conflicts than on economic phenomena. Thus the socialist idea cannot be explained by economic factors alone because "the attitudes that man takes in the presence of reality are highly variable according to circumstances."²⁸

From Vico, Sorel derived the idea of the importance of the psychological aspects of social movements. Vico suggested that memories of past struggles were expressed in "psychological concatenations" which members of a society experienced in the passage from one regime to another.²⁹ The difficulty with these notions, which Sorel saw very early in his writing career, was that Vico's concept of psychological upheaval did not always square with another notion Sorel derived from Vico, the idea that "man knows what he makes," which found its way into the Marxian theory of knowledge and, in a somewhat different form, into Sorel's theory of artificial nature. In Sorel's thought psychological upheavals were connected more directly than in Marxism to moral upheavals. There was in Sorel an autonomy of moral thought absent from conventional Marxism. How was Sorel to picture a psychological state without reverting to the very intellectualism he had condemned in rationalist utopias?

Sorel found a solution to this dilemma in an interpretation of these psychological states as "myths" which he depicts as states of mind roughly analogous to those accompanying religious conversion. Myths are highly subjective, and thus inevitably partial rather than societal. Thus in anticipating, subjectively, a total moral catastrophe, as for example in the Christian vision of the second coming of Christ, the very totality of the vision forced its adherents to isolate themselves from the larger society. The more total the vision, the higher the degree of psychological upheaval, and the more partial, the more isolated was the movement carried on in its name. For Sorel, psychological concatenations or myths are self-limiting and as such they inevitably produce only partial ricorsi. In a word, myths "dirempted" themselves from the totality.

Added to the paradox of a total vision becoming selflimiting was the notion that the more self-limiting the social boundaries of the new movement whose members had experienced psychological upheavals, the more effective their teaching became. What started as a total vision of catastrophe ended in transforming the world precisely by dint of the isolation the visionaries had imposed on themselves. Sorel responded to the difficulty of severing psychological upheavals from the productive process by separating mythical and scientific thought. Sorel does this largely by accepting what William James was later to call a distinction between the religious and the philosophical points of view. Religious or mythical points of view see the world subjectively, or, as Sorel expresses it here, they are like "optical devices turned around before our eyes and which mute the relative value of things." They obscure objectivity and are thus the opposite of scientific thought.

But to argue for the separation, for analytical purposes, of mythical from scientific thought is not to say that there are no relations between the mythical and scientific realms—especially if the science in question is economics. The relationship between mythical and economic thought is one of the most interesting questions that arises in the course of reading Sorel's works. The most explicit treatment of this relationship is in Reflections on Violence, where Sorel treats the myth of the general strike in syndicalist theory. This myth allows the subject to anticipate the future in which he feels certain his cause is to triumph. The subject does this without recourse to the historical "dialectics" of Marxian "science"—a rationalistic diremption having lost sight of its own limits and presuppositions.

Yet the myth too is a diremption because it is severed from its scientific offspring. It performs in economic life what the poetic spirit of invention performs in scientific life. It allows us to break out of the circle of the given. The myth of the general strike reinforces the feelings of heroic struggle against the enemies of the working class and the forces of natural nature. Even if there is nothing intrinsically scientific in the images of conflict engendered by the myth, the myth still has a scientific function in that such a struggle is a spur to creativity and hence to productivity. The myth is not an economic product; it is not as much acted upon by the economy as it acts upon the economy. It performs a role analogous to that which Sorel, in the present volume, assigns to heroic Norse and Homeric tales of historic legends of searches for lost treasure. These legends and tales produced a sort of intoxication in the minds of Medieval German metallurgists; they thereby encouraged the industry which was so important to the prosperity and independence of the old German cities.³⁰

Sorel only touches on the role of his theory of myth in the Insegnamenti, but he does provide helpful explanatory analogies to his conception of myth in his discussions of religion. He suggests that the development of mythical or religious thought can be viewed over time in the form of a bell-shaped curve in which the peak of vitality in the history of a religious belief is found at the mid-point between, on the one hand, an utterly primitive superstition which takes the form of magic, the pseudoscience which attempts to "explain" spiritual and physical totality, and on the other hand, a highly sophisticated liberal religion such as Enlightenment pantheism or Renan's relaxed Christianity, which attempted to justify itself on the terrain of the sciences by giving "rational" explanations of Biblical miracles.

In both extremes we find doctrine enmeshed in the totality of nature—in a sort of theological natural nature. The mythical or heroic period of religion, its highest point of vitality, is the point at which mystical or mythical components predominate over pantheistic naturalistic or pseudoscientific magical aspects. Exponents of this heroic religion are neither unitarians, pantheists, nor witch doctors. Nourished by holy legends and great efforts of resistance, the mystic insists on an "absolute cleavage"³¹ between his own beliefs and those of others. At this point, at which "science" has been rejected, religion, ironically, most closely approximates the diremptive efforts of the laboratory scientist or the inventor. Religion comes closest to science when it has most firmly excluded science from its realm, just as science attains its most dynamic point when it excludes religion, theology, and holistic philosophy from its realm. At this point religion (like science) attains its greatest meaning for its professors, its highest explanatory power for the believer, in no small part because of its centrality in the life of the believer who must devote much effort to preserving the integrity of the faith by severing it from other ideas.³²

In Sorel's view, like mystical religion, myth is separated from social totality and, like religion, solidifies certain ties with the world in the very process of reaffirming itself. In the case of certain religions and certain myths, these ties are with the economic world. The Nordic myths that were so important to the German miners' search for treasure have a counterpart in the faith of the early Protestant sectarians in England and America, whose beliefs strongly encouraged economic virtues even though there was no overt economic dogma in the early stages of the development of these beliefs.³³ Belief intersects with the material world at the point of economic productivity, and its vitality is measured in terms of its economic efficacy. (This is one of the themes of Sorel's La ruine du monde antique.)³⁴

Sorel makes approximately the same claims for economic beliefs, only in reverse. Just as religion takes on a peculiarly decadent quality when it attempts to ape scientific thinking and explain everything rationally, economic doctrine becomes moribund when it takes on the allure of a general belief system—when its diremptions have lost their empirical (hence limited) moorings and float free in a rationalistic totality. The particular example of the decay of economic dogma Sorel gives us in this section is the development of the labor theory of value and its particular Marxian applications. Sorel suggests that the labor theory of value had a useful application in early British political economy inspired by observations made in the operations of the British cotton industry. Soon this idea became transformed into a total system and deductions were made from these early observations in much the same way "as ancient physics was derived from the heavens."³⁵ In Marx's hands, labor is treated as a universal entity which is fairly nearly the same in all times, places, and circumstances. For instance, Marx said that there was little difference between skilled and unskilled labor and that any differences among workers were largely a matter of quantitative determination. To Sorel this universality was unfortunate. By assuming that all industries are equivalent and all workers reduced to a uniform type, the labor theory of value leads us to a homogeneous capitalism in which identical values of labor are exchanged. The result is that labor, which should be the basis of productive virtues, is now reduced to the process of exchange of equivalent values.³⁶ In Sorel's view, as long as socialism remains beguiled by this circular theory of value exchange, it will never be revolutionary. Instead, Marxism has remained steadfast to what is essentially a bourgeois law of Ricardo; it has merely replaced the fetishism of commodities with that of labor. "Isn't it odd," asks Sorel, "that socialism comes to regularize the order that, according to Marx, would be stabilized spontaneously and in large part in the manner of capitalist production?"³⁷

What is worse, in Sorel's eyes, is that if such movements of the economy can be reduced to such simplistic calculations, Marxists are thereby encouraged to calculate other social movements through the same reductions. Marx and Engels "believed that they could (like the physicist) uncover laws as inevitable as that of gravitation."³⁸ As Marx himself puts it in Capital, "capitalistic production begets its own negation with the inevitability that presides over the metamorphosis of nature."³⁹ Such "scientific" predictions, if taken literally, lead to the Utopian expectations of the social democrats who expect the progress of history to deliver the revolution to them. Such expectations not only discourage socialist action, but the vitality of the socialist movement becomes sapped, and the productive virtues which stem from the psychological tension that arises in the course of socialist action are replaced by a rationalistic pseudosocialist science of nature, a social "natural nature."

Elsewhere,⁴⁰ Sorel gives a perfect example of the scholasticism of the Marxian theory of value. If labor value can be calculated with certainty, the corollary theory of surplus value wherein the proprietor "steals" labor time from the worker can also be calculated precisely. By the abolition of capitalism, the precise and just compensation for the worker can supposedly be deduced. Authoritarian laws will be passed legislating the "just price" of labor in a harkening back to medieval concepts. Such concepts only lead to idyllic welfare utopias of a socialist land of milk and honey, of a consumers' paradise. In any case, they are not revolutionary, but based on a "medieval nostalgia," of which Marx was guilty at times in Sorel's view.⁴¹ Such a nostalgia was part of the basis of Sorel's critique of the French and German social democratic parties whose scholasticism was in harmony with the current order because of their emphasis on consumption rather than production. The bell-shaped curve which Sorel observed in religious thought has now been replicated in the economic "science" of socialism. The more Marxism emphasizes the importance of the labor theory of value and like formulas, the more similar it becomes to the primitive socialism it professes to criticize. Holistic religious magic, which found its parallel in Fourier's magical visions, has now come full circle to the universalistic science of the human economy.

The question remains as to what is left in the labor theory of value that has a valid place in economic explanation. Is it possible to make a diremption from the labor theory which rejuvenates its scientific vitality and in which it intersects with the heroic myths? Sorel analyzes the positive aspects of the theory of the labor contract which "abolishes all bonds between the employer and the employee: after the presentation of his labor merchandise . . . the worker is in the same position vis-àvis the master as a grocer is in regard to the customer who comes to buy coffee."⁴² A strictly business relationship abolishes all social solidarity; employer and employee are mere buyers and sellers. Objectively, they can pursue entirely opposite political goals and organize for the struggle against one another, and this is all to the good in Sorel's view.

What is interesting about this diremption is that it relies on legal as well as economic thought. Such a market arrangement can come about only when it is accompanied by a transformation in legal arrangements. At this point Sorel sees economic theory dovetailing with "outside" (or mythical) influences that give a theory the same vitality that "outside" (poetic) inspiration gives the process of science. Sorel concludes the first part of this book by stating that the only things the proletarians can know are "the principles of juridical rules that the victorious class will impose on society after its victory."⁴³ In such considerations, Marxism makes an economico-juridical diremption: "It knows only the worker and takes him as he has been conditioned by the historical conditions of capitalism."⁴⁴ This is the least metaphysical and most scientific aspect of labor theory.

But by itself, this theory is no more able to produce working-class action than scientific theory can of itself generate further scientific advancement. Neither the spirit of class struggle nor the struggle against nature can be derived solely from science because, in themselves, neither of these struggles is purley scientific. Both must be inspired by a poetry. Socialism, as the organization of revolt, must be guided by a myth which "expresses with perfect clarity the principle of the separation of classes, a principle which is the whole of socialism."⁴⁵ Sorel's readers, as we have noted, were to await an elaboration of the content of the myth in Reflections on Violence. In the Insegnamenti Sorel is content to argue that both mythical and economic (as well as scientific) thought become most efficacious when they embody the spirit of separation. Myth and science—especially economic science—are inverse bell-curves of each other and achieve their highest dynamism when their peaks intersect.

But how, we might ask, can Sorel criticize the labor theory of value for its conservative implications at the hands of orthodox Marxism, when his own theory of the labor contract is quintessentially bourgeois, a bedrock of economic liberalism? It would appear that, in Sorel's eyes, liberalism and socialism have a good deal in common, and it is precisely this issue that is addressed in the second part of the Insegnamenti.

In Part II, Sorel deals with the parallels between socialism and liberal capitalsim, pointing out that they have as much in common as they have differences, and that it is this very commonality which, ironically, sustains their separation from each other, both morally and intellectually when expressed in their dynamic forms. But commonality is also found in the degenerative forms of the two ideologies.

This section starts off with a comparison of two types of degenerative social thought, socialist utopias—especially Fourier's—and "bourgeois" democratic theories—Rousseau's in particular. Sorel maintains that there are strong resemblances between these two categories of thought which, if taken in certain ways, have particularly onerous social consequences. In Sorel's view, both sets of theories rely heavily on the notion of mathematical averages which, sometimes against the will of the inventors of these theories, bolsters state authoritarianism and arbitrary power. This authoritarianism in turn runs contrary to the productive virtues.

Sorel takes the thought of Charles Fourier as his archetypal Utopian socialist. Fourier, relying on probability theory, allows passions and instincts free rein, regulating his Utopian communities (or phalanxes) in such a way "as to obtain average results which translate precisely into natural laws. . . . A result will be obtained that will become independent of circumstances, and the entire society will have only to reproduce what was once produced on a small scale."⁴⁶ The uniformity of the world arises from "passional equilibriums" roughly analogous to those produced in free market theory.

In Sorel's opinion, Rousseau too was convinced by the importance of mathematical averages, which gave his theory of the general will a market orientation. In Rousseau the fatality of market relationships is transposed into the assembly in which the average opinion represents truth. Generalizing on the model of the almost completely mobile Swiss craftsman who, without roots, is able to move from job to job, Rousseau idealized homo economicus in such a way that "social atoms" would be obtained. The result would be a democratic government in which citizens, having had "no communication among themselves, the general will shall always result from the greater number of little differences, and their deliberations will always be good." Here, in Sorel's words, "the assembly produces reason as a prairie produces hay."⁴⁷

In the case of both Fourier and Rousseau, we have instances of a breakdown of diremptions whose historicoempirical origins have been obscured. As a consequence of this obscuring process, economic theories (diremptions) are inappropriately applied to political phenomena. The result is that what starts out as a random multiplicity of wills and passions terminates in a passion for unity that can only be satisfied by state authoritarianism.⁴⁸ In Fourier we find a false analogy between passions and commodities. Fourier has blotted out the fact that his notion of mathematical averaging has its origins in the market, and has thus taken his passional equilibriums as an absolute mathematical truth. More importantly, he has ignored the fact that the inspiration for his own laxist moral system is found in the loose morality of the Napoleonic era and translates politically into the Napoleonic desire for a universal monarchy.

In Rousseau's case we find a political doctrine which cannot be directly translated from economic theory without grave dislocations. Assemblies are not markets; they possess political powers. The mathematical averages of the general will are not used by Rousseau as justifications for free, individual market choices, but rather for the suppression of the particular will by the city. Sorel argues that no general will is possible. In his view, no assembly can live up to Rousseau's maxim that, in expressing the general will, members of the assembly can have no communication among themselves. Rousseau has forgotten that the market orientation of homo economicus demands bargaining, and this form of communication is lacking in his ideal assembly. Bargaining on votes would result in the will of all, i.e., the sum of particular wills, and not the general will.

Sorel goes further than merely rejecting Rousseau's democratic theory, for he thinks that even if we reject the adequacy of Rousseau's argument and admit bargaining into the legislative process, in the manner of the Federalist or of American liberal pluralist theories, the transposition of market theory to the legislature fails. Not only do "pure" markets ignore legislation, but legislators all too readily ignore market conditions when power is connected to their own interests. Bargaining in assemblies means logrolling and influence peddling; tariff legislation and other restrictions come all too readily into being; the "free market" of legislative bargaining is thus a self-negating process. In Sorel's view, most legislators regard the prosperity of a group as depending on compromises with other groups to obtain a parliamentary majority. But when this majority is obtained, it can ruin any group which stands in its way and "annihilate a cumbersome competitor who is too weak to make the hungry wolves in parliament listen to reason."⁴⁹ Such a result, Sorel realized, was utterly contrary to Rousseau's idea, especially if it takes place in the representative assemblies that Rousseau scorned. Sorel's critique of legislative bargaining as an activity in which "both the revolutionary and the juridical spirit are extinguished at the same time" is covertly imitative of Rousseau. In any case, Sorel's critique of Rousseau and Fourier ranges far beyond the two thinkers and extends implicitly to a critique of Madison and of most liberal and democratic theory.

It would be a mistake to assume that Sorel is content with a criticism of the decadent moments of liberal democratic and socialist theories. Perhaps the most interesting aspects of part II consist in the parallels he draws between the two theories in their moments of greatest vitality. Here Sorel presents the dynamic aspects of socialism and liberalism not only as mirror images of their decadent counterparts, but as having strong similarities with each other.

The first similarity between the two schools is that they both attain their highest and most powerful moment when they do not extend their economic theories beyond their proper limits, that is, when their diremptions maintain their historical functions. Liberal theory was at its most triumphant stage when the idea of the free market was limited to the market and did not extend to analogies found in the political realm. "Commerce became quite powerful and capable when, and only when, nobody could see any longer what interest the state had in intervening to control it."⁵⁰ The idea of unity that had so transfixed Rousseau was now replaced by a division between economics and what Sorel scornfully called the magical power of the state. The state's old function as the great protector of industry was abandoned.⁵¹

Sorel interprets Marxism as possessing a general antistatist view similar to that of liberal, laissez-faire capitalism (or Manchesterism). This antistatist component of Marxism makes it, in contradistinction to socialist utopianism, the most virile socialist theory. In support of this view, Sorel points to Engels's assertion of the ultimate powerlessness of the state in the face of economic forces. If the state attempted to resist autonomous economic forces, in Engels's view, it would be destroyed; the state could only accelerate or retard development. Sorel was aware that Marx and Engels were not anarchists. But he insists that the idea of economic fatality was a far more important element in Marx's theory than was state action. For both Marxism and Manchesterism, "the combination of many events produces fatality of movement." Under such conditions, "it is possible to assign any cause to the same fact, and it is really a chance phenomenon; instead, the totality is so well determined that if anybody pretended to oppose the movement he would invariably be defeated."⁵² In sum, the power of the economic theories of both capitalism and socialism lay in self-foreclosing their extension beyond economics, a self-imposed diremption.

A major consequence of the idea of economic inevitability in both capitalism and socialism is that both liberal capitalism and Marxism possess a view of historical development that foresees great sacrifice from their respective client classes. This sacrifice requires an ethic of struggle which is highly productive in the long run. Regarding liberal capitalism, Sorel argues that proprietors of most establishments had to change machinery or even abandon old enterprises altogether. Laissez-faire economics had the effect of imposing large fines on recalcitrant industries. Timidity was punished; boldness and innovation in the wrong direction could be equally disastrous. In regard to socialism, Marxist thought excuses the cruelest oppression in both past and present societies: slavery exploitation and despotism are necessary historical prerequisites to the development of capital, and capitalism is progressive.

The philosophy of struggle in both capitalism and Marxism is coupled with the view that events will develop "progressively." Free traders believe that their system will have the effect of satisfying every interest as products improve and prices become more reasonable. Similarly, for Marxists, the belief that the degradation of the working class under capitalism lays the ground for its future elevation is, Sorel argues, virtually identical to Manchesterism. To be sure, "the theoreticians of capitalism do not justify their judgments on the basis of the emancipation of the future proletariat, but this is the only difference."⁵³ In every other way, both theories are optimistic; both are certain that their cause will triumph. In Sorel's eyes, when this progressivism strayed from the economic realm into politics and other areas, this "certainty" degenerated into the "illusions of progress." But in its proper diremption, such a certainty has powerful psychological effects for economic practitioners—whether they be capitalists or socialists in their workshops.

Finally, both Marxism and Manchesterism regard political and historical developments as being "only a series of developments in the form of labor."⁵⁴ We have already mentioned that the idea of the labor contract is a juridical device accepted by both schools. Here we need only note Sorel's stress on the freedom the worker gains under such a system, in which the worker who has no ties to the master once his work has been performed thereby gains free labor time; conversely, the capitalist master is absolved of any paternalistic social duties to fulfill. Here we have the "perfect separation of classes through the encouragement of free labor time."

True to his own philosophy of science, Sorel insists that the self-limitation of diremption requires more than institutions, more than social "laboratory controls." For workers or capitalists to continue to rely only on the market without demanding state assistance requires extraordinary virtues not normally found among subject populations. Without the right character in the population, the free and fatalistic institutions of liberal capitalism as well as the factories run by free labor are doomed to failure.

Sorel is also aware that there are certain historical preconditions for the operation of these institutions. Free labor and free capital have, by virtue of their diremptive status, distorted the historical totality from which they have emerged. Certainly the development of the working classes is not produced as automatically as Marx believed it would; conversely, capitalist free markets and the advent of prosperity might coincide only accidently. Sorel maintains that government may play a more positive role in the development of the economy than allowed for by the Manchester school or even by Marxists. The presence of social legislation and government interference reveals the highly selective evidence cited by adherents of market fatality in support of their objections to government intervention. Just as liberal capitalism can have good and bad consequences depending on the uses to which it is put and the discipline to which its adherents subject themselves, so government interference in the economy has varying moral consequences according to its applications.

Sorel judges government intervention pragmatically, using the criteria of its effect on character and on the historical conditions under which the character develops. The historical possibilities of virtue constitute the main litmus test for the acceptability of government intervention in the economy, and to demonstrate this point Sorel takes two examples for discussion: tariffs and government legislation restricting the hours of labor (promotion of free labor time). In Sorel's view, protective tariffs can have various effects on a people, depending on their character. There are two types of protectionism: one is suitable for strong peoples, like Americans, who are growing in population and in wealth; the other is suitable for disheartened and lazy peoples with a stable population.

Sorel's other example is legislation that promotes free labor time so that the workers may develop their own autonomous institutions. It still leaves to the capitalists "the burden and profit of directing production for their own self-interest under certain legal conditions; let them leave socialism free to act on the working class, to educate it, and don't presume to 'civilize' it in the bourgeois way!"⁵⁵ On the other hand, Sorel observes that English workers use this free time in consumer and leisure activities, especially in sports and betting. Only a small and virile minority of English entrepreneurs has resisted the trend toward "laziness." This trend has increasingly gained sway among the British masses who, dominated by the desire for rest, "lack the power to think in a virile way."⁵⁶

In both examples Sorel bases his evaluation of a people's character on the degree to which they are still willing to undertake struggles against nature and also against other classes, irrespective of the degree of government intervention in the economy. In the concluding portions of this section, Sorel renews his assertions that the index of that willingness is reflected in the degree to which a social group exhibits hostility toward the notion of social solidarity. There is a species of "symbiosis" among the three factors of social vitality, class antagonism, and productivity. As Sorel states it, "everything capitalism does to urge the workers on is a gain for socialism, whatever the opinions of ethical theorists or of the politicians always ready to encourage sloth."⁵⁷ Revolutionary socialism cannot have as its purpose the moderation of the progress of capitalism. Further on Sorel quotes Marx as saying: "The evolution of the conditions of existence for a large, strong, concentrated and intelligent class of proletarians comes about at the same rate as the development of the conditions of existence of a middle class correspondingly numerous, rich, concentrated and powerful."⁵⁸ In this quote from Marx, Sorel implies that the idea of increasing misery and especially the idea of the ever-diminishing productivity of capitalism contradicts Marx's suggestion that "there are never sufficient productive forces and .. . the capitalist class is never rich or powerful enough."⁵⁹

We are left with the question of how these two opposing classes organize for the struggle. In Reflections on Violence Sorel deals with the organization of the working classes, but in the present work he concentrates on the organization of the capitalist class rather than on labor unions, for one obvious and urgent reason: "Capitalists have organized themselves in a methodical way; many people, moreover, estimate that the organization of the capitalists is progressing much more quickly than the organization of workers."⁶⁰ One type of organization in particular reflects this organizational superiority above all others: the cartel.

In the third and concluding section of the Insegnamenti, entitled "Cartels and Their Ideological Consequences," Sorel raises the same questions about cartels that he had raised about liberalism and socialism. While the first section of the work is devoted to the morally degenerative and regenerative side of socialism, and the second section concentrates on the similarities between socialism and liberalism in their various stages of moral development, the final part focuses on the regenerative and degenerative sides of capitalism and its corresponding ideologies and organizations, especially cartels.

In Sorel's view the cartel typifies a degenerative aspect of capitalist organization which finds a counterpart in the corruption of liberal political institutions. We will recall that in previous sections Sorel had criticized the liberal theory of legislative bargaining. In his view, capitalism, both in its corrupt beginnings and in its degenerative mature stages, is different from virile laissez-faire capitalism. Capitalism has its beginnings in a flaccid, feudal-style "collective seigneury" and it comes round full circle to conclude with an intimacy between cartels and state action. In both extremes of the continuum the power of government is harnessed to crush competitors. In both cases the virtues of laissez-faire capitalism, especially as represented in American and even German business, are being extinguished.

Sorel begins this section by discussing the institutions of the ancien régime, whose seigneuries resemble modern cartels in that both have had a species of eminent domain over the economic powers of their subjects, and this domain includes police and taxing powers. Both domains choose representatives to establish internal rules and defend their interests against outside forces. Just as the ancien régime's various estates were in large part cartels which deliberated and bargained on financial interests, so the cartels of modern times resolve their difficulties by sending delegates to mixed commissions, often including representatives of workers' organizations.

On the basis of this comparison between cartels and the ancien régime, Sorel comes out squarely against what we would call "functional representation." This feudalism, replicated in the industrial world, would entail the establishment of "little states": one for coal mines, one for mills, and so forth.⁶¹ In previous sections Sorel objected to extending the diremption of homo economicus to the political arena. Now he reverses the argument: any extension of political analogies to the industrial regime will only succeed in corrupting both areas. Thus any form of what would later be called "corporativism" is utterly alien to Sorel's viewpoint—whether in the form of guild socialism, codetermination, or fascism. All these notions seem to share one familiar trait. They resemble modern democratic parliaments which are "not so much political bodies that legislate to realize a national ideal as they are medieval-style diets in which one undertakes diplomatic discussions among plenipotentiaries and which come to establish compromises among various interests."⁶² In parliaments, corporate societies, and cartels we find the same blurring of economics and politics which Sorel had described as endemic to representative bodies where logrolling leads to systematic annihilation of uncooperative competitors. In both cases a protectionism is solidified which transforms the state into a "benefactor of all those with no confidence in their personal strength." This system has the effect of producing renewed tendencies toward "social peace, moderation of desires, and respect for weakness" which ultimately regard consensus as the highest social duty.⁶³

The emphasis on the need for consensus and for bargaining in parliamentary bodies brings Sorel to an interesting comparison between cartels and political parties. In Sorel's view cartels and political parties are not only functionally dependent on consensus and solidarity, but are invariably based on systems of representation with a hierarchical structure. Here the "admiration of the electors for the elected" arises from a superstitious veneration for the representative. The representative, in turn, legitimizes his position by virtue of his increased familiarity with the "official world." This veneration is a buttress for the ideal of community solidarity.

Not only does Sorel replicate Rousseau's antagonism to representation here, but he anticipates what Roberto Michels would later call "the iron law of oligarchy," which states that even professedly democratic organizations produce leadership cadres that are self-perpetuating and nonresponsible to their constituents.⁶⁴ Like Michels, Sorel argues that both cartels and parties coopt the potential leaders of workers' movements. For Sorel these leaders were potential forces for social tension, and the "negation" necessary for social vitality. Once this vitality is sapped by cooptation, according to Sorel, social life degenerates into what Herbert Marcuse would later call "one dimensionality."⁶⁵

Worse still, oligarchic corporativism discourages men of real talent and replaces them with men who possess "political skills." This perverse value system helps to undermine the ideal of production, which gives way to the consumers' ideal of just distribution. Hand in hand with the idea of just distribution is the erroneous notion that the spare time resulting from decreased labor time should be spent in politics. "There is no popular instinct more powerful than that which pushes man into laziness: democracy especially regards man as obliged to occupy his time in politics and has never understood the law of labor."⁶⁶

Implicitly, Sorel appears to be endorsing Aristotle's idea of the best possible democratic regime in which the best material for citizenship is found in the agricultural population. "Being poor, citizens have no leisure and therefore do not attend the assembly, and, not having the necessities of life, they are always at work and do not covet the property of others. Indeed they find their employment pleasanter than the cares of government or office."⁶⁷ According to Sorel, the opposite view of citizenship prevails in modern democracies, where the triumph of Kantian ideals is complete and men are no longer seen as means (of production or anything else). Instead we have an "ideology of supreme ends."⁶⁸

Sorel's strong indictment of cartels and corporativism is qualified in much the same way as was his condemnation of protectionism and social legislation in the previous section. With cartels, as with protectionism and social laws, one must take account of the character of the people with whom we are dealing. The spirit of enterprise found in the practices of the great American financiers who organized American trusts has a completely different character from the European outlook. The German cartel is not like the American trust because, unlike the German cartel, the trust is "the result of a life and death struggle."⁶⁹ In America, unlike modern Germany, "we are in the presence of a population that has preserved to the highest degree the rural, combative, and dominant characteristics which gave them a certain resemblance to feudal knights."⁷⁰ As Sorel noted elsewhere, this feudal warrior type "was pushed to its extreme in the American cowboy . . . admirable in the face of danger, insouciant, intemperate, improvident, and animated with the spirit of liberty."⁷¹ This independent spirit made Americans "the most daring people in existence," who defend their intellectual, moral, and civic independence as surely as they defend their property. Behind the facade of democratic political institutions in America there is an aristocracy, not of birth, but of ability and energy, personified in Carnegie and Roosevelt, warrior types who look upon life as a struggle instead of a pleasure. Here is an "aristocracy of power," not the European "aristocracy of weakness."⁷² The character of this aristocracy means in practical terms that even the most "reactionary" and unproductive form of capitalism, usury capitalism, has a unique character when practiced by the great American financiers whose spirit of enterprise is so strong. Sorel does not praise the trusts; he is simply stating that the historical conditions in America are such that trusts do not become a serious impediment to productivity.

The American spirit of enterprise has allowed the trusts to operate independently of the state. The few connections the trusts do have with political forces in the United States are of little consequence because American politicians "are universally regarded as rascals but have the ability not to interfere too much with the progress of business."⁷³ Economic and political power have sustained a separation in the United States, and this division between economic and political life makes the American economy the most dynamic and vital force in the otherwise decaying, bourgeois world. As Sorel stated in the previous section, this divorce of politics and economics is the greatest contribution of liberal thought. He has "dirempted" the positive aspects of liberalism which emphasize divided or checked power from those involving representative democracy.

The separation of politics from economics also means that liberalism can implicitly sustain a distinction between corruption and decadence.⁷⁴ Degeneration signifies the laxity of an entire culture—or a good part of it—while corruption can be confined to a small group of politicians and even, in the American case, function as a device to prevent degeneration of the larger society: corrupt politicians in America limit the extent to which the state can effectively intervene in the larger economy. In this case, the self-restraint of the state does not become a virtue; Sorel has reversed the argument of classical liberalism. Rather than private vices becoming public virtues—the standard moral justification for the free market—in Sorel's view public vices now enhance private virtues.

For Sorel the American experience also helps to confound traditional Marxian theory. The latter distinguishes three types of capitalism: primitive usury, commercial capitalism, and industrial capitalism. While accepting this typology as useful, Sorel points out that they do not succeed one another in serial fashion as some Marxists have argued. He insists that in most modern times there has been a mixture of the three. As his example, Sorel cites American trusts which, despite the advanced nature of the American economy, closely resemble usury capitalism. On the other hand, German cartels are largely marketing agreements and therefore resemble commercial capitalism.

One further element of Sorel's critique of cartels deserves mention. The social democrats of his day often cited cartels as an advanced form of capitalism because they were close in form and substance to state socialism and therefore constituted, in their eyes, a sort of final stage of the capitalist era. In Sorel's view no such interpretation is justified. Here Sorel appears to have reversed the social democratic argument. Rather than linking cartels and the state as forward-looking and progressive, he regards them as backward and unproductive. Once again the union of economics and politics, between state authority and production, can only result in the decadence of both capitalism and socialism. In misconstruing the role of the state, socialism decays, and "the degradation of socialism is everywhere accompanied by moral decadence, at least in our democratic countries."

What is the proper role of the state? There is some irony in Sorel's rejection of politics as an activity. In his complete embrace of animal laborans, it would appear that Sorel is totally opposed to the thesis of people like Hannah Arendt who insist on the autonomy of politics as a realm of self-revelation and fulfillment.⁷⁵ Yet in insisting that politics remain separate from the economic realm, Sorel appears to be arguing that each realm should reassume the dignity that had been denied it. For Sorel, politics would be an arena for the discussion of "a national ideal" or of "general principles," while economics would emphasize productivity without invading the political realm and transforming it into "national housekeeping," to use Arendt's term.

In other places Sorel, while not an anarchist, seems to scorn political life as such, and this scorn leaves Sorel's political thought shadowy. He argues that the pluralism of political centers of power is a good thing. But since he argues that a diremption such as market pluralism cannot be carried over into the legislative arena without disastrous consequences, the balanced equation that existed in liberalism between the pluralistic view of economics and its corresponding view of politics as bargaining is now abolished in Sorel's hands. So too is Marx's assumption that the state is little more than a handmaiden of ruling-class interests. But then what is left of government? The rather vague notion that politics should be an activity that concerns the discussion of "general principles" or "the national ideal" was not given much refinement by Sorel either in this work or in Reflections on Violence. It was not until 1913 and especially 1919 and the publication of De l'Utilité du pragmatisme that Sorel elaborated on the role of politics. Before that time, Sorel's implacable hostility to politics is inspired in large part by the traditions of French statism and centralization. In 1913, however, he juxtaposes the reality of sovereign authority in modern Europe to the memory of medieval Germanic kingships in which royalty did not execute tasks directly but remained mere "proprietors" of the crown. Surrounding the monarchies were networks of "true republics, the church, universities, religious orders, and corporations of all kinds."⁷⁶

The authority structure of these "true republics" was based less on persuasion or force than on symbols, myths, and the ordering of groups of activities belonging incontestably to the same type and whose participants followed the opinions of men of experience and possessing "incontestable dignity." Political authority does not exist here as much as "social authority" or rather a complex array of social authorities. Such authorities Sorel calls cités, but they are not so much cities as institutions that are themselves highly authoritative and devoid of political power of the state. We find such authorities in science (cité savante), art (cité esthétique), society (the American business aristocracy which he calls the cité morale), and in socialism (the syndicalist carriers of the general strike myth). It is the authority rather than the politics of the cities that Sorel admires, because they scorn the bargaining, the persuasion, or the force of the state and limit their scope to their respective arenas of experience.⁷⁷

That is why it is not only bargaining in the political realm that is unsatisfactory to Sorel, but even in the present volume he goes so far as to criticize it in the realm to which it is properly suited, the economic realm itself. Here as in Reflections on Violence, Sorel appears to condemn bargaining even between unions and management, and instead argues for a union movement that remains implacably hostile to having anything to do with the bourgeoisie. Yet Sorel's decentralized vision of socialist labor unions in the new society gave way to the reality of a labor movement with the same oligarchic tendencies and the same proclivity for bargaining he had condemned in political parties. These tendencies were already apparent to Sorel and are discussed in the last section of this work. Sorel's pragmatic myth of the general strike was already in the process of giving way to an even more pragmatic strategy of striking for more improved "consumer" benefits. In any case, Sorel's adherence to a labor movement as the motive force for a secular second-coming can only bring smiles today.

How valid is Sorel's critique of social unity in regard to its supposed undermining of productive virtues? Sorel's attack on social unity, whether of democracy, guild socialism, or (in the final section) any corporate state notions should give the lie to those who see in his thought a prelude to "fascist notions." Sorel's view of corporatism and of the state, and of social cohesion and community is generally the antithesis of fascism and owes much to liberalism. But there is no denying the powerful productive forces that social unity, in some form or another, has unleashed, especially in the modified corporatism of Japan or the profit-sharing and codetermination plans of West Germany and Sweden. The relatively unsolidaristic liberalism of the United States is appearing increasingly unproductive in comparison with these highly cohesive societies.

On the other hand, social insolidarity represents a stage in the development of a group whose conscious revolt against the existing order sustained by revolutionary myths has positive moral consequences for its adherents as is evidenced by the early stages of the Black Muslim sect in the United States. Sorel is useful to us today in the examination of sects such as the Muslims in seeing how their activities correspond to his sociology of virtue, the social and ideological bases that produce great transformations in a people or civilization. Sorel's concern with the subject of virtue has not been a prominent interest of academicians over the years, except perhaps in Nietzsche studies, and only recently have we seen a revival of interest in it on the part of philosophers with social science concerns.⁷⁸

There is still another reason for an interest in Sorel, and that lies in the realm of social science methods. Sorel's method of diremption is a forceful supplement to Weber's ideal types, and as such provides a helpful guide to the evaluation of both social beliefs and movements.

NOTES

¹ Both Réflexions sur la violence and Les Illusions du progrès were originally published in the syndicalist journal Mouvement Socialiste in 1906 and in book form in 1908 by the publisher Marcel Rivirère. Excerpts from both works are translated in John L. Stanley (ed.), From Georges Sorel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

² Georges Sorel, Le Procès de Socrate (Paris: Alcan, 1889).

³ See John L. Stanley, The Sociology of Virtue: The Political and Social Theories of Georges Sorel (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1981).

⁴ Letter to Benedetto Croce, 6 May 1907, Critica, 26 (20 March 1928): 100.

⁵ Georges Sorel, "Etude sur Vico," Devenir Social (December 1896): 1020.

⁶ Jean Variot (ed.), Propos de Georges Sorel (Paris: Gallimard, 1935). Statement of 14 November 1908.

⁷ Edouard Dolléans, "Le Visage de Georges Sorel," Revue d'Histoire Economique et Sociale 26 (no. 2, 1947): 106-107. Citing letter of 13 October 1912.

⁸From Georges Sorel, p. 210.

⁹ William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Mentor, 1958), pp. 22-23.

¹⁰ Sorel, "Etude sur Vico" (October 1896): 794-95 (November): 916, 919.

¹¹ Georges Sorel, De l'Utilité du pragmatisme (Paris: Rivière, 1919), p. 4 and note.

¹²Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 3, p. 394. The verb dirempt, first used in English in 1561, was derived from the Latin diremere, to separate or divide.

¹³From Georges Sorel, p. 228, citing Reflections on Violence, p. 259.

¹⁴From Georges Sorel, pp. 235, 231.

¹⁵ Ibid, pp. 239, 344, n. 52.

¹⁶Social Foundations of Contemporary Economics, p. 81.

¹⁷ Sorel deals with this question in "La préoccupation métaphysique des physiciens modernes," Cahiers de Quinzaine (16th Cahier, 8th series, 1901). This work was largely incorporated into chapter 4 of De l' Utilité du pragmatisme under the title "L'expérience dans la physique moderne."

¹⁸ "La science et la morale," in Questions de Morale (Paris: Alcan, 1900), p. 7.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 15 (Sorel's italics).

²⁰ Ibid., p. 7.

²¹ Ibid., p. 2.

²²From Georges Sorel, p. 369, n. 33.

²³Social Foundations, pp. 53, 56.

²⁴ Georges Sorel, "Vues sur les problèmes de la philosophie," Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 18 (December 1910):609.

²⁵ Georges Sorel, review of Fouillée, Eléments sociologiques de la morale in Revue générale de bibliographie (December 1905):489; From Georges Sorel, p. 216.

²⁶Social Foundations, p. 54.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 169.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 108.

²⁹ Ibid., p. 107.

³⁰ Ibid., pp. 106, 313.

³¹ See Sorel,Reflections on Violence, p. 184; idem,Le Système historique de Renan, passim.

³² See Georges Sorel, La ruine du monde antique (Paris: Rivière, 3rd ed., 1933), for an analysis of early Christianity in this regard.

³³Reflections, p. 125n; From Georges Sorel, p. 335, n. 7.

³⁴ Sorel,La ruine du monde antique, pp. 16-17.

³⁵Social Foundations, p. 150.

³⁶ Ibid., pp. 151-55.

³⁷ Ibid., p. 155.

³⁸ Ibid., p. 166.

³⁹ Ibid., p. 168. Cf. Marx, Capital (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. 837.

⁴⁰ See From Georges Sorel, pp. 152-53; Sorel, "Sur la Théorie marxiste de la valeur," Journal des Economistes (May 1897):215.

⁴¹ Georges Sorel, Lettres à Paul Delesalle, ed. André Prudhommeaux (Paris: Grasset, 1947). Letter of 9 May 1918, p. 139.

⁴² Sorel presents this view of the labor contract in Social Foundations, pt. II, ch. 8, p. 234.

⁴³Social Foundations, p. 167.

⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 168.

⁴⁵ Ibid., pp. 170-71.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 186.

⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 70.

⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 184.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 214.

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 205.

⁵¹ Ibid.

⁵² Ibid., pp. 199-200.

⁵³ Ibid., p. 201.

⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 200.

⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 216.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 217.

⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 237.

⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 289. Cf. Karl Marx, Revolution and Counter Revolution of Germany in 1848 (Chicago: Charles Kerr, n.d.), p. 22.

⁵⁹Social Foundations, p. 289.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 281.

⁶¹ Ibid., p. 265.

⁶² Ibid., p. 267.

⁶³ Ibid., p. 297.

⁶⁴ Roberto Michels, Political Parties, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (Glencoe: Free Press, 1958).

⁶⁵ Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964).

⁶⁶Social Foundations, p. 292.

⁶⁷ Aristotle, Politics, 1318 a 38—b 20.

⁶⁸Social Foundations, pp. 293, 296.

⁶⁹ Ibid., p. 310, citing De Rousiers, Les Syndicats industriels, p. 125.

⁷⁰ Ibid.

⁷¹ Georges Sorel, review of Paul de Rousiers, La Vie américaine: ranches, ferms, et usines, Revue Internationale de Sociologie (October 1899): 744-45.

⁷²From Georges Sorel, pp. 213-14; Social Foundations, pp. 311-12.

⁷³Social Foundations, p. 289.

⁷⁴ I am indebted to Richard Vernon for this observation.

⁷⁵ See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

⁷⁶ Georges Sorel, "Germanismo e storicismo di Ernesto Renan," Critica 29 (March-November 1931), citing Renan, Questions Contemporaines (Paris: Levy, 1868), p. 15.

⁷⁷ Sorel, De l' Utilité du pragmatisme, ch. 2; From Georges Sorel, pp. 257-83.

⁷⁸ Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979).