SOURCE: "Some Reflections on Sorel and Machiavelli," in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. LXXXIII, No. 1, March, 1968, pp. 76-91.

[In the following excerpt originally written in 1965, Wood expands on James Burnham's (excerpted above) thesis that Sorel was a Maciavellian thinker.]

The comparison of Georges Sorel and Niccolò Machiavelli is not without precedent. Some twenty years ago James Burnham maintained that Sorel (along with Mosca, Michels, and Pareto) shared in a tradition of thinking called Machiavellism.¹ The principal tenets of the tradition consist of a faith in an empirical science of politics, and a conception of politics as a struggle for power involving force and fraud, in which the role of a ruling elite and non-rational action arising from an ideology are central. Burnham's approach tends to distort rather than illuminate the ideas of Sorel and Machiavelli, although I have no intention of taking issue directly with his position. Instead I shall argue that grounds for the comparison of the two thinkers are to be sought in their common devotion to a regenerative morality born out of strife and conflict, for which they find a source of inspiration in the ancient classical world. Despite the four centuries separating the two thinkers, both view politics as a kind of warfare and describe it in military terms. Oddly enough, a strikingly similar outlook is reflected in much of contemporary American thinking on the political process, a fact to which little if any attention has been directed.

I

Like many of his Socialist predecessors, Sorel turns to classical antiquity. His first book, Le procès de Socrate, is evidence of his fascination with ancient Greece and its formative influence upon his thought.² In this work he discusses the Athenian polis prior to what he considers its period of corruption and decline, from the beginning of the fifth century B.C. onward. These ancient Athenians were far superior to the ignorant and avaricious bourgeosie of his own age.³ Their society was one of industrious and thrifty equals. In comparison with the modern bourgeoisie, the Athenian citizens were not merchants clamoring for guarantees of trade, for protection of their industry, or for governmental favors; they were soldiers whose very reason for being was the grandeur of their polis, whose slightest weakness endangered the common good. According to Sorel the significance of the life of ancient Greece and Rome cannot be grasped unless heed is given to their military arrangements.⁴ Ancient constitutions were shaped by the necessities of war; the education of youth was fundamentally preparation for war. The polis was indeed a warriors guild. Classical thinkers, among them Aristotle, were fully aware of the basic military nature of the polis. So, for example, the Stagirite attempted to imitate the ancient Athenian military order in his preliminary outline of the ideal constitution contained in the last two books of the Politics.⁵

A life of military preparedness, of constant war and the threat of war, were for Sorel not the only interesting characteristics of classical times. He was greatly attracted to what he understood of the ancient economy, predominantly rural and agrarian, as opposed to the urbanism and commercialism of the later decadent years.⁶ Agrarian life in itself, however, was not so much the attraction as the fact that the citizen-soldiers were landed proprietors who formed a fraternity of producers. Instead of living a parasitic life of indolence and luxury, the warrior-farmers actually planned the labor, did much of it themselves, and closely supervised their workers. Their unusual understanding of the productive process is manifest in the careful records kept by the ancient Roman agriculturalists.

Two articulate representatives of the hardy, traditional spirit survived the increasing decay of commercial Athens: Aristophanes and Xenophon.⁷ As have few commentators, Sorel succeeds in penetrating to the heart of Xenophon's thought in a brief evaluation of the Oeconomicus, which he judges one of the most remarkable works of antiquity. The Oeconomicus, the first extant treatise on estate management, is by the famous soldier-farmer and founder of Western military science, whose exploits are largely known through his account of the trek of the Ten Thousand in the Anabasis. Xenophon is a kind of archaic survival of Greek military and agrarian life. Sorel notes that he approaches the problem of estate-management from the standpoint of a man of war. Military imagery and comparisons are employed to explain the performance of various tasks and the duties of the different workers. The ideal farm, in fact, is organized and managed like an efficient army.⁸ Xenophon, comments Sorel, carries on in the Oeconomicus the ancient tradition of a great national poetry, without resorting to the overly polished exposition or the fine dialectical hair-splitting of his master Socrates. Much later, in the Reflexions sur la violence (1906), Sorel, referring to the Memorabilia as well as the Oeconomicus, affirms that Xenophon represents an older Greek tradition than Plato.⁹ The soldier-farmer understands the nature of production; the philosopher does not. Speaking in the guise of Socrates in the Memorabilia, Xenophon advises a destitute citizen, who must provide for a large family, to establish a workshop in his home manned by the members of his family. Sorel's implication is that a recommendation of this kind represents a tradition older than Plato, because the ancient Greeks did not shun labor if by it they could free themselves from subjection by others and become self-sufficient.

What, then, are the reasons for Sorel's fixation upon the military and productive characteristics of the ancient polis? Obviously, he is not urging the revival of the polis as a form of social organization for his own industrial Europe. He does believe, however, that something of its élan and social solidarity can be recaptured at a new and higher level by the creation of revolutionary syndicates of workers. An indication of his ideal is found in a concluding statement of La ruine du monde antique (1902): "Socialism returns to ancient thought; but the warrior of the polis has become the worker of large industry; his weapons have been replaced by machines."¹⁰ The vigorous, patriotic, almost ascetic soldier-farmer is replaced in Sorel's mind by the proletarian artisan, exercising control over the means of production in the small workshop, experiencing the joy of genuine creation, and becoming the master rather than the slave of the works fashioned by his art.¹¹ United in syndicates, the proletarian warriors will be locked in constant struggle with the bourgeois enemy. Out of the new warfare and the new production a new morality will emerge, completely transforming human relations and revolutionizing society.

Excited as he is by the ancient polis, Sorel never views its life of war and production as an end, only as a means to the fruition of a heroic morality. Ancient strife between cities was responsible for a virtue hardly equaled since. The industrial workers' revolutionary action against capitalism, in preparation for the ultimate clash of the general strike, is the latter-day substitute for the warfare of antiquity: "The revolutionary Syndicates argue about socialist action in the same manner as military writers argue about war."¹² Much of Sorel's outlook is clarified in an article on Proudhon.¹³ The Proudhonian community is analogous to the polis, which "had always been a congregation of soldiers." War for Proudhon "reveals our ideal to us . . . creates the great epics . . . reinvigorates nations gone soft." In the course of battle "man discovers his own best qualities: courage, patience, disregard of death, devotion to glory and the good of his fellows, in one word: his virtue." Repeatedly in the Reflections on Violence Sorel refers to the ancient heroic morality dependent upon the pursuit of honor and glory in military ventures.¹⁴ Nietzsche's eulogy of the Homeric heroes is quoted with obvious relish: "that audacity of noble races, that mad, absurd, and spontaneous audacity, their influence and contempt for all security of the body, for life, for comfort."¹⁵

But, according to Sorel, the ancient Athenian heroism had practically disappeared by the time of the Peloponnesian War, once the city had become the emporium of a vast commercial empire with a consumer's economy characterized by avarice, luxury, and indolence. The emergence of oligarchical government catering to the masses and encouraging mediocrity in all walks of life suggests modern bourgeois democracy to Sorel. A morality of the golden mean, of moderation, based upon reason instead of conflict and war, replaced the morality of soldier-producers. The rationalism of the Sophists and of Socrates and his disciples was responsible for an intellectual orgy of introspection and self-consciousness, the ideological manifestation of a dying culture. Sorel's observations concerning the decline of Athens in Le procès de Socrate are his first efforts to formulate a general theory of decadence, elaborated in subsequent writings.¹⁶ By adopting Vico's conception of ricorso, he conceives of each organized society passing through successive ascending and descending phases of grandeur and decadence. Western civilization has experienced at least three phases of decadence: the breakup of the Hellenic polis, the disintegration of the Roman empire, and the corruption of nineteenth-century bourgeois Europe. Decadent periods of history display political disunity, economic stagnation, military weakness, disrespect for tradition, creative decline, and the leveling of all social classes to the lowest common denominator. A prime causal factor seems to be the disappearance of conflict. When a people no longer are compelled to struggle for survival, when internal contention is reduced to a minimum, their original vigor, hardiness, and decisiveness decline and disappear. Self-seeking and the loss of a sense of civic duty destroy the social fabric. Disintegration is accelerated by the questioning of rationalism; a malady of reflection and self-analysis paralyzes the will to action. Sorel's lifelong quest is for a solution to the decadence of his own epoch, and for the foundation of a heroic morality in a new dimension.

II

Machiavelli also looks to the ancient world for moral inspiration. His political theory, reconstructed from the four major works, The Prince, the Discourses, The Art of War, and the History of Florence, is informed by the notion of an ideal man and the kind of society necessary to produce his hero.¹⁷ The model is the sturdy citizensoldier of the Roman republic prior to the first Punic War. He is the patriot dedicated to the common good, a man of action exhibiting foresight, constancy, boldness, selfdiscipline, fortitude, determination, and bravery—qualities often summarized by Machiavelli's use of the single term virtù. The Machiavellian hero of virtù is homo militans, the very opposite of homo oeconomicus, the self-seeking, acquisitive individual who aims at economic aggrandizement through a life of commerce, the model for the concept of human nature found in many of the early liberal thinkers and in the classical economists. Homo militans is the glory-seeker desirous of immortality, that is, some permanence in a cosmos of perpetual flux, through a personal triumph remembered and cherished by his contemporaries, and, more importantly, by posterity. Glory of the highest variety can be achieved by founding a new order of things, a new religion or a new state, by giving an existing state a new code of laws, and by great political or military leadership.¹⁸ True glory can never be won simply by the acquisition of wealth and power,¹⁹ but the glory-seeker may win fame even in failure, as defeat brought posthumous renown to a Leonidas or Cato Minor. While Machiavelli stresses the military virtues of the Romans, and gives scant attention to their economy, he does refer to the simple agrarian life of his hero, who in times of peril may be called by his city to the highest office, only to return like Cincinnatus, after the fulfillment of his civic obligation, to the ploughing of his humble acres.

The Romans, as presented by the Florentine, were a frugal, disciplined people, devoted to a life of arms. A single, steadfast attachment to the common good accounted in great measure for their glorious exploits. Moreover, Roman glory resulted from an ardent and deep-rooted republicanism. Citizen-soldiers of Rome won the greatest glory in their continuous struggle for existence in a hostile environment of ferocious enemies, by fighting, as it were, for themselves, not for the sake of a commander or ruler. Roman glory was the citizen's glory, and the citizen's achievements redounded to the credit of the whole military brotherhood. The liberty provided by the republican form of government proved to be the ideal condition for the pursuit of glory.

Rome, for Machiavelli, is the model of the best government because it secured most adequately the ends of good government in general. The foundation of good government is an adequate military establishment for protection against the external foe. Internally, security must be provided for a citizen's life, family, property, and honor. Although general economic prosperity is important, individual acquisition and conspicuous consumption are to be strictly regulated. Merit is to be rewarded generously, and the pursuit of honor and glory in the service of the state is to be encouraged. The mixed constitution of the Roman republic, with institutions such as dictatorship, censorship, public accusations, popular assemblies, sumptuary laws, and a citizens' army, are fundamental means to these ends. In addition, Machiavelli emphasizes the significance of the rule of law as a guarantee of the citizen's liberty and security. Machiavelli's ideal, therefore, was a republic of citizen-soldiers, designed to provide peace and security in a hazardous world and to offer opportunities for heroic actions.

Machiavelli also offers a theory of civic degeneration similar to Sorel's. Commonwealths can be virtuous only under conditions of necessity, when, in order to survive, a people must display a spirit of cooperation and of dedication to the common good and act with industry, determination, and courage. The necessity that unites a people and generates such spirit may be a hostile physical environment, the constant threat of an external power, or the actual aggression of an enemy. Once a commonwealth succeeds in securing and maintaining its existence, degeneration begins. Although well-devised laws can serve as a substitute for an external foe by forcing a people to be virtuous, those responsible for executing the law and adjusting it to new conditions will grow lax in any prolonged period of peace and prosperity. Of course, class conflict, providing it takes place within the limits of a patriotic devotion to the common good and a willingness to abide by the rules of the game, will invigorate the body politic. Once corruption sets in, however, healthy class conflict deteriorates into factional strife and civil war. Long periods of peace and plenty result in a general relaxation and indolence, a decline of the old spirit and vigor, a propensity to acquire personal wealth, power, and luxury at the expense of the common good. Respect for authority and the sense of civic duty are weakened; questioning of traditional values begins; the original social solidarity is transformed into a collection of individuals, each for himself. Religious belief ceases to be a vital social bond; extremes of wealth and poverty develop. From the political standpoint, conspiracy, assassination, and governmental instability become commonplace. From the military standpoint, the degenerate commonwealth may at any time be a victim of foreign aggression. Every commonwealth is doomed to such eventual corruption. Inspired leadership and rational social organization may delay, but cannot indefinitely prevent the spread of decay. Even the most virtuous of all peoples, the Romans, could maintain their liberties for only four hundred years. Machiavelli summarizes his views in his case-history of civic decadence, the History of Florence:

It may be observed that commonwealths amid the vicissitudes to which they are subject, pass from order into disorder, and afterward return from disorder to order. Since the nature of the world does not allow things to continue in an even course, when they have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline. Similarly, having been reduced by disorder to their worst condition and, unable to descend lower, they, of necessity, reascend. Thus from good they gradually decline to evil, and from evil again return to good. The reason is that virtù produces peace; peace, indolence; indolence, disorder; disorder, ruin; so from disorder order springs; from order virtù, and from this, glory and good fortune. Hence, wise men have observed that the age of literary excellence follows that of distinction in arms, and that in commonwealths and cities, great commanders are produced before philosophers. Arms having secured victory, and victory peace, the spirited vigor of the martial mind cannot be corrupted by a more excusable indolence than that of letters. Nor can indolence with any greater or more dangerous deceit, enter a well established commonwealth. Cato was aware of this when the philosophers, Diogenes and Carneades, were sent as ambassadors to the Senate by the Athenians. Perceiving with what earnest admiration the Roman youth began to follow them, and knowing the evils that might result to his country from this excusable indolence, he enacted that no philosopher should be allowed to enter Rome.²⁰

III

Sorel and Machiavelli were moralists in the sense that both were profoundly disturbed by the behavior of their contemporaries and wished to change it for the better. They were not moralists as, for example, Plato and Kant were, for they did not arrive at universal moral principles from an elaborately conceived and intricately developed philosophic system. Sorel and Machiavelli begin directly with a more or less vague notion of a good society, not from a cosmology or metaphysic. Their moralizing consists of recommendations for a mutually sustaining individual behavior and social organization. Each rejects the commercial, exploitative life of his own age, analyzes its nature, determines its causes, and suggests how a new era of grandeur and heroic morality could be introduced. Each emphasizes the value of social conflict for the new morality and conceives of politics as a kind of warfare.

This emphasis upon conflict represents a radical break with the classical-medieval tradition of political thought, and is distinctively modern. Machiavelli must be credited for first assigning a positive social and political value to domestic conflict. While traditional thinkers like Plato and Aristotle had clearly recognized the existence of conflict within the polis, they thought of it as an unnatural condition arising from the domination of the human soul by the baser appetites. Since the nature of the soul was thought to be a harmony of parts under the rule of reason, social conflict represented a defection of the psyche from nature. Consequently, a social organization was recommended in which a harmony, if not a unison of parts, would replace all antagonisms, and in which civic education would mold healthy, harmonious human souls. This social-psychology of harmony has a parallel in the ancient physical concept that matter at rest is more natural than matter in motion. During the Cinquecento both theories were challenged by two Italian thinkers. Machiavelli argued that social disorder and decadence cannot be solved by the elimination of conflict. Conflict, so natural to man, the slave of contending desires, will always be present in human society. Any attempt to eliminate conflict will eventuate in the destruction of man. The solution to social and governmental instability must lie in conflict itself. Through proper regulation conflict can be a strengthening, vitalizing, creative, and integrating social factor, a way of freeing man from the domination of man. Galileo performed much the same service for physics that Machiavelli earlier had rendered politics by arguing that the natural state of matter is motion instead of rest.

Unlike Sorel, Machiavelli does not give class-struggle an economic basis. Class-warfare is considered largely in psychological terms. The major cause for intermural and intramural conflict stems from an individual lust for power and domination. In all societies a few wish to dominate the many, while the majority wish to be free and secure from the domination of this minority. Economic aggrandizement is simply a manifestation of the lust for power in all men, what St. Augustine calls the libido dominandi.²¹ The power-seeking elite may be a rich and powerful commercial class, such as that of Renaissance Florence, or a relatively poor warrior class, like the patricians of early republican Rome. The difference between the struggle of the plebes with the patricians in the well-ordered Roman commonwealth and the contention of the ciompi and oligarchs in decadent Florence is that the former occurred within specific limits while the latter did not. In republican Rome, patriotism, a sense of civic duty, and a respect for law and authority prevented class conflict from erupting into civil war. Moreover, Roman constitutional arrangements had been modified by experience to embody a balance of powers between the Senate, representative of the patricians, and the plebeian assemblies with their tribunes, thus institutionalizing and regulating conflict.

Sorel's view of society as a battlefield for the economic class-struggle is much more extreme than Machiavelli's outlook. Yet, after Machiavelli, theorists of limited conflict as a social good and of the state as the umpire of contending interests, including the British empiricists, the classical economists, and Montesquieu and his great disciple Tocqueville, broke ground for the later and more radical Socialist position on class-warfare in bourgeois society. Machiavelli, however, tends to be much closer to Sorel than most intervening non-Socialist thinkers, because out of his military interests and experience he conceived of domestic politics as a kind of warfare between groups and individuals struggling for power. Indeed, his model for leadership is military, and his political recommendations are often little more than the translation of the stratagems of classical military thinkers into maxims of statecraft.

To a marked extent much of the vocabulary of politics used today by American politicians, journalists, and political scientists is a military vocabulary. Whether one reads a description and assessment of an election in the newspaper or the erudite evaluation of practical politics in textbook, dissertation, or monograph, the language is often that applied traditionally to accounts of military operations, never to the quest for the good society. Our use of military metaphor and simile is so habitual that we are rarely conscious of it and of its historical novelty. The very use of the words struggle, contest, conflict, warfare, battle, enemy, arena, campaign, soldier, troops, recruits, and deserters is highly significant. The political enemy is attacked or defeated; he advances or retreats; from a defensive position, he assumes the offensive. A political party is a camp to be stormed or besieged, an army to be conquered. At the head of the political army is the commander who plans his campaign in his headquarters and marshals his forces with the aid of a staff and a chief-ofstaff. Communities favoring one party over another become strongholds, bastions, fortresses, and citadels. Military organization provides columnist and scholar with terms like ally, auxiliary, echelon, cadre, column, rank and file, wing, flank, rear guard, vanguard, base, battalion, and division. The words strategy and tactics never could have been applied by the ancients to domestic politics; they could be applied only to the foe in military operations, because all citizens of the polis were considered to be friends. In the second half of the twentieth century, what American politician, pundit, or political scientist is not perpetually indebted to them! Tactical terms particularly are savored: mobilize, maneuver, disposition, deployment, flanking, foray, sortie, thrust and counter-thrust, confrontation, infiltration, penetration. And when the battle is over we even talk of an armistice, or if a mutually arranged lull in hostilities occurs, we often refer to a cease-fire, a parley, or a truce.

If early modern thinkers, with their emphasis upon the value of limited social conflict and the state as umpire of competing interests, contributed to this contemporary American way of conceptualizing domestic politics, they, of course, cannot be held wholly responsible for it. Certainly the recent concept—a particular favorite among some American students of politics—that politics is purely a struggle for power, and the decline of the idea that politics is a moral science, may have contributed to the new image. Suggestive also is the group theory of politics. Perhaps the polarization of international politics into the maneuvering of two super-powers in a "cold war" to eliminate or neutralize each other has been unconsciously projected upon the domestic scene. Nor should we forget that Freud, whose thought has so shaped directly and indirectly the attitudes of the present American generation, offers a psychology of conflict in which men are in a virtual state of war and the psyche itself is a battlefield.

Certain practical developments may well have been more important. The organization of centralized, disciplined parties in the nineteenth century to achieve the social and economic demands of the masses is quite possibly a decisive reason. Socialist theory and practice have always been especially concerned with the formation of militant, fighting parties. The Communist Manifesto of 1848 was an open declaration of war in the name of the worker against the bourgeoisie. Its portrayal of past and present is in terms of extreme conflict: 'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," and within society there rages a "more or less veiled civil war," in which the "bourgeoisie finds itself involved in constant battle" with the proletariat.

It is not a coincidence that one of Sorel's foremost disciples, Roberto Michels, devoted a chapter of his very influential book, La Sociologia del Partito nella Democrazia Moderna (1912), to "The Modern Democratic Party as a Fighting Party, Dominated by Militarist Ideas and Methods."²² Michels writes that rules essential to the conduct of military affairs are equally applicable to modern political life, which is uniquely characterized by a "perpetual condition of latent warfare."²³ Modern fighting parties must conform to the laws of tactics, and the similarity between such parties and military organization is reflected by the Socialist vocabulary, which especially in Germany comes from military science. Scarcely one expression of military tactics and strategy, he writes, hardly a phrase of barracks slang, does not occur again and again in the Socialist press. Even early anti-militarist French Socialists referred to their leader, Gustave Hervé, as "our General." Interesting, although not mentioned by Michels, is the fact that a small group of British middle-class moderates who banded together in the eighties for social reform through education and piecemeal action should call themselves Fabians. Michels continues that a number of Socialist leaders, including Engels, Bebel, and Jaurès, wrote extensively on military affairs. Since Michels, the Russian disciples of Marx and Engels did transform their party into a military organization in an almost literal sense, and increasingly employed military imagery in discussing the struggle between proletarians and bourgeoisie. In his Foundations of Leninism, Stalin allots a chapter to "Strategy and Tactics," which he terms "the science of proletarian leadership," and then proceeds as if he were writing a military handbook for proletarian generals. For each different political situation he enumerates the appropriate "main blow," "reserves," and "disposition of forces."²⁴

That many American scholars and European Socialists should employ a military vocabulary to describe and assess domestic politics is one of the minor ironies of history. Precisely the justification of the Socialists in using a military model is their central doctrine of class struggle, the insistent denial of which appears to be the stock-in-trade of most American analyses of the political scene. If Socialists were pitted against the bourgeoisie in America, the use of a military vocabulary by non-Socialist students of politics would be appropriate. But the very nature of American political parties, the similar class composition, the minimal ideological differences, the obeisance to some kind of sacred consensus—all these traits would seem to reflect an almost obsessive dread of social conflict, even a denial of its very existence. The use of military metaphor to describe the relatively mild and gentlemanly rivalry among singularly like-minded men so characteristic of American politics today is, to say the least, somewhat incongruous. The much vaunted end of ideological politics in America appears to be accompanied by the emergence of a new ideology, an ideology arising from the presumed absence of conflict but expressed nevertheless in the idiom of conflict and military struggle.

IV

Notwithstanding the many parallels between the ideas of Sorel and Machiavelli, a fundamental difference in their styles of political thinking cannot be overlooked. This difference, most apparent in their accounts of the ideal man, gives to each a unique role in the history of political ideas. Machiavelli's classical hero, supremely rational and calculating, is engaged in a rational enterprise of fighting a war, ruling a people, or organizing a viable civil society. The statesman like the general is a master manipulator of men. He may assume a charismatic role for the sake of more effective control and management, but he is undone if he neglects the rational calculation of self-interest, his own and those he seeks to manipulate. On the basis of his perception of the inherent order and form of things social and political, he can meticulously plan his course of action in terms of the most efficient means to achieve the public utility, and then act in a vigorous, decisive, and flexible manner. The organization and leadership of an army or a commonwealth is always a highly rational enterprise in the eyes of the Florentine. His faith in the molding of a civic-minded, sturdy, and courageous people by the rational construction of society makes him a true forerunner of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

By contrast, Sorel is deeply distrustful of what he calls the utopianism and the rationalism of the Enlightenment. His proletarian hero is a truly charismatic figure, a man of spontaneity, feeling, and virility, not the objective, calculating type.²⁵ His philosophical inspiration is the élan vital of Henri Bergson rather than the phron sis and s phrosyn of Aristotle. At the heart of his theory of action is the notion of action for the sake of action. Admittedly, acting in a prescribed manner will produce a new heroism; but this new heroism seems to be for its own sake, in large part to satisfy Sorel's own esthetic sensibility. Although Machiavelli places a premium upon heroic action, he is clear that it is a means of achieving a society of peace and security and a happy people. In addition, Machiavelli's rationalism is suggested by his faith in law as an instrument of social control. Whether he discusses an army or a commonwealth he has in mind the elimination of uncertainty and insecurity in human relations by the institution and maintenance of a rational legal order. In these various senses, therefore, Machiavelli is a political thinker, while Sorel is fundamentally apolitical. His society of proletarian-warriors would be characterized by constant novelty, excitement, and upheaval. He possesses no vision beyond the anarchy of the class struggle, beyond the heroic brotherhood forged in battle with the bourgeoisie, and the joy of creation in the workshop. Sorel may possibly be the spirit of the Erinyes reincarnate, but Machiavelli never forsakes the shrine of Athena.

NOTES

¹ James Burnham, The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom (New York, 1943).

² Georges Sorel, Le procès de Socrate (Paris, 1889).

³Ibid., 170-72.

⁴Ibid, 167.

⁵Ibid., 170-71; also Sorel, Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat (Paris, 3d ed., 1929), 388.

⁶Le procès, 375 ff.; Matériaux, 387-89.

⁷Le procès, 375 ff.; Matériaux, 387.

⁸ For a full discussion of this perspective, see my article, "Xenophon's Theory of Leadership," in Classica et Mediaevalia XXV (1964), 33-66. On this score my view of Xenophon is in agreement with Sorel 's, although I did not discover his interpretation until after my article had gone to press.

⁹ Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T. E. Hulme and J. Roth, Introduction by Edward Shils (Glencoe, 1950), 263, n. 50.

¹⁰ Sorel, La ruine du monde antique: conception matérialiste de l'histoire, Introduction by Edouard Berth (Paris, 3d. ed., 1933), 311.

¹¹ Sorel believed that a true art would develop only on the basis of syndicates of workers. Such an art would be one of utility. See Pierre Angel, Essais sur Georges Sorel (Paris, 1937), 229-30.

¹²Reflections, 137.

¹³ "Essai sur la philosophie de Proudhon," Revue Philosophique, XXXIII (1892), XXXIV (1892). The following quotations are from page 44, as found in James H. Meisei, The Genesis of Georges Sorel, An Account of His Formative Period Followed by a Study of His Influence (Ann Arbor, 1951), 96. Also see Sorel, Le procès, 170, ç. 3; Matériaux, 389, ç. 2.

¹⁴Reflections, 50-57, 187-88, 257-60, 268-69, 276.

¹⁵Ibid., 257.

¹⁶ A very useful analytic summary of Sorel's concept of decadence drawn from his various works is Jean Wanner, Georges Sorel et la Décadence: Essai sur Vidée de décadence dans la pensée de Georges Sorel (Lausanne, 1943). Also see especially Sorel, Les illusions du progrès (Paris, 4th ed., 1927), 287-336; Reflections, passim.

¹⁷ Unless otherwise indicated, what follows on Machiavelli summarizes certain of my views in my Introduction to Machiavelli, The Art of War, a revised edition of the Ellis Farneworth translation (Indianapolis, New York, and Kansas City, 1965).

¹⁸ Machiavelli, Discourses, I, x.

¹⁹ For the distinction between true and false glory, see Machiavelli, Prince, VIII, XIX; Discourses, I, ix-x.

²⁰ Machiavelli, History of Florence, V, i. The translation is a modification of that of the Harper Torchbook edition, Introduction by Felix Gilbert (New York, Evanston, and London, 1960), 204.

²¹ See Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York and London, 1963), 48-53.

²² Roberto Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (Glencoe, 1949), 41-44.

²³Ibid., 41.

²⁴ Joseph Stalin, Foundations of Leninism (New York, 1939), 88-106. The chapter on "The Party" begins by proclaiming that it "must be, first of all, the vanguard of the working class" (p. 109).

²⁵ Note the excellent appraisal in Irving L. Horowitz, Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason: the Social Theories of Georges Sorel with a Translation of his Essay on "The Decomposition of Marxism" (New York, 1961), 156-58.