[In the following excerpted review of Sorel's Reflections on Violence, Lovejoy identifies key differentiators between Sorel's socialist concepts and traditional socialist theories.]

Whatever the future of revolutionary syndicalism in Europe, the movement will at least continue to have interest for the historian as a type of social agitation, based upon novel and distinctive theories, which had attained somewhat formidable proportions at the moment when "le régime bourgeois" eventuated in an outbreak of "violence" more atrocious and more widespread than any of which the syndicalist had dreamed. An English version of [Reflections on Violence] the principal book of the chief philosopher of the movement is therefore to be welcomed. The translation, it may be said at once, is clear and idiomatic, and for the most part accurate. There are occasional errors, such as the rendering of moeurs by "customs" (29, 44, 57), and of cléricaux by "clergy" (249). This last makes nonsense of the passage in which it occurs. "Worthy progressives" is an overtranslation of braves gens.

To be rightly understood the book needs to be read backwards. For it is concerned with two questions, that of the ends to be accomplished by the social revolution, and that of the means by which it can be effectually brought about. The latter question is discussed first and at much greater length; but the spirit of this discussion, and the main premises of it, are sure to be missed by readers who do not bear in mind the ethical ideal of the syndicalist revolution, as set forth in the concluding chapter on la morale des producteurs. It is primarily, though not solely, Sorel's conception of the ends to be accomplished, that prescribes the choice of those means to which he gives the sensational and partially misleading name of "violence."

The moral ideals which inspire Sorel are highly dissimilar to those which have animated most of the older Socialism. His hostility to the existing régime is not chiefly due to a demand for justice in the distribution of the produce of industry, nor to a humanitarian sympathy with the victims of capitalistic 'exploitation,' nor to a sense of the waste and disorder involved in the competitive system. The morale des producteurs is a sort of 'gospel of work.' Its ideal will be realized only when productive industry is freely and joyously carried on by every man for its own sake, with no desire for compensatory sugar-plums, in the form either of material rewards or the praise of others. The new social order is to be one in which men have become capable of finding their chief satisfaction in the activity that is inevitably their destiny, and in which life is lived simply, unaffectedly, and with a certain austerity. "The striving towards perfection which manifests itself in spite of the absence of any personal, immediate and proportional reward, constitutes the secret virtue that assures the continued progress of the world." The syndicalist millennium is to give this virtue constant play in the daily business of every man.

In order to bring about this consummation two things are chiefly necessary. The first is that the working class shall be kept undebauched by the ideals and ambitions of the existing bourgeois society. Among the workers, and among them alone, is to be found the germ of that "virtue which has power to save civilization—a virtue which middle-class intellectuals are incapable of understanding" (267). Hence the necessity for avoiding the methods of parliamentary socialism—which merely have the effect of robbing the proletariat of its leaders, by exposing them to the corrupting influence of middle-class associations. Hence also the necessity for "violence" i.e., for frequent strikes, undertaken not for the sake of gaining specific concessions, but to prevent the rapprochement of the two classes and the consequent infection of the workers with the base and vulgar standards dominant among the bourgeoisie. But a second requisite, for syndicalism, as for every great popular movement, is that it shall be animated by a "myth"—by a vivid and stirring image of some single, near-by, divine, event, in which every participant in the movement can picture himself as having a part. The "myth" which thus functions in syndicalism is that of the general strike. "Strikes have engendered in the proletariat the noblest, deepest and most moving sentiments that they possess; the general strike groups them all into a coördinated picture, and by bringing them together, gives to each its maximum of intensity" (137). It is not the practicability of the general strike that Sorel assets, but only the efficacy of the "idea" of it. A "myth must be judged as a means of acting on the present; any attempt to discuss how far it can be taken literally, as future history, is devoid of sense" (135).

The most crushing comment upon the book has been, unwittingly, uttered by Sorel himself, when he remarks that "the revolution has no place for intellectuals who have embraced the profession of thinking for the proletariat." His own (former) profession is there defined with precision. He is an intellectual of the intellectuals—all the more so in that he is, after the present Bergsonian fashion, an "anti-intellectualist"—who seeks to save the unlettered classes from the depraving influence of middle class culture by offering them a large and learned volume of social philosophy, heavily buttressed with footnotes. He is an avowed "pessimist" who sets out to inflame the popular mind with unconquerable hopes, by preaching a "myth" concerning which his own scepticism is unconcealed. The lofty, austere, and almost ascetic, moral ideals which he looks to the revolutionary proletariat to realize, are not such as the proletariat, left to itself, has ever shown much disposition to pursue. The very glamor which the working-class soul possesses in his eyes is a typical bourgeois illusion. One may well doubt whether Sorel has ever genuinely expressed the real temper of the movement which he has sought to interpret and to promote. And it is not at all surprising that he has of late looked rather towards royalism and Catholicism and a return to the ancient traditions of French culture, for a more congenial expression of that distaste for the vulgarity of middle-class ideals, and that contempt for the pedestrian methods of the mere intellect,' which first inspired his syndicalist philosophy.