SOURCE: "Rationalism and Commitment in Sorel," in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XXXIV, July-September, 1973, pp. 405-20.

[In the following excerpt, Vernon draws distinctions between traditional interpretations of Marxism and Sorel's interpretation.]

In this essay I shall explore Georges Sorel's thought in the light of two contrasting conceptions; the idea that history forms an intelligible whole, knowledge of which provides criteria for political action, and the idea that no valid criteria exist for evaluating our actions, which rest on nothing more than a personal decision. The former idea is what Sorel thought of as "rationalism"; it is not what is thought of as rationalism today; in fact, later theorists have rejected that notion as an irrational one.¹ The latter idea is what is now described as "commitment"—though this term is not always used with a sense of its real implications—and is the theory which has usually been attributed to Sorel. Whereas the former idea is regarded as irrational because it involves a fallacious extension of reason, an attempt to reduce history to a rational scheme, the latter is held to be irrational because it represents an outright rejection of reason for action; thus Sorel's theory of the myth, for example, supposedly asserted that ideas have a merely instrumental value in provoking action, and should not be judged as true or false.

This interpretation of Sorel is a long-standing one; much of it was implicit in Julien Benda's condemnation of him as one of a generation of intellectuals who inverted the traditional values of philosophy.² But a closer examination of Sorel's conception of history suggests that his irrationalism should be interpreted in terms of the former idea rather than the latter; for while his thought contains hints of the theory of commitment which was to become so influential in the twentieth century, the context of its development was supplied by the philosophies of history of the nineteenth, the influence of which he was never able to escape.

I. Part of Sorel's criticism of rationalist philosophies of history, such as the neo-Comtean doctrines current in Third Republic France, was directed against their content, that is, against the vision of the emergence of a rational order from the archaic remnants of the past, a vision which he held to be illusory and frivolous.³ But he was also critical of the possibility of representing history as an orderly development towards any single goal; from this standpoint, he was as severe a critic of Marx, with whom he sympathized, as he was of the Comteans, whom he despised. His fundamental objection to rationalism in this sense—to the view that history corresponds to an intelligible plan—was that it mistook what was only an "interesting" or "illuminating" interpretation of events, a factitious construction imposed by the observer, for a kind of force inhering in the events themselves. It is characteristic of what Sorel meant by rationalism to treat what is only an explanatory device as reality itself; to substitute "machines," following logical rules, for "historical complexities"; to confuse the rational and the real, by abstracting a coherent pattern from a mass of events, rejecting whatever has no place in it as "accidental."⁴

Sorel never in fact held that reality was incomprehensible, but only that it was not conclusively comprehensible as a whole. He thought of reality as an immensely intricate mass of interlocking events, related by a complex logic; in attempting to understand it, one was confronted by a choice between establishing the details of a certain limited situation from the inside, as it were, examining the motives of those involved and the inter-relationships between their actions, and standing outside the events in order to impose a bold and "frankly subjective" interpretation of their meaning.

The most explicit source for this dualism of Sorel's is Le système historique de Renan, one of his most apolitical works, written in 1900, and intended, according to the Preface, for a readership of "enlightened priests."⁵ A long introduction to the book is devoted to the problem of the compatibility of theology and historical science; Sorel's argument is that the Church's hostile reaction to Renan's Life of Jesus was misplaced, for the historical examination of phases in the development of Christianity is on a plane quite distinct from that of Christian belief or disbelief. In support of this position he develops a distinction between two conceptions of history, each of which, he suggests, has a sphere sharply delimited from the other's.

Usually, historians concern themselves with "the emergence of the future" from the initial situation, explaining the genesis of events by means of "exact knowledge of the men who occupied the scene at this moment." But one can adopt a quite different technique, "considering the past as a congealed mass, the general appearance of which is susceptible to schematic outline." One can explain the course of events causally, in other words, or else one can retrospectively assemble the accomplished facts into a general pattern. "The first system takes its stand on a process generated by certain determinate men; the second regards men as bearers of symbols rather than creators. . . . The first claims, thanks to psychology, to penetrate to the roots of living reality, explaining it completely; the second aims at no more than an illumination of the past."

The first conception of history—the causal and psychological conception—is the one which "corresponds to the instincts"; it has the advantage that, being narrative, it is close to the documents, and that its plausibility can be established by common sense, for it is concerned primarily with establishing human motivations. But the second conception is at once more ambitious in its scope and more modest in its explanatory claims. This second, retrospective historical method—which Sorel calls "scientific"—can make sense of the historical process at a high level of generality, by tracing the relationships between institutions and ideas, and interpreting change in teleological terms, as the "birth" of future achievements; Renan's theory of the historical missions of successive civilizations is offered as an example. However, scientific history can achieve this generality only by forfeiting any claim to providing a causal explanation; from this point of view, all the material of history must be regarded as "chance," and the task is to reduce the infinity of chance events to a comprehensible order. Because it is inherently retrospective, this type of history is perfectly compatible with a theological explanation of any specific set of events; since it says nothing about the causes of things, it cannot contradict any causal hypothesis. Hence Renan's very wordly historiography was quite compatible with the Christian view of the nature of Christ.

Though he is primarily concerned with defending Renan from his clerical critics, Sorel also takes the opportunity to attack the neo-Comtean philosophy of progress. The Republican ideologues, he objects, interpret post-revolutionary history in terms of such "occult forces" as "progress," "democratic evolution," "the tendency to equality," and so on; but this sort of theory rests on a confusion of the two historical methods, since it involves attributing causal force to essentially ex post facto generalizations. This confusion, Sorel suggests, owes something to the profound influence of the historical novel on historical thought; presumably he means that the novelist can shape his material towards a conclusion with a freedom that the historian does not have, and that in modeling his method on that of the novelist the historian imagines that his own ideas "control" the course of events in the way that the novelist controls the events he narrates.⁶

Sorel's comments on the philosophers of progress are typical of his criticism of the nineteenth-century philosophers of history, who all, in his view, neglected the distinction between causal and retrospective history. He seized, for example, on Plekhanov's use of Saint-Simon's maxim, "One may easily deduce the future from sound observation of the past,"⁷ for this implied that the patterns constructed by historians were forces whose future direction could be deduced by extrapolation. He took Proudhon to task for supposing that the "general tendency" of civilization could be deduced from the balance of forces among "the various interests" in society. "When the historian speaks of a general tendency," he objected, "he does not deduce it from its constitutent elements, but constructs it by means of the results revealed in the course of history." The "synthesis" of conflicts in society takes place historically, not logically; it is "outside the realm of reasoned thought."⁸ In short, the philosophers of history had thought that their schematic representations explained the course of events, whereas in reality such representations can only be formed after the events have run their course, in accordance with a complex logic which cannot be schematically reduced.

Sorel's criticism of Marx was much more elaborate and requires detailed treatment. Initially, however, it is worth noting that Sorel's dualism, applied to Marxism, corresponds to what has since been recognized as a major problem of interpretation. In his distinction between the history of "the men of this moment" and the history of schematic representation, there is an echo of the young Marx's rejection of the abstract, hypostatized history of Hegel in favor of a materialist history of "sensuous human activity"; in fact, Sorel's use of the term "bearer" (porteur) to express the instrumental role attributed to the actor in retrospective histories recalls precisely Marx's use of Träger in the course of criticizing Hegel in The Holy Family.⁹ However, those of Marx's contemporary interpreters who regard the later economic writings as a better guide to Marx's thought contend that he did think of the historical actors as "bearers" (of "objective structures," that is), and argue that the study of the activities and perceptions of "the men" is irrelevant to true Marxian analysis.¹⁰ Thus Sorel's dualism foreshadows to some extent the debate between those who, appealing to the young Marx, regard history as human action, mediated by its own products, and those who advise us to read Capital and interpret historical development in terms of an underlying structure beyond the consciousness of the actors.¹¹ In this sense, Sorel's categories of psychological and scientific history anticipate those of phenomenological and structuralist sociology.

Sorel's interpreters have not often placed him in the context of the development of French Marxism, not least because his "fascist utterances" (the phrase is Sartre's¹²) have commanded no respect among his Marxist successors. But Sorel had rather more sophistication than he has been given credit for, and the problem of the relationships between "structural" and "phenomenal" reality in Marx's thought was familiar to him, even though the terms are those of a later generation. In 1910 he published a Preface to the French translation of Labriola's Karl Marx; Labriola's thesis, essentially, turned the young Marx against the later Marx, applying the categories developed in The Holy Family to the later economic writings. Labriola pointed out that Marx himself had criticized Hegel for introducing a speculative or "esoteric" history into the empirical or "exoteric" course of events, but that he too had introduced an esoteric history to the extent that he had interpreted development in terms of economic categories which were not necessarily visible to the historical actors.¹³ While Sorel never offered so cogent a formulation as this, his discussion of historiography in Le système historique de Renan involves a precisely similar problem, one can write an exoteric history in terms of the men and their consciousness, or one can write an esoteric history which imposes an overall pattern by means of a retrospective ordering of the events. If Marxism is a theory which attempts to combine these radically opposed methods, one which treats the retrospective schemas as explanations of the events in a causal sense, then it would seem to involve the same fatal ambiguity as Comtean positivism. Sorel's attempt to rescue Marxism from this trap occupied him for some twenty years.

II. Sorel's problem was to develop a variety of Marxism which respected the complexity of the historical process, and did not misread it in some rationalistic manner of attributing to the course of events the qualities of a logical process. During the 1890's, when he devoted an energetic flurry of articles and prefaces to the task of "revising" Marxism, his solution took the form of attempting to rescue an empirical Marx from a rationalistic Engels. His principal target was Engels' dialectical materialism; those who owed more to Engels than to, Marx "replaced real history with a succession of forms engendered by causes independent of human action; they reverted to Idealism; they substituted for class struggle antagonisms between abstractions and the resolution of antinomies." They think that "history is ordered by the immanent logic of concepts"; for them, "it is words that regulate things, signs which provide the motive power of history"; having constructed an ideal conception of the historical process, they imagine that this imposes necessity on the course of events itself. In reality, concepts such as "capitalism" or "the proletariat" are only abstractions, and to imagine that history is reducible to such concepts is to invest what is only "a product of the intelligence" with objective reality.¹⁴

Sorel presents Marx himself as an empirical sociologist; in fact, Marx's technique is distinguished so sharply from Engels' "historicism" that at times Marx emerges as something of a "methodological individualist" in the manner of Professor Popper. Marx, according to Sorel, did not mistake models for reality; when he used abstractions such as "productive forces," he did so only "symbolically," for beneath such references there was always an empirical appraisal of the concrete "producers."¹⁵ Marx saw history as human action mediated by the "logic of the situation," or, in Sorel's term, by the "social mechanism."¹⁶ If Marx sometimes used deterministic language, regarding socialist revolution as a necessary event, it was not because he deduced it from metahistorical categories, as Engels did, but because his empirical study of the social mechanism of the industrial society of his day convinced him that revolution was imminent; "since he believed revolution to be imminent, he did not warn his disciples of the contingent historical basis of the mechanism observed by him."¹⁷ As it happened, Marx's social observation was mistaken, for the revolution did not take place; but instead of blindly continuing to insist on the imminence of revolution, erecting Marx's empirical error into a necessary truth, socialists should continue Marx's empirical work examining the logic of contemporary society in order to determine the potential of the workers' movement.

It was considerations of this kind that lay behind Sorel's distinction between the two types of history in Le système historique de Renan. If one wants to make predictions and examine possibilities, then the relevant technique is that of causal analysis, and this should be conducted in terms of the projects of the actors themselves and the ways in which they interrelate. The concepts which Engels employed really belong to a more abstract order of reflection; they are essentially categories for organizing masses of accomplished facts in a meaningful way, and tell us nothing about the motive forces which brought the facts into being. Thus the distinction which Sorel was to make between the standpoint of the agent and the standpoint of the observer is foreshadowed, in 1899, by a distinction between the concrete groups within which people act and the descriptive abstractions employed in speculation. "To remain on the realistic ground of Marxism," he wrote, "it is necessary to speak not of 'society' and 'the proletariat,' but of economic and political organizations the functioning of which is known and about which one can reason. 'Society' and 'the proletariat' are passive aggregates; the state, local government, cooperatives, trade unions, and friendly societies are active bodies, which follow considered projects."¹⁸

However, Sorel found this distinction between the speculative and the concrete increasingly hard to sustain, for it imposed an unacceptable division between the sphere of empirical research and the sphere of meanings. Quite obviously, one cannot examine the potential of socialism unless one has some conception of what socialism is. Although he attempted, with Bernstein, to define socialism simply in terms of the workers' movement, he found it impossible to avoid considering the end to which it should develop. Although he attempted to dissimulate this end—"it is useless to discuss it at length," he wrote¹⁹—it was inescapably there, for he was prepared to identify socialism with the workers' movement only if it fulfilled certain strict conditions. It had to "struggle against bourgeois traditions" and acquire a sense of its "historic mission."²⁰ Such conceptions clearly belong to the eschatology which Sorel attributes to Engels rather than the empiricism which he considers Marxist, for they imply that the working class is something more than an empirical aggregate of men, "moved by the influence of observable sentiments"; they imply that the class has an essential nature, derived from its place in historical development, which empirical men must struggle to fulfill.

Similarly, Sorel was obliged to recognize that the "speculative" elements in the thought of Marx himself could not be so lightly dismissed; although the cruder elements of dialectical materialism could plausibly be attributed to Engels, Marx himself had quite obviously had some historical schema in mind. His conception of the transition from capitalism to communism, Sorel suggests, was a transposition of Hegel's vision of a process from the individual to the universal²¹; and while he would like to free the essential, sociological Marx from such metaphysical trimmings, for "it is impossible to show that such logical arrangements can govern the course of history," he has to admit, in other contexts, that Marxism cannot be understood in isolation from its Hegelian foundations. Sorel's objection to other revisionists of the period is that their evolutionary conception of socialism fails to do justice to "the Hegelian manner" of Marx, who saw history as a succession of epochs marked by "sharp oppositions."²²

By the turn of the century, Sorel was in fact prepared to abandon his distinction between the empirical and the speculative, admitting that the categories of empirical analysis could only be supplied non-empirically. In 1899, he admitted that Marx was "an impassioned man," who found it difficult to separate the scientific and persuasive parts of his thought, and had failed to distinguish between speculative constructions and real entities²³; by 1901, he was arguing that no such separation could be made, for all understanding of social events depended on "a personal conception" of a "process" held to be under way, "for example, the theory of class struggle in Marx depends on the idea which Marx held of the historical process by which the proletariat had to emancipate itself. If one suppresses the idea of the future of the world conceived by the author, the class struggle becomes no more than a vague notion of an antagonism between groups of interests. Everything in his system is bound together and depends on a preconceived idea of revolution."²⁴

III. Thus from arguing that true Marxism was a strictly empirical affair founded on patient, detailed research, Sorel developed a very different opinion of the nature of the doctrine, according to which it was to be seen as essentially speculative; the Marxist had to interpret the present in terms of an imagined process of development. In terms of Sorel's historical dualism, this involved abandoning the agent's standpoint for the observer's; just as the retrospective, speculative historian ignores the conceptions of the men of the past and locates their actions in the framework of the process which he has constructed, so the Marxist cannot rely simply on observation of the ideas and behavior current in the workers' movement, but must think of the present in terms of "the future of the world."

It was this logic that led Sorel to conclude that Marx's philosophy of history could rest only on a myth. For whereas the historian constructs a "process" with the advantage of hindsight, relating actions to later events of which the actors were unaware, the present cannot be understood retrospectively. Just as the history retrospectively constructed by present historians differs from history as it was experienced by the men of the past, so the historians of the future will not see the present as we see it. "The historians of the future," Sorel wrote, "are bound to discover that we labored under many illusions,"²⁵ for the meaning that we attach to events will not be the meaning that emerges after the event, when the general outlines of the "congealed mass" of accomplished facts will have become discernible.

This objection applied very forcibly to Marx, whose interpretation of the present, Sorel had realized, depended completely on a conception of the future by means of which contemporary development could be assessed. Marx had indulged in prospective speculation, whereas only retrospective speculation was possible; in short, he had neglected Hegel's dictum on the Owl of Minerva. He had applied to history as a whole conceptions such as "evolution" or "development" which could in fact be applied only to past history. "The term 'evolution' has a really precise sense only when it is applied to a definitively closed past in an attempt to explain this past by the present"²⁶; applying it to the present, therefore, involved a sort of pretense that the present state of things has no future, that its potential is exhausted, and that it can therefore be regarded as "finished," since no decisively new events will emerge to alter the relevant standpoint of interpretation. Marx's conception of history is therefore defensible only if one agrees from the outset that capitalism is exhausted, and that society is on the eve of a great catastrophe²⁷; Marxism itself obviously cannot afford such a prediction, for it rests on the assumption that the prediction is true.

Sorel is most Bergsonian here, for Bergson, too, argued that what is often regarded as prediction of the future is really only a stretching forward of the present, a mental act which is appropriate to static physical systems but inappropriate to vital phenomena.²⁸ Vital development is characterized by the emergence of genuine novelty which cannot be deduced from the patterns abstracted from past behavior; similarly, Sorel held that historical development involved genuine novelty and that the future could never be assumed away—Marx's conception of the imminent exhaustion of capitalism, for example, failed to take account of modifications ("mutations") such as finance capitalism which secured its continued survival.²⁹ Furthermore, Sorel agreed that while deterministic conceptions could to some extent be applied to past events, even though this misrepresented the quality of the durée which had produced them, they could have no place in the consideration of future events; thus Marx's error—Sorel makes explicit use of Bergsonian categories—was that he confused the se-faisant and the tout-fait, presenting the future, which would be the work of free creation, in mistakenly finished terms, appropriate only to the past.³⁰

The principal effect of this critique of Marx was to remove from Marxism its privileged status. Since the future is open there is no presently available standpoint from which to judge the historical meaning of the present; therefore, although prospective interpretations of contemporary development have the appearance of reflective speculation, since they locate events in terms of their long-term meaning, they have the status of actor's conceptions, not observer's conceptions; they are comparable to the ideas through which the men of the past interpreted their world, not to the privileged knowledge of observers, for the observers are, by definition, of the future.

Hence Marxism itself, as a philosophy of contemporary history, belongs to the realm of "exoteric" history, of consciousness and action, not to the "esoteric" realm of reflective knowledge; it is a contribution towards contemporary development, not a summary of historical evolution. Sorel's doctrine of the myth was the formal statement of this perception; the conceptions which Marx had regarded as elements of a philosophy of history are transferred to the consciousness of the "militant." The revolutionary syndicalist is to engage in a kind of simulated retrospection; he is to imagine that "he has been transported into a very distant future, so that he can consider actual events as elements of a long and completed development."³¹ The interpretation afforded by the myth is explicitly compared to the retrospective notion of "development" constructed by the historian; just as the historian traces a "theoretical axis" through a host of detail, so the myth imposes an idea of finality on the complex mass of situations which comprises present reality.³² The militant's right to disregard the complexity of the present in order to impose a unitary interpretation upon it is the same as the historian's right to impose a selective "schema" upon the events of the past.

Whereas the historian makes his selection in the light of subsequent events which he knows to have taken place, the selective vision of the syndicalist can rest only on hypothesis; he can only imagine that he is looking at the present from the standpoint of the future, he cannot know what will be known about the course of present events in the real future. It has usually been thought that Sorel welcomed this situation, rejoicing in the vital unpredictability of history and applauding the myth of the general strike as a romantic "gesture" with unpredictable consequences. But nothing could be further from the truth. Sorel was in fact a stern opponent of romantic gestures; when he quoted, from Marx, George Sand's "Combat or death! Bloody struggle or nothing!" it was only in order to reject this notion as irresponsible and immature.³³ He approved of the myth of the general strike because he approved of its probable consequences, and thought it valuable as a revolutionary strategy; his estimate of its likely effects is presented in Reflections on Violence in almost obsessive detail.

Alternative strategies, notably the electoral politics of the socialist reformers, he regarded as "irrational" because "they leave the future completely indeterminate."³⁴ In addition to the syndicalist militants, Sorel proposed that there should be a "social science" of revolution, formulating "rules of prudence" and speculating shrewdly on the probable consequences of the militant's action³⁵; in addition to violence, in other words, there should be "reflection on violence," although this reflection, being prospective, could not provide the certainty which Marx had assumed.

Thus Sorel's myth was a kind of make-believe rationalism; the highly intellectualized speculation of Marx, in condensed form, was transferred from the theorists to the militants, who were to continue believing it to be true; while the more sophisticated theorists, knowing that such speculation was beyond the scope of demonstration, would attempt to supply by prudential calculation that certainty which Marx had wrongly assumed. What Sorel was attempting to recover, in a patched-up form, was the conviction that contemporary development made sense as a stage in the evolution of an objective, knowable, and total historical process, and that, consequently, action could be taken in the secure knowledge that it contributed to the ultimate ends of history. As such, it had more in common with Hegel than with Bergson; for the myth, in Sorel's view, was not like the elan which contributes to an unforeseeable evolution, but like the "passion" which is essential to history, but is of value only as an instrument of a process of development.³⁶ Sorel believed, with Hegel, that history was "ruseful," but he did not regard it as "rational"; one, therefore, had to connive with it, projecting as accurately as possible the consequences of current convictions. Thus any socialist theory had to contain not only a conception of the meaning of history but also consideration of the impact of this conception on the "mechanisms" of contemporary history; otherwise the tactics of the socialists would not generate "a process appropriate to their nature,"³⁷ for the historical process cannot be relied upon to conform to the intentions and meanings of those who contribute to it.

IV. By means of this proposed division of labor between militant and theorist, Sorel believed that he had rescued the essentials of Marxism and "recomposed" the doctrine.³⁸ The myth of the general strike would, he calculated, bring into operation a process which would lead to socialist revolution. It would intensify conflict between workers and employers, ruin the politicians' plans for social peace, and in general return the historical actors to the roles which Marx had written for them. But though the doctrine's essentials may have been preserved, there would no longer seem to be any reason for regarding it as true; its validity, in its revised syndicalist form, would seem to rest simply on the decision that it was worth preserving; it would only be made true by a well-conceived revolutionary strategy. In the last resort, therefore, the myth would seem to have become a theory of "commitment." However, there are hints in Sorel's theory of an attempt to claim more than this for it; for the syndicalists, in his view, were the bearers of a universal value.

Sorel found it necessary to distinguish between the consciousness of the historical actors and the reflective knowledge of the historian because he saw history as a complex and devious process which did not correspond to the intentions of those who made it. The results of actions are modified to such an extent by the "mechanisms" of the historical environment that their meaning can only be understood after the event. History is therefore an alien process, a "weight" on human action, following a blind logic of its own which is incommensurable with our intelligence.³⁹ Such a conception of the alien nature of history may be connected with a vision of human unity which, by suppressing conflict, will eliminate the impersonal mechanisms which distort human effort, and thus render history "transparent" to the participants whose common will it would reflect. There is such a component, for example, in Sartre's desire to suppress the "polyvalency" of the world and dissolve history into "the men who make it in common"⁴⁰; and Sartre's conception is anticipated in significant respects by a suggestion made by Cournot, whose writings Sorel knew and admired. Cournot's view of history in general, as a set of intersecting causal chains which can be organized into broad tendencies by the historian, was very like Sorel's. But within this general process, Cournot singled out for special consideration the development of science; as science becomes more organized, and as communications between practitioners improve, it will tend to leave its "historical phase," that is, its development will no longer be composed of a succession of causes and effects, but will reflect the working out of the collective purpose of the scientific community; its evolution, in other words, will become rational as distinct from causal.⁴¹ What is especially significant is that Cournot contrasted scientific history with political history, which is, he said, of all the aspects of history, that in which, "the fortuitous, the accidental and the unforeseen" exercise the most powerful influence, and which, therefore, can be understood only as a series of causes and effects.

Sorel put forward a precisely similar conception, though in his case, it was technological rather than scientific history that was contrasted with political history. As far as technology was concerned, Sorel held what amounted to a full-fledged theory of progress. Those who contribute towards the development of technology are united by a purpose which is immanent in the apparatus of advanced industrial production; as a producer, each of us has "a modest place in a society urged on by an irresistible current of productive scientific research."⁴² The direction of this current is indeed unpredictable, for in Sorel's view scientific theories could only follow concrete advances in technology; nevertheless the development of science and technology is progressive because its ultimate goal, the subjection of nature to human control, is a universally accepted value, and therefore the unpredictable inventions contribute towards a wider purpose.

Hannah Arendt has suggested that Vico, today, would have been far more likely to turn to technology as an example of the self-made pattern which man collectively imposes on himself than to the history of civilization in general.⁴³ Like Dr. Arendt's hypothetical modern Vico, Sorel accepted the view of technology as a human, and hence intelligible creation, but looked more skeptically on the history of civilization as a whole. For outside the technological sphere, there was no common purpose to render change intelligible. Political history, in particular, reflected only the random clash of ideologies and personal ambition. In fact it was quite possible—and Sorel believed this to be true of early twentieth-century France—that politics could actually impede the development of production⁴⁴; in their hungry quest for votes, politicians propagated plans for social peace, distracting the capitalists from their true role of ruthless profiteering, and sponsored pacific wage increases in order to settle strikes, turning the workers into money-conscious petit bourgeois and thus distracting their attention from the factory. In general, democratic politics turned people into citizens, and degraded ideas of m tier; but as citizens, men contributed nothing to the single valuable task of increasing the productive power of man.

Thus Sorel allotted a special status to technological history. On the whole, he held a relativist view of historical reconstructions; the patterns discerned by historians are only "theoretical axes" with a largely subjective basis. However, technological history was to be exempted from this judgment, for Sorel held—in opposition to certain pragmatists—that scientific theories were true, and hence the development of scientific knowledge was to be regarded as an absolute, an axis of development derived not from a "subjective" point of view but from the standpoint of a permanent human value. The products of technology, therefore, unlike social and political institutions, are "commensurable with our intelligence"; hence technological history has the progressive character ascribed by rationalists to the historical process as a whole, for it is the history of an "artificial milieu" constructed by the collective intelligence of the productive groups.⁴⁵ The scope of this artificial milieu—or "artificial nature," as he calls it in his last book, to distinguish it from "natural nature"—is identical with the scope of the rational and of the human; for this is the sphere which man wrests from nature, and which alone is comprehensible to him. Nature cannot really be understood; it can only be interpreted metaphorically in various ways, but the artificial nature can be understood rationally and objectively, since technology can demonstrate in practice the truth of scientific laws.

Sorel thought that the syndicalists, as the community of industrial workers, were the group which embodied this mission against nature. He regarded them as men who were totally devoted to the factory, and whose victory would inaugurate a civilization in which industrial work would absorb the individual completely—as industry advanced, Sorel predicted and hoped, the hours of work would become longer and longer, and the nature of work increasingly technical and difficult.⁴⁶ In other words, syndicalist man would inhabit the artificial nature, constructed by technology, to the exclusion of the irrational natural nature; hence the history of technology, hitherto a sacred thread in an otherwise profane history, would become the whole of history. The function of the syndicalists' violence was to protect the factory from the malign influences of politics; for in Sorel's view—Saint-Simonian rather than Marxist, insofar as it presented politics as a parasitic growth rather than as a functional superstructure—political life had rather the same qualities as the despised natural nature; it involved insidious emotions and appetities, it was devious, unpredictable, treacherous, and destructive.

The function of violence, therefore, was not at all creative; it was strictly instrumental. Sorel approved of the syndicalists' violence because, by rebuffing the pacific politicians, it established a strict demarcation between the artificial nature of the industrial world and the indeterminacy of politics. Violence, in short, was to refine history down to its only rational element, the history of technology; and as history was purged of its irrational elements, becoming the history of the collective technological endeavor, the dualism of experienced history and retrospective history would vanish, for experience would become collective, and the course of events would reflect the collective will of mankind.

V. Thus it is misleading to regard Sorel as a theorist of commitment and to ignore his profound debt to the rationalism which he criticized. For in the first place, he shrank from the conclusion to which his criticism of Marx had led him, his demonstration that Marx had confused retrospective and prospective reflection; he continued to attempt a "philosophy of modern history,"⁴⁷ even though he had discovered that such an attempt rested on a rationalistic illusion, since only past history could be the object of speculation. In the second place, he did not see his attachment to syndicalism as an arbitrary decision, or as a commitment adopted for the sake of sheer vitality or excitement; on the contrary, he saw it as an attempt to remove arbitrariness and emotion from history altogether, by expunging the irrational elements from history. Sorel's technological Utopia, of course, lacks the rationalist content of Marx's "realm of freedom"; furthermore, one should not overlook Sorel's personal irrationality and the romanticized primitivism characteristic of much of his later thought. But I believe that in the limited context in which I have been considering him here, there is a case for regarding Sorel as a rationalist manqué, who tried to retain the substantive ambitions of nineteenth-century philosophy of history while skeptically narrowing the scope of reason.

NOTES

¹ For criticism in three very different styles: K. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London, 1945); E. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago, 1952), Ch. IV; A. Camus, L'Homme Révolté (Paris, 1951).

² J. Benda, La trahison des clercs (Paris, 1928), 183.

³Les illusions du progrès (Paris, 1908).

⁴D'Aristote à Marx (Paris, 1935), 131ff.; Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat (Paris, 1919), 35, 184.

⁵Le système historique de Renan (Paris, 1905), 3.

⁶ Sorel's comment (ibid., 25) that Scott was "prudent" not to make real historical heroes the central characters of his novels anticipates a theme of Georg Lukàcs' study, The Historical Novel, Eng. trans. (London, 1969), 35ff.

⁷ Letter to Croce, 23 April 1898, Critica, 25 (1927), 169.

⁸Les illusions du progrès, 7-8.

⁹ L. D. Easton and K. H. Guddat, Writings of the young Marx on Philosophy and Society (New York, 1967), 375.

¹⁰ For a particularly clear example: N. Poulantzas, "The Problem of the Capitalist State," New Left Review, 58 (Nov.-Dec. 1969), 70.

¹¹ Compare Sartre's rejection of the view that men are "les simples véhicules de forces inhumaines qui régiraient à travers eux le monde social," in Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris, 1960), 61, with Althusser's conception of history as "l'inaudible et illisible notation des effets d'une structure des structures," in Lire le Capital (Paris, 1970), 14.

¹² Preface to F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Eng. trans. (London, 1967), 12.

¹³ A. Labriola, Karl Marx, French trans. (Paris, 1910), 110ff.

¹⁴ "Y a-t-il de l'utopie dans le marxisme?," Revue de métaphysique et de morale (1899), 165ff.

¹⁵Ibid., 167.

¹⁶ Preface for S. Merlino, Formes et essence du socialisme (Paris, 1898), V.

¹⁷ "Y a-t-il de l'utopie dans le marxisme?," 158.

¹⁸lbid., 159.

¹⁹ Merlino, op cit., XXVII

²⁰ "L'éthique du socialisme," G. Belot et al., Morale sociale (Paris, 1899), 150-51.

²¹ "Y a-t-il de l'utopie dans le marxisme?," 173.

²² Merlino, op. cit., XL-XLI.

²³Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat, 182-92.

²⁴ Preface to F. Pelloutier, Histoire des bourses du travail (Paris, 1902), 2-3.

²⁵Reflections on Violence, trans. T. E. Hulme (New York, 1961), 149; Réflexions sur la violence (Paris, 1908).

²⁶Introduction à l'économie moderne (Paris, 1903; 2nd ed., 1922), 2.

²⁷ "La marche au socialisme," Les Illusions du progrès, 4th ed., 374-75.

²⁸ A major theme of Les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris, 1889), and of L'évolution créatrice (Paris, 1907); also R. Aron, "Note sur Bergson et l'histoire," Les études bergsoniennes, IV (1956), 41ff.

²⁹ "La marche au socialisme," 373ff.

³⁰L'indépendance, II (1911), 30. Sartre makes a very similar criticism of orthodox Marxism, which, he says, confuses "teleological" and "finalist" explanations: Critique de la raison dialectique, 40.

³¹Reflections on Violence, 58; in Sorel's idea of simulated retrospection there is perhaps an echo of Proudhon's fear that only posterity could learn the lessons of history; cf. De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières (Paris, 1864), Nouvelle édition, 1924, 73-74.

³²Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat, 11-12.

³³Introduction à l'économie moderne, vi, xi.

³⁴Reflections on violence, 89-90.

³⁵ Preface for Pelloutier, op. cit., 3.

³⁶ G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York, 1956), 32-33.

³⁷Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat. loc. cit.

³⁸ The theme of La décomposition du marxisme (Paris, 1908).

³⁹Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat, 7.

⁴⁰Critique de la raison dialectique, 63.

⁴¹ A. A. Cournot, Considérations sur la marche des idées et des événements dans les temps modernes (Paris, 1872), 8-9.

⁴²De l'utilité du pragmatisme (Paris, 1921), 28.

⁴³ H. Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York, 1954), 57-58.

⁴⁴Reflections on Violence, 137.

⁴⁵D'Aristote à Marx, Chaps. XIII, XIV; De Vutilité du pragmatisme, 83-85, 413-27. Unlike Bergson, who regarded the truths of physics as only predictive abstractions, and looked to the "intuition" of the biologist, Sorel retained a positivistic attachment to physics, and regarded biology as no more scientific than sociology.

⁴⁶De Vutilité du pragmatisme, 426-27.

⁴⁷Reflections on Violence, 57.