In 1907, Louis Dimier, who worked as a professor at the Institut d’Action française (where a Proudhon Circle initiated by Georges Valois, Edouard Berth and Henri Lagrange held its meetings), mentioned him as one of the Masters of 19th-century counter-revolution.
A theoretician of ‘proletarian violence’, which he considered ‘truly magnificent and heroic’, Georges Sorel conceived of socialism as ‘a practical philosophy’. He contested society’s division into disparate classes, fulminating against the ‘parasitic intellectuals’ of the workers’ movement.
He writes: ‘Revolutionary syndicalism would correspond rather well to the Napoleonian armies whose soldiers accomplished countless feats while retaining the ability to remain poor’.
In 1840, five-year-old children worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day in cotton mills. Such was the age of ‘unbridled capitalism’. Nowadays, it is in the West that the living standards enjoyed by the greatest number of people are highest, and visibly so. The question at hand thus focuses more on the quality of existence than on the issue of product quantity.
Whenever it seized power, ‘socialism’ was compelled to disavow itself, unless, to use an expression coined by Mr Pierre Mania-Teruel,277 it turned into ‘panzer-Communism’. The Soviet state, which was doomed to wither away and give birth to a fraternal city, is the most cold-blooded of all cold-blooded monsters. It represents the ‘truncheon’ mentioned by Lenin in The State and Revolution.
By 1933, Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu278 had already remarked: ‘When order is no longer found in order, it must be sought in revolution; the only revolution we contemplate is thus that of order’ (in La revolution nécessaire,279 Grasset).
On 17th May, 1846, two years prior to the publication of the Communist Manifesto, Proudhon wrote to Karl Marx, saying: ‘Let us avoid turning ourselves into the leaders of a new form of intolerance! Let us, instead, welcome and encourage all protests. Let us wilt away all exclusions and mysticisms. Should this condition be met, I shall join your association. If it is not, then my answer is no!’
The answer, ultimately, was ‘no’; and the dispute still rages.
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Le Socialisme français face au marxisme, an essay by Robert Aron, Grasset, 279 pages.
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Of all French socialists, the one that attracted most attention among essayists is undoubtedly Proudhon. To date, more than fifty literary works have been dedicated to him, especially by Jacques Bourgeat (Proudhon, père du socialisme français,280 Denoël, 1943), Henri de Lubac (Proudhon et le christianisme,281 Seuil, 1945), Pierre Haubtmann (Marx et Proudhon, leur rapports personnels,282 Economie et humanism, 1947; Proudhon, Genèse d’un antithéiste,283 Mame, 1969), and Georges Gurvitch (Proudhon sociologue,284 CDU, 1955; Proudhon, PUF, 1965; Proudhon et Marx. Une confrontation,285 CDU-SEDES, 1966). The two most recent books on the topic are those authored respectively by Mr Bernard Voyenne (Le fédéralisme de P. J. Proudhon,286 Presses d’Europe, Nice, 1973), which includes a chronology and a complete bibliography (pages 189 to 206), and by Mr Jacques Langlois (Défense et actualité de Proudhon,287 Payot, 1976), a well-intentioned book that does suffer from being rather loquacious.
In Leftist milieus, the comparison between Marx’s and Proudhon’s respective merits has traditionally given rise to a great deal of debate. In Proudhon et la démagogie bonapartiste288 (Ed. Sociales, 1958), Mr Georges Cogniot expresses the point of view espoused by the French Communist Party. Some syndicalist currents declare themselves ‘Proudhonian’, but this attitude has attracted the criticism of various personalities such as Mr Boris Souvarine (as seen in his article entitled ‘Le contrat social’,289 March–April 1965, as well as in his letter to the ‘Proletarian Revolution’, dated August–September 1974).
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Georges Sorel
Although violence is still on the daily menu, the 50th anniversary of Georges Sorel’s death would have passed completely unnoticed if Marcel Rivière Editions had not come up with the idea of reediting his Reflections on Violence.
‘Sorel, a 20th-century enigma, seems to be an offshoot of Proudhon, an enigmatic 19th-century personality’, Daniel Halévy stated in the preface to Mr Pierre Andreu’s book entitled Notre maître, M. Sorel,290 Grasset, 1953). What an enigma he was indeed, this doctrinaire of gigantic build, with his non-protruding ears, large nose, bright eyes, and white beard; this relentless socialist, who felt uneasy in the face of the Russian Revolution and admired Renan, Hegel, Bergson, Maurras, Marx and Mussolini, while also sympathising with the Action française.
Georges Sorel was born in Cherbourg on 2nd November, 1847. He is of double Norman descent, both through the Manche and the Calvados. His first cousin, Albert Sorel, would become a historian of the Empire and Revolution.
A polytechnics expert and a bridge and roadway engineer, Sorel had, until 1892, paid little to no attention to social issues. His books, which are now hardly read at all, have, however, lost none of their value. This is particularly true of Les illusions du progrès,291 Réflexions sur la violence,292 De l’Eglise et de l’Etat,293 De L’utilité du pragmatisme,294 La décomposition du marxisme,295 D’Aristote à Marx,296 La ruine du monde antique,297 Le procès de Socrate,298 and many others.
Initially published in 1908, Reflections on Violence was rereleased in 1973 as part of the Etudes sur le devenir social299 collection headed by Mr Julien Freund, a professor at the University of Strasbourg.
It immediately becomes apparent that the book represents the fundamental literary work of revolutionary syndicalism.
Displaying hostility towards parliamentary socialism and Jean Jaurès (since both have been sustained by bourgeois ideology), Georges Sorel contrasts them with what he has baptised ‘the new school’. The latter considers strikes to be the essential means of making social demands. It is, in fact, through general strikes that society will be divided into enemy factions and the bourgeois state destroyed. Strikes are ‘the most radiant manifestation of individualistic strength among insurgent masses’.
Strikes entail violence. Unlike other contemporary socialists (with the sole exception of Proudhon), Sorel sees no contradiction between work and violence. He is reluctant to rant and rave about ‘the workers’ desire for peace’. In his eyes, violence is an act of war: ‘An act of struggle, one that is reminiscent of the strife experienced by armies during a military campaign’, he wrote.
‘The attitude in which he equates strikes to acts of war is a decisive one’, Mr Claude Polin300 points out in the preface to the new edition of Reflections on Violence. ‘For everything that has to do with war takes place without any hatred and without any vengeful state of mind: in war, one does not proceed to kill the vanquished; one does not burden harmless beings with the consequences of the tribulations that the armies may have undergone on the battlefield’. This explains why Sorel disapproves of the ‘vengeful violence’ that characterised the revolutionaries of 1793: ‘One must be wary of confusing violence with senseless sanguinary brutalities’.
In the Beginning, There Was Action
Adopting the now traditional distinction between ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ warfare, Sorel contrasts bourgeois violence with proletarian violence. From his perspective, the latter has a twofold virtue. Not only does it ensure future revolutions, but it is also the only way for European nations (which have all been ‘numbed by humanitarianism’) to reclaim their former vigour.
Class struggle is thus defined as a confrontation between firm yet not blind resolves. In this respect, violence becomes the manifestation of a certain will. It simultaneously plays a kind of moral role in which it produces an ‘epic’ state of mind.
‘Violence is an intellectual doctrine’, Sorel told his friend Jean Variot. ‘It is the will of powerful minds that know where they are heading. Genuine violence is what is necessary to follow through on one’s ideas’ (in Propos de Georges Sorel,301 Gallimard, 1935).
Sorel would have approved of Goethe’s following words: ‘In the beginning,
there was action’. In his eyes, men of action are, regardless of what they do, always superior to the ones that suffer the actions of others: ‘Genuine violence is what places the pride of free men at the forefront’.
In order to reinvigorate our current world, what is required is a ‘myth’, meaning a theme that is neither true nor false, but has a great impact upon minds, mobilising people and inciting them to undertake action.
Georges Sorel considered 19th-century Prussia to be ancient Rome’s heir.
In his praise of ‘Prussian virtues’, he adopts a tone that is rather reminiscent of Moeller Van den Bruck302 in Der preussische Stil. ‘Sorel, the artisan, holds all well-done work in great esteem’, remarks Mr Claude Polin. ‘And well-done work must embody an end in and of itself, independently of all resulting benefits. This disinterestedness is what characterises violence: one finds, at the very core of Sorel’s thoughts, the intuition that all work is struggle, which is especially true of well-done work, and that no work could ever be done well enough unless it involves a struggle. This idea thus adopts the perception that work is of an essentially promethean nature. For all work is defined as a transformation of things that encompasses the necessity to transform not only oneself, but others as well’.
Gradually, Sorel ended up condemning democracy (which he described as the ‘true dictatorship of incapacity’), bringing together the strongest views of Maurras, Bakunin303 and Secrétan.304
Nevertheless, he considered proletarian dictatorship to be an illusion: ‘One must be quite naïve to assume that those who profit from demagogical dictatorship would readily relinquish the advantages that they have reaped from it’. He simultaneously rejected the avant-gardist role that intellectual Bolshevism claimed to be playing: ‘Socialism’s entire future lies in the autonomous development of labour unions’ (in Matériaux pour une théorie du proletariat).305 ‘Marx has not always enjoyed a great deal of inspiration’, he went on to say. ‘In his writings, what he introduced were, at times, old-fashioned notions that originated from the minds of utopians’.
This conception of action is in complete contradiction with all ‘avant-gardist’ theories (including Trotskyism, for instance). One encounters it, however, in the postulations formulated by the advocates of revolutionary syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism.
In the end, it is not for sentimental reasons that Sorel chose to defend the proletariat so fervently (as was the case with Zola),306 nor is it due to some petty bourgeois taste for self-blame or even to some kind of ‘class awareness’ on his part. The real reason lay in his conviction that within the bourgeois society, it is only among the people that one can find the vigour which the ruling classes have long lost. Aware of the ‘illusions of progress’, he remarks that both societies and men are mortal. He contrasts this fatality with a certain will to live, whose many manifestations include violence itself.
Were he alive now, Sorel would not only denounce our mercantile society but also all thought leaders of contestation. As written by Mr Polin, ‘Marcuse would have represented, in Sorel’s eyes, the prime example of a man that has been afflicted with degeneration as a result of his idyllic belief in progress; a man to whom progress was a source of disappointment because of his utter inability to understand it and his unrealistic expectations of it; a man incapable of pinning his hopes on anything but exacerbated and radicalised progress, meaning on the dream of an abundance that is so automatic that it would bestow happiness upon people by enabling the disorderly quenching of the most insane passions; someone who is, in short, unable to comprehend that the very source of evil lies in man’s devirilisation through economic faith’.
The Name of Ancient Antioch
From 1907 onwards, Georges Sorel became the architect of a reconciliation between Right-oriented and Left-oriented anti-democrats. The tool that allowed this reconciliation to take place was La Revue critique des idées et des livres,307 in which nationalist Georges Valois published the results of his inquiry into The Monarchy and the Working Class.
The year of 1910 saw the publication of another magazine, La Cité française, followed by L’Indépendance from 1911 to 1913. The contributors included Georges Sorel, Jean Variot, Edouard Berth and Daniel Halévy, but also the Tharaud brothers, René Benjamin, Maurice Barrès and Paul Bourget.
In 1913, journalist Edouard Berth, who authored a book entitled Méfaits des intellectuels,308 hailed Maurras and Sorel as ‘the two masters of both French and European regeneration’. In September 1914, however, Sorel wrote to him, saying: ‘We are entering an era that could be described rather accurately using the name of ancient Antioch. Renan gave us a very precise depiction of this metropolis, with its courtesans, charlatans and merchants. We shall soon have the pleasure of witnessing Maurras being condemned by the Vatican — a just punishment for his misbehaviour. Incidentally, what would a royalist party be like in a France whose sole preoccupation is centred upon enjoying the easy life of Antioch?’
Sociologist Gaëtan Pirou explains: ‘Sorel reproached Maurras for being excessively democratic, a reproach that may, at first sight, seem rather paradoxical. In actual fact, what Sorel meant to say was that Maurras, being both a positivist and an intellectualist, had only rejected democracy in its political shape and not its philosophical foundation’ (in Georges Sorel, Marcel Rivière, 1927).
National-Revolutionaries
Sorel will have influenced Barrès and Péguy309 as well as Lenin. In his Materialism and Empirio-criticism, the latter would, however, denounce him as a ‘chaotic mind’.
As pointed out by Mr Alexandre Croix310 in The Proletarian Revolution, it was Italy that took over from France as ‘Sorelism’s land of choice’. For it was there that Sorel initially exerted a major influence upon the syndicalist school led by future Labour Minister (1920–1921) Arturo Labriola. In 1903, the latter proceeded to translate L’avenir socialiste des syndicats311 in the Avanguardia (Milan). One of his lieutenants, Enrico Leone, wrote the preface to the first version of Sorel’s Reflections, which was originally published in Italy under the title Lo sciopero generale e la violenza (General Strikes and Violence, 1906).
Sorel would then go on to influence Vilfredo Pareto, Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile and, through Hubert Lagardelle, Benito Mussolini.
In Germany, Sorelism would find its extension in national-revolutionary currents (under the Weimar Republic) during the mid-1920s (See Michael Freund’s Georges Sorel. Der revolutionäre Konservatismus, Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt/M., 1932 and 1972).
Upon Sorel’s death in 1922, monarchist Georges Valois (in L’Action française) and socialist Robert Louzon (in La vie ouvrière)312 would pay homage to him in a display of equal admiration. A few weeks later, while entering Rome, Mussolini313 would tell a Spanish Journalist: ‘Sorel is the one to whom I owe most’.
On the very same day, both the Soviet government and the Fascist state offered to take charge of maintaining Sorel’s grave.
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‘Reflections on Violence’, an essay by Georges Sorel, published by Marcel Rivière (22 Soufflot Street, 75005 Paris, France), 394 pages.
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In a collection of articles entitled Inquisitions (José Corti, 1974), Mr Jules Monnerot published a remarkable essay on ‘Georges Sorel, or the Introduction to Modern Myths’ (pages 7 to 47). In it, he describes the ‘coherence of the Sorelian approach’ through a constant quest for the ‘sublime’. The latter term defines the collective and individual source of ‘the psychological motivations that remain invincible at a certain historical time — invincible within the event itself’. In Sorel’s eyes, the sublime is defined as a ‘mental nourishment’ that is essential for western societies. Should it ever vanish, it is decadence that would surface. Mr Monnerot writes: ‘The entire secret behind Sorel’s migration from Marxist socialism to revolutionary syndicalism and from then on to activist nationalism and a sort of Bolshevism or National-Socialism that death prevented him from fully conceiving, indeed the very secret beh
ind his entire literary work, seems to be contained in this sentence of his: “The sublime perished in the bourgeoisie”’.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, several books have been dedicated to Sorel, especially by Frenchmen Pierre Lasserre, Georges Goliéry, Victor Sartre, J. Rennes, P. Angel, Edouard Berth, Gaëtan Pirou, Jean Variot, René Johannet, and many more. In Italy, Mr Paolo Pastori recently published an anthology of ‘anti-democratic’ Sorelian texts (Le illusioni della democrazia, Giovanni Volpe, Rome, 1973).
Nowadays, Sorel’s works (most of which have been published by Marcel Rivière Editions) are virtually impossible to find. Several collections of his texts, however, are currently being prepared.
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Vilfredo Pareto
‘Plato uses a simple and efficacious manner to obtain either universal consent or the assent of the wise: he has an interlocutor grant it to him. In the Theaetetus, Socrates asks: “Is movement not a good thing, and its contrary the very opposite?” To which Plato has Theaetetus respond: “It seems so”. Had there been another interlocutor, however, he might have answered: “I do not know, oh Socrates, what you mean to say through this rigmarole”, thus bidding universal consent, the assent of wise men, the blessing of reason, etc. farewell’.
A Logical-Experimental Science
Born in Paris to Italian parents, sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) is one of the main representatives of the elitist school. In his Machiavellians (Calmann-Lévy), James Burnham314 ranks him among the ‘defenders of freedom’, along with Machiavelli, Michels, Georges Sorel and Mosca.
Systems and Debates Page 16