Philosopher of Violence
Georges Sorel, Prophet Without Honor. (Harvard Historical Studies, Volume lix.)
by Richard Humphrey.
Harvard. 311 pp. $4.00.
A few thinkers in the 19th century had foreseen the coming reversion of politics to a pattern of violence and irrationality; in a complacent and optimistic age, their disillusioned clear-sightedness was exceptional and admirable. Some of these prophets of doom, Jakob Burckhardt for instance, deplored the trend they saw to be in the ascendancy. Others, on the contrary, seemed to welcome it. Georges Sorel, the hero of Mr. Humphrey’s volume, is chiefly remembered today as the advocate of physical violence and of irrational myths as the instruments of a superior type of politics. Was he not, then, the intellectual ancestor par excellence of present-day totalitarianism? Mr. Humphrey says no, all appearances to the contrary; and those who study Sorel at first hand will tend to agree that he has a valid case. Sorel did extol both violence and the political myth, but neither of these concepts, as he evolved them, coincides with the totalitarian version of myth and of violence.
What did Sorel actually teach? Since he was not a systematic thinker and shifted his ground almost continually, we cannot propose any brief formula as the essence of Sorelian doctrine. A few dominant attitudes and theses, however, recur constantly in all his work. One of these attitudes is his choking rage against politics and politicians of the Third Republic, particularly of the progressive and socialist brand. To him, a socialist or liberal in politics was a sinister fraud, wanting only to live luxuriously at the expense of the public and, to do this, deliberately sacrificing the cause he professed to serve. Sorel defined a progressive (and in particular, a socialist) politician as a man who systematically befuddled the minds and debased the mores of his constituents in order to live like a bourgeois. Sorel was indeed, as Mr. Humphrey says, a “moralist” in politics, and a very grouchy and uncharitable one, full of self-righteousness and venom. But he was not merely a puritanical grouch. Another dominant aspect of his personality was his consuming thirst for greatness and sublimity.
Sorel suffered from the smallness of his age. He was haunted, tormented, and inspired by one question: how could the world (to him as a very typical Frenchman, the world meant in reality France) again breathe the pure air of the sublime and heroic’? After the rise of Germany and the debacle of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, military glory was out of the question. But there was one field in which epic glory was still to be won, that of social revolution. Here, the Latin peoples, and particularly the French, had a great advantage (if they would only use it) over their German and Anglo-Saxon contemporaries. The proletariat in the Latin countries (as distinct from its despicable political leaders) had a heroic conception of the social struggle, far above the pedestrian bread-and-butter outlook of Anglo-Saxon labor and the bloodless intellectual pedantry of German Marxism. Here was the historical vocation of French syndicalism: it could, if it would, remake the Great Revolution and recapture its glory; doing this, it would also regenerate human civilization.
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History shows, according to Sorel, that such a mission of cultural regeneration depends on two things: on a “myth” filling the soul with a vision of sublime greatness, leaving behind all base everyday interests; and on “violence,” that is, readiness to stake one’s life in physical combat against an enemy force. Without a myth and war waged in its name, nothing great can be achieved; and without greatness, human culture must perish. In our age, Sorel thought, the only myth capable of inspiring heroic deeds was that of the “general strike,” conceived by him as an act of war. What was needed to save culture, then, was an extreme and clear-cut division of society into two hostile camps: proletarians who would fight, not for higher wages but for total liberation—meaning the elimination of bourgeois control; and bourgeois who would take up the challenge and also fight to the death, not for profit but for power. To the devil with those who gloss things over and preach social justice and cooperation among classes! They, the soft-hearted bourgeois liberals and the conciliatory socialist politicians, were the enemies of mankind. The only “good” people were those who would deepen the class conflict to the utmost. The real proletarians must be blasphemers against all bourgeois ideals, just as the early Christians were blasphemers against the emperor-God. They must deny patriotism and the flag; they must reject the idea of nation. The Sorel who said this was, at the same time, an ardent French nationalist; but this is how his mind worked. He was always inconsistent, but always for the sake of consistency.
Enough has been said to show that in their Sorelian setting, neither violence nor myth has a totalitarian character. Violence to him did not mean terror; it meant a heroic and chivalrous war against combatants on the other side. This war, he believed, would not involve great destruction and loss of life; the victims would be few but illustrious. And once victory was won, the lives and dignity of the vanquished would be spared. No reign of terror would be instituted; only politicians, Sorel declared, were capable of the baseness of police and judicial terrorism. And as to the “myth,” it had nothing to do with mass indoctrination. The Sorelian myth was a dream welling up from the depth of the soul spontaneously, involving neither coercion nor manipulation from above. The final consummation of the great regenerative war, Sorel thought, would be a sublime era in which the “producers,” having achieved their freedom, would organize society on an anarchic, individualist, and cooperative basis.
This is, as we see, an intellectual edifice of heroic proportions, built in the grand style. It is also built, alas, on thin air, without a solid basis in reality. Sorel lived long enough to see that regeneration-through-war, as he conceived it, was not for this world, and he recognized that whatever inspired the French proletariat of his day, it was not his myth. For a while he thought that his myth had at last become reality in the Russian Revolution, and he saluted Lenin dithyrambically. But Soviet reality, too, disabused him.
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Sorel was a pathetic, great, lonely figure. Absurd in his petulance and his enthusiasm alike, he was a “pure fool,” he was single-minded in his devotion to the ideal of regenerating mankind through greatness. The last thing we can say about him is that he had insights about political reality that were valid for his time and ours.
But this is precisely what Mr. Humphrey would have us believe. He calls Sorel a “prophet of our age,” along with Nietzsche and Freud, arguing somewhat along the following lines: Explosive and destructive energy, as symbolized by the atomic bomb, is the basic fact of our time. Among pre-atomic thinkers, the three mentioned above in particular were those who sensed what was coming and in time proposed a “cure” to save mankind from ruin. “All three men proposed the same cure: if anxiety is to be replaced by harmony and hatred by love man must regain his self-respect, he must accept the energies at his disposal and use them maturely for his own welfare and for the welfare of others.”
It seems to me that Sorel got mixed up in Mr. Humphrey’s mind with Erich Fromm somewhere along the way. His idea of violence is equated with the psychoanalytic concept that healthy release of aggression is a necessary precondition for benevolent and harmonious “object relationships.” In actual fact, however, Sorel’s concept of violence had nothing to do with such hygienic and prophylactic considerations.
Sorel looked to war, not as a means for man to “abreact” anxiety and become healthy, but as the only thing that will enable future generations to acquire a lofty and heroic spiritual heritage on which they may live. He wanted to regenerate mankind through a grand illusion, disdainful both of the “pleasure principle” and of the “reality principle.” Freud, of course, waged a relentless war against this kind of thinking, in which he detected all the clinical signs of neurosis.
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The trouble with Mr. Humphrey’s treatment of Sorel is that instead of interpreting him he identifies with him. He attributes to Sorel a kind of outlook now in honor among American intellectuals: a concern with “healthy social adjustment” and “maturity”; a passion for “verifiable factual knowledge.” The result is a strangely unhistorical and unperceptive book. Every motif in Sorel’s work is treated thoroughly and seriously, but somehow all the accents are misplaced. The man never comes alive for the ironical reason that all his poses and conceits are taken at face value.
To mention one example among many: the author makes much of Sorel’s aloofness and detachment from every cause. He construes Sorel’s relationship to syndicalism as that of the historical observer: to Sorel, he says, “syndicalism was a historical phenomenon to be observed in the same light as the patriotism of the Greek city-state, or Christianity, or the ideals of the French Revolution.” The true interpretation of this Sorelian analogy is just the reverse: it shows, not that syndicalism to Sorel was merely an antiquarian theme, but that to him the Greek city-state, primitive Christianity, and the French Revolution were living and contemporary things, creative myths that still exercised their magic across the mists of the past. Sorel did break with syndicalism, but not because his attitude towards it was that of the cool and detached observer; it was because it no longer fulfilled the longing of his aching, childish, indignant, noble heart.
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