Georges Sorel REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE (Perry, 283-86) The new insights into the irrational side of human nature and the growing assault on reason had immense implications for political life. In succeeding decades, these currents of irrationalism would be ideologized and politicized by unscrupulous demagogues, who sought to mobilize and manipulate the masses. The popularity after World War I of fascist movements, which openly denigrated reason and exalted race, blood, action, and will, demonstrated the naivete of nineteenth-century liberals, who believed that reason had triumphed in human affairs. Among the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social theorists who focused on the implications ions of the non axonal for political life were Georges Sorel and Gustave Le Bon. Twentieth-century dictators would employ these social theorists' insights into groups and mass psychology for the purpose of gaining and maintaining power. Nietzsche and Freud proclaimed that irrational forces constitute the essence of human nature. French social theorist Georges Sorel (1847—1922) recognized the political potential of the nonrational. Like Nietzsche, Sorel was disillusioned with contemporary bourgeois society, which he considered decadent, unheroic, and life-denying. He placed his hopes in the proletariat, whose position made them courageous and virile. Sorel wanted workers m destroy the existing bourgeois-liberal-capitalist order and rejuvenate society by infusing it with dynamic and creative energy and a sense of moral purpose. The overthrow of decadent bourgeois society would he accomplished through a general strike: a universal work stoppage that would bring down governments and give power to the workers. Sorel saw the general strike as having the appeal of a great myth. What was important was not that the general strike actually take place, but that its image stir all the antibourgeois resentment of the workers and inspire them to carry out their revolutionary responsibilities. Sorel understood the extraordinary potency of myth. It structures and intensifies feelings, unifies people, elicits total commitment, and incites heroic action- Because they appeal to the imagination and the emotions, myths are an effective way of organizing the masses, buoying up their spirits, and moving them to acts of revolutionary heroism. By believing in the myth of the general strike, workers would soar above the moral decadence of bourgeois society and bear the immense sacrifices that their struggle calls for. The myth serves a religious function: it unites the faithful into a collectivity with one will and induces a heroic state of mind. Sorel applauded violence, for it intensified the revolutionaries' dedication to the cause and spurred them to acts of revolutionary heroism. Violence also accorded with his general conception that life is an unremitting battle and that history is a perpetual conflict between decay and vitality, between passivity and action. In his view, struggle purified, invigorated, and promoted creative change. borers pseudoreligious exaltation of violence and mass action--action for its own sake—his condemnation of liberal democracy and rationalism, his recognition of the power and political utility of irrational and fabricated myths, and his vision of a heroic morality emerging on the ruins of a dying shabby bourgeois world found concrete expression in the fascist movements that emerged after World War I. In the billowing selection from Reflections on Violence (1905), Sorel explains the function of the myth of the general strike and necessity of violence if the workers are to fulfill their historical role. Renan* asked what was it that moved the he-roes of great wars. "The soldier of Napoleon was well aware that he would always be a poor man, but he felt that the epic in which he was taking pan would be eternal, that lie would live in the glory of France." The Greeks had fought for glory the Russians and the Turks seek death because they expect a chimerical paradise. "A soldier is not made by promises of temporal rewards: He must have immortality. In default of paradise, there is glory, which is itself a kind of immortality." Economic progress goes far beyond the individual life, and profits future generations more than those who create it: but does it give glory? Is there an economic epic capable of stimulating the enthusiasm of the workers? The inspiration of immortality which Renan considered so powerful is obviously without cif-limey here, because artists have never produced masterpieces under the influence of the idea that their work would procure them a place in paradise (as Turks seek death that they may en-joy the happiness promised by Mahomet). The workmen are not entirely wrong when they look on religion as a middle-class luxury, since, as a matter of fact, the emotions it calls up are riot those which inspire workmen with the do-sire to perfect machinery, or which create methods of accelerating labour. The question must be stated otherwise than Renan, put it; do there exist among the work—men forces capable of producing enthusiasm equivalent to those of which Renan speaks, forces which could combine with the ethic of good work, so that in our days, which seem to many people to presage the darkest future, this ethic may acquire all the authority necessary to lead society along the path of economic progress? We must be careful that the keen sentiment which we have of the necessity of such a morality,and our ardent desire to see it realised does not induce us to mistake phantoms for forces capable of moving the world. The abundant "idyllic" literature of the professors of rhetoric evidently mere chatter. Equally vain are the attempts made by so many scholars to find institutions in the past, an imitation of which night serve as a means of disciplining their contemporaries; imitation has never produced much good and often bred m h sorrow; how absurd the idea is then of borrowing from some dead and gone social structure re, a suitable mean of controlling a system of production whose principal characteristic is that every day it must become mom and more opposed to all preceding economic systems. Is there then nothing to hope for? Morality is not doomed to perish because the motive forces behind it will change; it is not destined to become a mere collection of precepts as long as it can still vivify itself by an alliance with an enthusiasm capable of conquering all the obstacles, prejudices, and the need of immediate enjoyment which oppose its progress. But it is certain that this sovereign force will not be found along the paths which contemporary philosophers, the experts of social science, and the inventors of far- reaching reforms would make us go. There is only one force which can produce today that enthusiasm without whose co-operation no morality is possible, and that is the force resulting from the propaganda in favour of a general strike- The preceding explanations have shown that the idea of the general strike (constantly rejuvenated by the feelings roused by proletarian violence) produces an entirely epic state of mind, and at the same time bends all the energies of the mind to that condition necessary to the realisation of a workshop carried on by EA- men, eagerly seeking the betterment of the industry; we have thus recognised that there are great resemblances between the sentiments aroused by the idea of the general strike and those which are necessary to bring about a continued progress in methods of production. We have then the right to maintain that the modern world possesses that prime mover which is necessary to the creation of the ethics of the producers. I stop here, because it seems to me that I have accomplished the task which I imposed upon myself. I have, in fact, established that proletarian violence has an entirely different significance from that attributed to it by superficial scholars and by politicians to the total ruin of institutions and of morals there remains something which is powerful, new, and intact, and it is that which constitutes, properly speaking, the soul of the revolutionary proletariat. Not will this be swept away in the general decadence of moral values, if the workers have enough energy to bar the road to the middle-class corrupters, answering their advances with the plainest brutality. I believe that I have brought an important contribution to discussions on Socialism; these discussions must henceforth deal exclusively with the conditions which allow the development of specifically proletarian forces, that is to say, with violence enlightened by the by the idea of the general strike. All the old abstract dissertations on the Socialist regime of the future become useless; we pass to the domain of real history, to the interpretation of facts- to the ethical evaluations of the revolutionary movement. Time bond which I pointed out in the beginning of this inquiry between Socialism andproletarian violence appears to us now in all it strength. It is to violence that Socialism owes those high ethical values by means of which it brings salvation to the modern world.