Georges Sorel (1847-1922) (2 of 2)

[Continued from Part 1 yesterday] As one may imagine, this lead to a lot of conceptual and rhetorical hair-splitting. This can be seen in his most famous work, the Reflections on Violence (1908), first published as a series of newspaper articles. Sorel railed through various political transformations against philosophical idealism and utopianism. Yet in Reflections, he spells out a theory that sounds like some mixture of Utopia, Christian eschatology and idealism (at least in the more colloquial sense).

He contrasts two kinds of general strikes. One is the "political" general strike, which he views as bad because in the end it preserves and strengthens some form of the existing system of law and the Socialist Party politicians, who he denounces as a bunch of careerists and cynics in terms that an employers' association could easily adapt to their distinctly non-socialist, non-syndicalist purposes.

The "proletarian" general strike, on this other hand, he sees as virtuous in the extreme. The working class will conduct this happy event in the most highminded way, without the normal human failings of leaders and political movements:

The Syndicalist general strike presents a very great number of analogies with the first conception of war: the proletariat organises itself for battle, separating itself distinctly from the other parts of the nation, and regarding itself as the great motive power of history, all other social considerations being subordinated to that of combat; it is very clearly conscious of the glory which will be attached to its historical rôle and of the heroism of its militant attitude; it longs for the final contest in which it will give proof of the whole measure of its valour. Pursuing no conquest, it has no need to make plans for utilising its victories: it counts on expelling the capitalists from the productive domain, and on taking their place in the workshop created by capitalism. (From the authorized translation by T. E. Hulme; 1914)

This tract could be read – and was – as a glorification of redemptive social violence. But when you start digging into Sorel's arguments, it can quickly come to feel like an infinite spiral that leads nowhere. Violent doesn't actually mean committing acts of violence. All systems of law are based on violence, and replacing them will another system of law is violent, even if the change doesn't require acts of violence, because all law is based on violence. But the eschatological Proletarian General Strike is nonviolent even if it is accompanied by acts of extreme violence, because it will abolish all law and produce a golden age of disciplined cooperation, and because it abolishes law that is inherently violent, the Proletarian General Strike is in its very essence nonviolent.

Freund notes, "Schon Sombart nannte die Syndikalisten die Gourmets der sozialistischen Theorie. Sie erschienen als die sozialistische Gnosis." ("Sombart had already called the syndicalists the gourmets of socialist theory. They seemed to be the socialist Gnosis.")

If this were the only place Sorel made such arguments, one might wonder if it weren't some kind of convoluted way to avoid official censorship. But as Freund’s account makes very clear, he argued this way all the time. Thus, in the last few years of his life, he admired Lenin as the regenerator of the Russian nation and admired Mussolini for much the same reason, though he heavily criticized key aspects of both phenomena.

Some of this may have been an over-cautious attitude of the intellectual and polemicist in him, trying to work lots of alibi arguments into his texts to make it difficult for critics to pin down particular weaknesses. But it's hard to avoid the impression that the result is a confusing eclecticism. As Freund discusses, even though Mussolini described Sorel as a direct and important influence on his Fascist political outlook, it's impossible to say definitively what Sorel's view of Italian Fascism really was. Because there are places in his postwar work where he seems to argue for Fascism, and other places where he seems to be arguing against it.

Freund's argument about Sorel's core conservatism gives us the unifying threads: a sentimental notion of the virtues of Old France; opposition to progress accompanied by a horror for the decadence of civilization; reverence for the role of Catholic Church in French history; belief in the need for a heroic national myth to motivate a country’s people to discipline, modesty and sexual chastity.

A dusty-minded thinker, in other words, who nevertheless couldn’t help being fascinated and engaged by the social dynamics of the world in which he lived. As Freund writes:

Sorel war ein konservativer Denker. Der Verkünder des Ruhmes Lenins war vielleicht der größte konservative Denker unserer Zeit. Der konservative Untergrund Sorels ist unzerstörbar.

[Sorel was a conservative thinker. The herald of Lenin’s glory was perhaps the greatest conservative thinker of our time. The conservative underground of Sorel is indestructible.]

Tags: georges sorel, michael freund

Georges Sorel (1847-1922) (1 of 2)

Georges Sorel (1847-1922) was a French philosopher primarily known for his social and political philosophy whose influence flowed many different ways:

Sorel, Konservativer, Marxist, Revisionist, revolutionärer Syndikalist, Nationalist, Bolschewist, Antiklerikaler, Verkünder der Wiederkehr Gottes nacheinander, schien alle Bewegungen der Zeit zur durcheilen, um nur einmal der reinen Flamme glühender Leidenschaft zu begegnen.

[Sorel, conservative, Marxist, Revisionist, revolutionary syndicalist, nationalist, Bolshevist, anti-clericalist, herald of God’s return, one after another, seemed to have rushed through all movements of the time in order to encounter the pure flame of fervent passion at least once.]

That description if from Michael Freund in Georges Sorel.Der revolutionäre Konservativismus (1932) [Georges Sorel: Revolutionary Conservatism]. In another summary reaching to the end of his life, Freund writes: "So ist er nacheinander Konservativer, Sozialist, Revisionist, Syndikalist, Nationalist, Bolschewist gewesen. Die Überzeugengen jagen sich." ("So he was, one after another, a conservative, a Socialist, a Revisionist, a syndicalist, a nationalist, and Bolshevist. The convictions chased each other.") As Freund also discusses, Sorel's work was influential for Benito Mussolini and other Italian Fascists.

Georges Sorel (1847-1922)

Sorel retired from a civil-service position as an engineer in 1892 and devoted himself for the remainder of his life to writing and research. His ideological periods in his publications can usefully be broken down as follows:

• 1886-92: Conservative, published books on the Bible and the trial of Socrates

• 1893-95: Marxist, then the mainstream position in European Social Democracy

• 1896-1901: Advocate of the anti-Marxist Revisionist school of Social Democracy advocated by Eduard Bernstein

• 1902-10: Revolutionary syndicalist and bitter critic of Social Democracy in France and elsewhere; syndicalism is a variety of anarchism and is also known as anarcho-syndicalism

• 1910-14: Nationalist in the general sense of Action Française, a French nationalist organization that contributed significantly to fascist thinking

• 1914-17: Opponent of French participation in the Great War, hoped for a German victory

• 1917-22: Admirer of Lenin and of Bolshevism; at the same time an admirer of Mussolini and the Italian Fascist movement

The Dreyfuss Affair engaged him intensely at its height in 1897-8. He was appalled at the demagogic anti-Semitism used by Dreyfuss' opponents but also by what he say saw as the narrow opportunism of the French Socialist Party. Later, in his nationalist phase, he engaged in anti-Semitic polemics himself.

How do we explain such seemingly erratic shifts in the emphasis of Sorel's work? Or, if we want to be put it more obscurely but generously, what accounts for the remarkable plasticity of his constantly evolving views? Had he, like Alfred Döblin's Friedrich Becker, "herumschlug, um die Wahrheit und den guten Wind zu finden, der sein Schiff treiben sollte" ("floundered around to find the truth and the favorable wind that would drive his ship")? (November 1918: Karl und Rosa [1950] p. 720)

Freund seems to have made his way through Sorel’s works patiently and attempted to "get into his head" to understand this question. And Freund’s narrative makes a plausible case that Sorel's perspective throughout these many ideological metamorphoses was essentially conservative. Sorel's conservatism was defined through by his fear and hatred of democracy, which he viewed as "das Übel der Übel" ("the evil of evils"). (Freund)

Sorel admired the old, aristocratic ruling elite of pre-Revolutionary France. He saw the Catholic Church as an essential defining aspect of the Old France he admired, and Catholic Christianity providing a valuable pessimism toward life that rejected the idea of progress as such. One of his books was called Illusions of Progress (1908). He saw the elite of Old France as providing a heroic attitude toward life, which was part of a broad and effective myth by which the French people had lived. His concept of political myth, by which he meant an inspiring framework for understanding the common political life of a given nation, was one of his most influential and enduring concepts.

This calls to mind elderly men sitting in front of dusty bookshelves in an English gentleman's club, reading old books that were dull and largely irrelevant even when they were new. Yet Sorel's own dusty mind insisted on engaging with the tumult going on outside the men's club.

The fall of Napoleon III in 1870 was a defining moment in Sorel's understanding of politics and philosophy. He saw the Second Empire as having been a form of Caesarism, in which a charismatic figure established his power with broad public support in order to establish his own authority. Sorel believed that too much democracy led to such a result. With the fall of Napoleon III and the establishment of the French Republic, the ruling bourgeois class had lost its competence, and the Republic as it existed would not be able to return to the imagined virtues of Old France.

The Paris Commune of 1871 was also for Sorel a horror show of democracy. Freund explains that Sorel maintained the notion that a "slave revolt" like those in ancient Rome was absolutely destructive to a civilization. He saw the Commune as another of the slave revolts. His decades-long journey through various ways of understanding himself as an advocate for working-class and mass movements was based on his belief that the working class (proletariat) was the rising force of history and civilization and that its rise was simply a fact of modern life that he needed to recognize. But he also carried through that journey an essentially conservative notion that the working class had to take power in the right way so they could become the right kind of people. A slave revolt just wouldn't do.

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2]

Tags: georges sorel, michael freund

Walter Benjamin and Georges Sorel on the nature of law and violence

One of German literary critic Walter Benjamin's most famous essays is his "Critique of Violence" (1921). It is a response to the German philosopher Georges Sorel's most famous work, Reflections on Violence (1908).

Benjamin in this essay understood the historical role of violence to ultimately be a question of the expiating role of violence as directed by God in history. The sacredness of life, understood as demanding freedom and development toward godliness of human beings, has to be the underlying principle for judging acts of violence. This principle opposes pacifism because defending the sacred elements in human life requires violence against those who would degrade or destroy them. But he elides the meaning of violence in discussing German pacifism. Those like the antiwar dissenters from the majority Social Democratic Party prowar position who were called pacifists during the First World War were opposed to international war in particular because of its multiple destructive effects. That's not the same as denying the role of violence in the legal order and the opposition to it.

Building on the Sorel's conceptions, Benjamin argues that law-preserving and law-establishing violence are the two types which belong to the world of profane history. "All violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving." He treats the military as law-establishing and militarism in the form of conscription in the First World War as law-preserving, the latter because it preserves the basic violence inherent in the state itself. The police as the regular organ of force in an established order combine both functions. They enforce the existing laws ("the right of disposition") but also establish precedents by their actions, thereby creating law in practice ("the right of decree").

Apollo and Artemis killing the children of Niobe

Benjamin argues that natural law provides no justification for revolutionary (law-making) violence. In this point, he seems to be following Sorel, who took natural law in this context to be Thomas Hobbes' state of nature, a war of all against all. He finds the justification for law-making violence in mythic violence. But in a conventional Jewish religious judgment, he argues that God opposes mythic violence, specifically that the divine (including divine violence) is the "antithesis in all respects" (p.249) to mythic violence and that God will ultimately destroy all law to create a state of divine anarchism beyond law and the state as we know them. "if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates." He uses the judgment against Korah, Dathan and Abiram (Num. 16-17) as an illustration of this divine, expiatory, law-destroying judgment with a "lack of bloodshed". (In the Korah story, the deaths come from being swallowed up by the earth, by fire from heaven and from a plague.) This Niobe-Korah contrast frames his concept of the establishment of divine justice requiring the abolition of positive law and the violence associated with it, both law-preserving and law-establishing.

The judgment of Korah

Issues with Benjamin's argument in his 1921 essay include: his conventional Jewish distinction between mythic violence (Niobe) and divine violence (Korah), though Biblical scholarship would treat the Korah story as mythical, as well; eliding the meaning of violence, as when he treats the act of a normal labor strike as violent because its exercise reinforces the established legal system which ultimately relies of violence for its self-preservation; his Sorelian view of natural law as not placing any restriction of violence as a means when used toward a just end; a failure to distinguish between underlying violence and actual acts of violence, e.g., in his discussion of parliamentarianism; and, what seems to be the equation of Darwin's theory of natural selection with Social Darwinism.

No conservative would likely disagree with Benjamin's argument that normal strikes represent extortion, which he equates with violence. This connects with Sorel's essentially conservative idea that any normal strike preserves the existing order. But both Sorel's and Bejamin's concepts of violence in the works in question treat violence in a very abstract manner. It does make a difference in real life and death whether conflicts are handled through means that don't involved beating, maiming and shooting people, or through means that don't involve physical violence. That is not meant to dismiss the importance of the larger frameworks, only to note that those formulations, especially with Sorel, can too easily lend themselves to empty sophistry.

Benjamin makes an interesting twist on Sorel's 1908 discussion of two kinds of general strikes: the "political" general strike, which is of a law-making character, but is essentially violent in that it leaves in place some system of law based on violence. The second is the "proletarian" (working-class) general strike, which Sorel described a general uprising of a self-conscious working-class that would not be dependent on politicians and which would be essentially non-violent because it would completely abolish law as we know it and establish a sort of New Jerusalem state condition in which humanity would cooperate without the need of a system of law and therefore the New Jerusalem state condition would not be based on violence. Sorel argued that the vision of the working-class general strike was more important as a myth, a motivation vision by which the working class could frame their actions.

Benjamin considers the same two types of general strikes. But he defines the political general strike as mythic violence (the Niobe type). And he suggests that the working-class general strike would be a type of divine violence (the Korah type). Thus he sees an eschatological function for the working-class strike, as Sorel does. But where Sorel defines the later as having its great value as a myth, Benjamin sees it as the "antithesis in all respects" to the mythic violence which Benjamin identifies with the political general strike rather than the working-class general strike.

Benjamin is considered part of the Frankfurt School circle, though he never actually worked at the Institute for Social Research. His articles were featured in their journal and they considered his thought as closely related to theirs. There were differences, of course. Theodor Adorno argued with Benjamin about the latter's affinity for Jewish mystical theology. Benjamin was a close friend of the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem (1897—1982).

Tags: frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, georges sorel, walter benjamin