Poincaré, Sorel denied that this had subjectivist implications for science but
crucially his argument entailed a rejection of all positivist claims to a unitary and
universalistic body of knowledge. Such monist illusions failed to see that science
and religion offered two equally valid ways of seeing the world. As scientific
explanations were conventions or hypotheses that said nothing about the real
world they could not claim to present scientific objections to Catholic faith. It
was via a similar logic that Sorel, having first accepted the empirical veracity of
Marx’s laws of capitalist development, came to redefine the central tenets of Marxist
socialism as ‘social poetry’ and then as ‘social myth’.
Sorel’s challenge to positivism went further than this however. As an assiduous
reader of the works of Max Nordau, Théodule Ribot, and Gustave Le Bon, as well
as John Henry Newman, Sorel had become acutely aware of the non-rational
sources of human motivation. Individuals, he wrote, ‘do nothing great without
the help of warmly coloured and clearly defined images, which absorb the whole of
our attention’.312 It was the failure of the ‘intellectualist philosophy’313 (Sorel again
had Renan in mind) to appreciate this which explained why it could not grasp that
an individual, be he a Napoleonic soldier, a striking worker, or an early Christian,
310 See e.g. ‘Les Théories de M. Durkheim’, Le Devenir social, 1 (1895), 1–26, 148–80.
311 Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 13 (1905), 858–89.
312 Réflexions sur la violence (1972), 184.
313 Sorel frequently made contemptuous reference to the ‘intellectualist philosophy’ as the ‘little
science’.
386
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
might perform a selfless and heroic act. This led to the development of one of
Sorel’s most important ideas: the importance of myths. Myths, Sorel argued, were
‘expressions of the will to act’ and were the very antithesis of such intellectualist
constructions as utopias.314 This, as he wrote in his introduction to Réflexions sur la
violence, could be explained by reference to the ideas of Bergson. Sorel argued that
Bergson asks us to consider ‘the inner depths of the mind and what happens during
a creative moment’. Acting freely, we recovered ourselves, attaining the level of pure
‘duration’ that Bergson equated with ‘integral knowledge’.315 This new form of
knowledge, as Sorel recognized, could be understood as intuition and it was
precisely this variety of intuitive understanding that Sorel believed was encom-
passed by his category of myth.
Sorel had been moving towards this conclusion for some time, arguing in his
essay La Décomposition du marxisme of 1908 that Marx had ‘always described
revolution in mythical form’ but in the main body of Réflexions sur la violence it
was the general strike that featured as a myth, precisely because, in Sorel’s view, it
provided an ‘intuitive’ understanding and picture of the essence of socialism. More
than this, those who lived in the world of myths were ‘secure from all refutation’
and could not be discouraged. They attained an ‘entirely epic state of mind’, were
capable of ‘serious, formidable, and sublime work’ and saw themselves as ‘the army
of truth fighting the army of evil’. Seen in this light, the revolution was ‘a revolt,
pure and simple’, an expression of class war, in which the proletariat, in a display of
‘black ingratitude’, sought the ‘total elimination’ of its bourgeois and capitalist
adversaries.
What was the purpose of this decisive and violent struggle? Crucially, Sorel
dismissed what he saw as the nineteenth-century ‘illusion of progress’,316 believing
rather that French society was entering a period of decadence, of corruption, of
moral frivolity, and of economic decline. He poured scorn upon the superficial and
misguided optimism of his age, seeing the optimist in politics as an ‘inconstant and
even dangerous man’ and preferring to embrace an undisguised pessimism. The
latter, he avowed, was a doctrine ‘without which nothing of greatness has been
accomplished in the world’ and which considered ‘the march towards deliverance’
as narrowly conditioned by the immense obstacles before us and by ‘our natural
weaknesses’.317 Thus, when faced with what Sorel saw as the total ruin of institu-
tions and of morals, it was to violence that socialism owed ‘those high ethical ideals
by means of which it brings salvation to the modern world’.318 It might not, Sorel
conceded, be the best means of securing immediate material advantages but it did
nevertheless serve ‘the immemorial interests of civilisation’ and might yet save the
world from barbarism.319
In brief, for Georges Sorel the triumphant bourgeoisie and democracy of the
Third Republic were the heirs of the rationalism and scepticism of the Enlightenment
314 Reflexions sur la violence, 38.
315 Ibid. 34–5.
316 See Les Illusions du progrès (1908).
317 Réflexions sur la violence, 9–19.
318 Ibid. 331.
319 Ibid. 110.
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
387
and as such represented everything that was shallow, mediocre, corrupt, and lacking
in moral seriousness. In their hands, science was reduced to little more than a subject
of conversation in the salons of polite society and religion was treated as an object of
ridicule. In such circumstances, the existence of a sublime ethics was not possible
and politics became the domain of intellectuals who believed themselves capable of
thinking for the people. The entire force of Sorel’s mature writings was that a decisive
and irrevocable break had to be made with such a decadent society. This involved
him not in a dismissal of science as a valid form of knowledge or in a flight towards a
blind irrationalism but in a rejection of the positivist designation of science as the sole
mode of explanation applicable to all natural as well as social phenomena and in an
acceptance of the reality and distinctiveness of religious faith. In ethical terms, as
Sorel made clear, it amounted to a denunciation of the casuistry of the Jesuits and
their bourgeois descendants and a return to the moral rigour and severity of Pascal
and Jansenism, replete with an emphasis upon original sin. To that extent, the wheel
has come full circle and we find ourselves again in a world where an austere
Augustinianism finds itself face to face with the Voltairean spirit, the important
difference being that it was no longer a question of Catholicism versus Protestantism
or of the Enlightenment against the Church but of the proletariat against the
bourgeoisie. It is to this struggle that we will now turn our attention.
9
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
I
As Auguste Comte’s own writings testify, he was deeply concerned that the
material and spiritual condition of working people should be subject to im-
provement. The entire third section of the Discours sur l’Ensemble du positivisme
was devoted to a discussion of the place of the proletarian within positivism.
Moreover
, in Fabien Magnin, converted to positivism in the 1840s and
subsequently an executor of Comte’s will, positivism had its first proletarian
disciple.1 An early illustration of positivist interest in the condition of labour
can be found in the Rapport à la société positiviste par la commission chargée
d’examiner la question du travail, published in June 1848 with a preface by
Comte himself.2 After Comte’s death, Magnin continued to spread the gospel
of le positivisme ouvrier. In 1863 he established the Cercle des prolétaires
positivistes, which formally affiliated to the (socialist) First International in
1870. With the advent of the Third Republic and the slow re-emergence of the
workers’ movement after the Paris Commune, the positivists continued to press
their case, a process culminating in the publication in 1876 of Le Positivisme au
congrès ouvrier. For its time, this represented the most complete expression of
the positivist strategy for proletarian emancipation. In their preface, Magnin,
Émile Laporte, and Isidore Finance specifically denied that positivism was ‘an
oppressive doctrine’ which sought ‘to condemn the proletariat without hope
to a social hell under the double exploitation of the capitalists and the priests’.3
Indeed, the proletarian positivists talked of the need to develop ‘a rational,
scientific, positive socialism’ and sought to replace an economic system char-
acterized by exploitation and selfish individualism. They also shared a belief in
the autonomy of the working class. Participation in parliamentary politics
would deprive the proletariat of its best elements.
1 See ‘Notice sur la vie et l’uvre de Fabien Magnin’, in Fabien Magnin, Études sociales (1913),
pp. v–xxxvii. See also ‘Discours de M. A. Keufer sur la tombe de M. F. Magnin’, Revue occidentale,
23 (1889), 408–14.
2 Magnin, Jacquemin, and Belpaume, Rapport à la société positiviste (1848). Comte’s preface
affirmed his belief in the need for a ‘new spiritual authority’ capable of acting as ‘a neutral arbiter’ in
industrial conflicts. This text was repr. in Magnin, Études sociales, 1–12.
3 Magnin, Le Positivisme au congrès ouvrier (1876), 13.
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
389
The positivists therefore were of the view that they disagreed with the mainstream
of the socialist movement—described by the positivists themselves as ‘metaphysical
socialism’—only about means and not ends. This was only partly true. The disagree-
ment on means was unequivocal. ‘We prefer’, Magnin and his colleagues wrote,
‘peaceful, enduring, slow but sure changes to dangerous agitation.’4 Education, not
violence, was what was required. Similarly, they believed that the State should be
reformed rather than abolished.5
However, what truly separated the positivists from the increasingly radical
opinions of the workers’ movement in France was their view that classes would
continue to exist in the future society. Faithful to the dictates of Comte’s original
pronouncements, the positivists held to the belief that the resolution of the social
problem did not demand a transfer of wealth or the abolition of property but rather
the establishment of ‘a set of reciprocal duties between industrial leaders and their
employees’.6 If this meant that, at the Congress of Marseilles in 1879, the
positivists voted against the collectivist resolutions that received majority support,
it also entailed support for the Third Republic as the regime best suited to make
possible the advances required towards a positivist society. In line with this, the
positivists were prepared to participate in the activities of the State and from the
1890s onwards were to be found in influential positions in such consultative bodies
as the Conseil Supérieure du Travail and the Office du Travail. Designed to
facilitate mutual understanding between workers, employers, and the State, these
institutions were the physical embodiment of the solidarist aspiration towards social
and economic peace.
One of the leading figures in the Conseil Supérieure du Travail was the positivist
Auguste Keufer, general-secretary of the print workers union, the Fédération du
Livre, from 1884 until 1920.7 Drawn to the labour movement by a distaste for the
impurities of political activity—in 1906 Keufer voted for the Charte d’Amiens
distancing the French trade union movement from political parties—and the desire
to improve the material and mental condition of the working class, he consistently
endorsed a reformist strategy placing the attainment of immediate and piecemeal
goals before the achievement of revolutionary ends. Negotiation, compromise, and
dialogue, rather than strike action and industrial sabotage, were his preferred
courses of action. A change of heart amongst industrialists was deemed to be
more beneficial than the enforced expropriation of their wealth.
It was this stance that brought Keufer repeatedly into conflict with the revolu-
tionary leadership of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) after the turn
of the twentieth century. However, it was Keufer’s approach that was to prevail
with the outbreak of the First World War—when the vast majority of the labour
movement supported the French war effort to the bitter end—and this approach
also that the CGT was to endorse in 1918 in the shape of a ‘minimum programme’
of desired reforms. Nevertheless, two years later at the Congress of Tours, the
4 Ibid. 17.
5 Ibid. 82.
6 Ibid. 149.
7 See my Syndicalism in France (London, 1990), 119–32. Keufer was both President of the Cercle
des prolétaires positivistes and vice-President of the Société Positiviste Internationale.
390
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
French socialist movement split, and the French Communist Party (PCF) came
into existence. The following year, at Saint-Etienne, the trade union movement
split along the same lines, the newly created Confédération Générale du Travail
Unifié (CGTU) aligning itself with Moscow’s International of Red Trade Unions,
the Profintern. The cold and iron-like grip of Bolshevism was about to seize hold of
the French left.8
I I
That the French left remains wedded to a conception of the Revolution of 1789 as
an anticipation of later movements towards greater social and economic equality is
beyond dispute. Likewise it is clear that this reverence for the Great Revolution as a
formative and defining example of what revolution can be taken to mean is not of
recent origin.9 If the terms ‘socialist’ and socialism’ did not come into usage in
France until around 1830, the actual distinction between ‘left’ and ‘right’ had its
origin in the seating arrangements of the National Assembly. At the outset, to be on
the left was to be in favour of reform and to be against the arbitrary power of the
crown, but such was the dynamic internal to the Revolution that this position was
quickly outdistanced by those calling for an end to monarchy and the introduction
of universal suffrage. As popular protest continued to push the Revolution in an
ever-more radical direction, so
the political map of left opinion was redrawn on
a regular basis, the sans-culottes of Paris ruthlessly determining the fate of their
erstwhile representatives. In those circumstances, it was the Jacobins who not only
succeeded in establishing themselves as the authentic voice of the people’s demands
for social justice but who were also to define a distinctive and enduring conception
of the ends and means of revolutionary activity. It was to be upon this experience
that the various branches of what came to constitute the left in France were to
reflect for decades to come, the cult of the revolutionary tradition becoming part
of the mental universe of broad sections of left-wing opinion.10 It was, moreover,
an experience that was never to secure universal approval.
The Jacobins came to be seen by their nineteenth-century admirers as democrats
and republicans and as fervent defenders both of the nation and of international
solidarity with the oppressed. Collectively and individually they set an example of
heroic and selfless devotion to the cause of the people. More than this, they
established a paradigm for the seizure and use of power in the name of the
revolution. According to this model, a dedicated and virtuous minority was to lay
hold of the central levers of power in Paris and, once secured, revolutionary
government was to be installed with the express purpose of defeating the forces
of counter-revolution. If power was to be exercised in the name of the masses, the
8 Robert Wohl, French Communism in the Making 1914–1924 (Stanford, Calif., 1966).
9 In 1893 the anarchist thinker Kropotkin published an account of the Revolution entitled La
Grande Révolution.
10 Patrick H. Hutton, The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition (Berkeley, Calif., 1981).
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
391
people were called upon to be ever-vigilant, to watch over their parliamentary
representatives, to remain present upon the public stage, and, at the least sign of
betrayal, to rise up in armed insurrection. Yet, as even their most enthusiastic
admirers acknowledged, the Jacobins were not socialists. If their cause was that of
the regeneration of humanity and the privileged were their enemies, they were
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