The Notebooks of the Circle Proudhon {Translation & Editing in Progress}

The French who came together to found the Circle P.-J. Proudhon are all nationalists. The patron they chose for their assembly made them meet other Frenchmen who are not nationalists, who are not royalists and who join them to participate in the life of the Circle and in the writing of the Notebooks. The initial group, thus extended, includes men of various origins, of different conditions, who have no common political aspirations, and who will freely set out their views in the Notebooks. But, federalist republicans, integral nationalists and trade unionists, having solved the political problem or removing it from their thinking, all are equally passionate about the organization of the French city according to principles borrowed from the French tradition that they find in the Proudhonist work and in contemporary trade union movements, and all are in perfect agreement on these points:

Democracy is the biggest mistake of the past century. If we want to live, if we want to work, if we want to have in social life the highest human guarantees for Production and Culture, if we want to conserve and increase the moral, intellectual, and material capital of civilization, it is absolutely necessary to destroy democratic institutions.

Ideal democracy is the silliest of reveries. Historical democracy, carried out in the colors known to the modern world, is a fatal disease for nations, for human societies, for families, for individuals. Brought back among us to establish the reign of virtue, she tolerates and encourages all licenses. It is theoretically a regime of freedom; in practice, it has a horror of concrete, real freedoms and has handed us over to a few large companies of looters, politicians associated with or dominated by financiers, who live from the exploitation of producers.

Finally, democracy has allowed, in the economy and in politics, the establishment of the capitalist regime which destroys in the city what democratic ideas dissolve in the mind, that is to say the nation, the family, manners, by substituting the law of gold for the laws of blood.

Democracy lives on gold and on a perversion of intelligence. She will die from the revival of the spirit and the establishment of the institutions that the French create or recreate for the defense of their freedoms and their spiritual and material interests. It is to promote this double enterprise that we will work at the Circle Proudhon. We will fight mercilessly against the false science which served to justify democratic ideas and against the economic systems which are intended, by their inventors, to brutalize the working classes, and we will passionately support the movements which restore to the French, in the forms specific to the modern world, their franchises that allow them to live while working with the same satisfaction of the feeling of honor as when they die fighting.

We have the honor to open our study circle before you and to publicly begin our work under the voice of P.-J. Proudhon. We thought that, placing ourselves, integral nationalists under such patronage, it would be useful to explain, even for informed people, the choice of our patron. But before I tell you why we link our work to the Proudhonian spirit, I ask your permission to present to you some thoughts on the formation of the circle itself.

First of all, a point of history. Last May, some of our students asked me to join them in organizing a study circle, not a social (I will tell you why later), but an economic one. I do not want to hide from you the name of one of our friends from whom this idea was born in the form I am indicating to you. It is Henri Lagrange. So much to inform Professor Bouglé, and to enable him to complete, in a second edition of his Sociology of Proudhon, the dubious note he devoted to our Circle.

The founding of the Circle presented some difficulties. When a few people come together to study improperly named social problems (because they are only political, or economic, or religious), there is a very great danger. It is the corruption of principles and people. There is a strong risk of forming a worldly group that will grow in the world by using its love for men, its pity for the humble, or of preparing intellectuals for the exploitation of workers' passions. You can clearly see that the first form of danger does not threaten us. We could have feared the second, if we had offered ourselves the sole study of labor issues and the preparation for a sort of social and national apostolate among the working classes. You already know that our intentions are quite different and that they rigorously exclude anything that could recall this hypocritical form of political action which is so-called popular action. You will not find men here looking for the means to teach people to abandon their errors; who would have the unbearable pretension to guide them, to direct them, and who would profess to be their representatives to the ruling classes and future powers. The report that I had the honor of presenting to the last Action française Congress gave you the necessary details on this crucial point.

We came together, each one here preserving his family spirit, profession, body, and class (especially class), to make a work of which I would dare say (although the term is singularly dishonored today) that it will be scientific. We all have very clear ideas on the political problem. We are also fully aware of our national quality. It remains for us to know, in view of our action, in view of the organization in which we are called to take part, each in our class, it remains for us to know the world in which we live, and particularly under one of its aspects which is among the most obscure, the economic one. We will have to live in this world. For us, it is a question of knowing what place we occupy there, what role we must play there, always placing above our concerns, in our studies, the national interest. We cannot think of relying on our inner feeling (which is naturally not excluded), because this feeling, if it must be the motive of our action, is perfectly blind and calls, to be satisfied, the collaboration of knowledge, intelligence. We have to discover for ourselves where nobles, bourgeois and workers, our good and our evil, are in this domain of the economy.

I told you that we will do scientific work. But you have seen that this work will be done for the purpose of action. I do believe that we are passionate about knowledge. But we are not contemplators; we are not interested in the phenomena of the world as spectators. We do not separate thought from action. And we are neither salon people nor cabinet people. We are all at the heart of the present realities, and those that are most pressing. We know, not from books, but from personal experience, not only the daily problems of life, but the serious problems which arise in the mind and soul of the French. If we want to do scientific work here, it is in order to serve our common life, and our distinct interests. And what life? It is French life. What interests? these are our interests of family, profession, and class. This tells you that we add to our appetite for knowledge a deep feeling, a lively human passion. Very precisely, we seek to know the current forms of the economy to discover the conditions of the French order and, in French society, the order of classes, the organs proper to each which will favor them without breaking national ties, and without losing sight of the reason that all these conditions are attached to an eternal order, to which the French order is linked, as the western oak is linked to the law of growth that governs the tropical palm tree. This knowledge acquired in common, we will separate for practical action; each of us will return to his hereditary home, his wife and children, his laboratory, his workshop or his office, his association where he will find his peers with whom he will work for the organization of the French country, according to his own law, according to the command of his ancestors, and according to the conscience of his interests, in his republic, under the protection of the King of France.

Having undertaken this task, we looked for a patron. We wanted them to belong to the French tradition, to the most authentic and oldest French tradition, that which was born and formed in the heart of the French peasant, that it belonged at the same time to the race of new manufacturers, and that it might reconcile in itself, in addition to certain civic virtues that we place very high, two forces that are opposite and that have made war in nineteenth-century democracy, agricultural force and industrial force. Our intentions explain to you the homage we paid to the memory of P.-J. Proudhon.

People who know the history of counter-revolutionary ideas will not ask us for any justification for our choice. They remember that Drumont often relied on Proudhonian thought, that Maurras discovered, in the author of the Federation in Italy, the perfect sense of French policy, that Dimier placed Proudhon among the masters of the counter-Revolution, which Bainville, finally, united in the same dedication, the pontifical Zouaves and the revolutionary thinker who "in his full freedom of mind, rediscovered the policy of the kings of France." And they are not unaware that two French writers, who have made in France the strongest criticism of democracy, from the trade unionist point of view, Georges Sorel and Édouard Berth, are all imbued with the purest Proudhonian spirit.

The recognized part that Proudhon took in the movement of counter-revolutionary ideas will therefore be, in the eyes of all, our first justification. But there is more, we believe. It is not only Proudhon criticizing democracy, socialism and anarchism that we will invoke here. It is Proudhon the constructor. It is on this that I especially want to give you some explanations.

Proudhon, critic of democracy, socialism and anarchism, papal Proudhon, was at the same time a democrat, a socialist and an anti-clerical, if not anti-Catholic, and although he had none of the characteristics that we know of the anarchist, his reaction against the state often led him to strongly anarchic movements. It is even fair to say that most of our contemporaries hardly know him except under this last aspect: "Property is theft!" - "God is evil!" Two formulas inseparable, in the minds of the greatest number, from the memory of Proudhon and which sum up his work. You know how insufficient it is, how wrong it is, you even know what to hear in those cries. You know that the first Proudhonian criticism of property resulted in one of the strongest defenses of property that have ever been made; you also know that among the writers of the nineteenth-century, Proudhon is one of those who had the deepest understanding of Catholicism. But the fact remains that Proudhon is a son of the Revolution, a lost child of 1789, and that he had the revolutionary faith. And, nevertheless, he is a builder. Even with his revolutionary faith, he builds, he has the passion for construction, for organized, orderly, disciplined life. Even dominated by the guiding ideas of the Revolution, to the point that he gave his Theory of Property the conclusion that the right of the owner is just and necessary because it ensures Liberty (and he writes the word Liberty in capital letters, and he understands it in the revolutionary sense); even directed, inspired, aroused by revolutionary enthusiasm, he opposes with all the strength of his blood, with all the vigor of his thought, the anarchy resulting from 1789. And here is the truth which appears to us. Proudhon is eternal France suffering in the nineteenth-century the intellectual anarchy of the eighteenth-century, which continues to repeat the senseless words imposed in its memory, but whose peasant and workers' hands, trained by toil in the arts of life, reproduce the traditional gestures of work and whose intelligence, disciplined by the centuries, seeks order in this new world where it sees only the signs of disorder.

Well! Gentlemen, this anguish, this research of Proudhon, was ours, and I say more, it is still ours. We have been in the same moral and intellectual anarchy as Proudhon. Like him, we have endured the prestige of the eighty-nine clouds. But, thanks to the genius of Maurras, we have resolved the first of problems, the problem which commands all the others, and without the solution of which no other can be solved, the political problem, the problem of the State. We are consciously, very consciously counter-revolutionaries. And from our knowledge of the first solutions, our awareness of the national interest flows from the principles which will be applied to the economy. But what work do we have left here to do? A whole world of new forms has been born. Which forms are good, which are excellent, and which are bad, which are harmful? We have to discover them, to recognize them, to estimate them, in order to predict how we will use them, under the monarchy, for our common good and for our particular good. To a few young men who questioned him one day about these serious problems, Maurras replied: "It is up to the second generation of Action française to resolve these questions and apply their solutions." One of the first steps these young men took was to go to Proudhon. For the reasons I told you, and for others. In this area, Proudhon represents more than the counter-revolution. The Proudhonian spirit represents a revolutionary value that we can incorporate into our own values, I would say better: that we find in our own movement.

When we consider the French problem in all its extent, in all its aspects, political, social, economic, moral, religious, from the point of view where we place ourselves, at Action française, what do we see and what do we foresee?

Do we just see a nation that has made some intellectual mistakes and has given itself an absurd diet, and do we simply foresee a regime change, the effects of which would spread throughout the nation through all bodies? Will all the groups currently in existence bring us, the French, all the benefits that we expect? We French nationalists know perfectly well that such views and such forecasts would be completely insufficient. We know perfectly well that one can hear nothing, absolutely nothing, about the current political and economic problems, if one does not look at them in the light of the admirable and profound theory of Maurras on the Four Confederate States. Under this dazzling illumination, everything lights up. The French nation appears as a conquered nation, deprived of its national state, and dominated by a confederation of four groups. Jews, Protestants, Masons, Métèques, who constitute a distinct State, whose interests are completely opposed to ours, which deals with the Foreigner according to his particular interest and which associates with him for the plundering of the nation. And these Four States, this Confederation, this State which is above all, at present, Jewish, and which is sometimes either an extension of the German State, or an extension of the English State, is not at all built in the image of the disorder that we see in French society. It has a political order which maintains cohesion in Confederation but whose function is to maintain disorder in French society, which sort of does what the Manchus did in Chinese society. The Confederation which reigns in France imposes a moral order on us, a social order, a religious order, which are created to ensure its domination; above all it has an economic order which allows them to exploit us, to strip us and even to expel us, to take our ground, this for the benefit of the Foreigner. In short, in France, currently, there is no longer a French order. There is an order, in the defense of which a certain number of French participate, conscious traitors or demi-dupes, or fools, or idiots (as there are Hindus who defend the order of His Britannic Majesty in India), but this order is not ours. And faced with this situation, our movement is necessarily both counter-revolutionary, in that it tends to re-establish the centerpiece of the French order, the monarchy, and revolutionary.

It is here that we meet Proudhon, as Maurras and Bainville met him in the royal chancellery. This revolutionary passion which drives Proudhon is ours. In the France where he lived, with the French order inscribed in his blood, Proudhon did not recognize in this social order, which was already the foreign capitalist order, the extension, into the new economic world, of the French order transformed according to its tradition. He has been criticized for being an opponent of the social order, for being an anarchist in everything. Ah! Gentlemen, those who have addressed this reproach to him have not seen the flame which illuminates his work; they did not see that the social order that they themselves were defending was not the traditional social order that their fathers had bequeathed to them, that it was already a foreign order, and that the true defender of our interests, our historical rights, to us French, was P.-J. Proudhon. It is in this, in this deep reaction, that the Proudhonian spirit manifests itself; it is this spirit that we invoke to preside over our work. With this spirit, with this passion, we will continue the Proudhonian research, but with other methods, and guided by unassailable political doctrines, we will seek to know our world, the French world enriched and transformed by the industry of our fathers, to live there according to our law and our right.

It is therefore a new work that we are undertaking and, as Galland told you, we will not be doing a Proudhonian exegesis here. But we will not deprive ourselves of the assistance of the revolutionary analyst; we will read his works, and we will comment on them, which is moreover essential to understand some aspects of French intellectual life and of workers' organization. Someone who is more qualified than myself will tell you about Proudhon himself and all his work. But I cannot refrain from quoting to you this evening a few pages which support what I have said to you. I hope that those who have come here and who do not know Proudhon will take away the memory of a few words, in which they will recognize an accent which in no way recalls the accent of Geneva or Königsberg, let them know how deeply Proudhon had understood our history, and how much respect he had for it. Here is a page taken from the Solution of the Social Problem:

Do you recognize the French, the real French, the man of the land of France? And you will recognize him again, you will recognize the peasant who defended his soil, who fought with Joan of Arc, with Henry IV, with Turenne, and in the armies of the Republic and the Empire; the French soldier, the French warrior, but larger than life, seeing his arms trace the characters of a law of the world. Let's open this admirable book, War and Peace:

Professor Bouglé will tell us that this apology for war ends with a condemnation of war. Hey! we know it better than he does. We read at the end of the book the sentence that Proudhon wrote in capital letters HUMANITY DOESN'T WANT WAR ANYMORE. But we also know by what error, which some of us have known in our minds, Proudhon had come to this conclusion. And they know very well that this book, which ends with an anti-war statement, remains, from the front line to the last, a warrior book; they know that if Proudhon concluded thus, it is because he believed, not in the disappearance, but in the transformation of war.

New work would no doubt have corrected and completed these conclusions. On this point, as on so many others, one can imagine that Proudhon would have known the adventure which, from his first memoirs on property, led him to this strong Theory of Property, in which we find so many pages that many of us would sign, if they didn't find the terms a little harsh - from the cry: "Property is theft!" Of this first negation, which, according to him, was the first step of the critic, of the social explorer, what does Proudhon achieve? This:

What would we blame for these analyses and these strong assertions? To be too harsh, to overly neglect the softening of the State and property brought on by centuries of Christian and French civilization. But the spirit and the doctrine are ours, almost without reservations. It would be futile to wonder to what extent Proudhon would have continued his reconnaissance, his discoveries. I do not know if the paths, if the rough hazardous roads which he followed would have brought him to the royal road. But, sure enough, he was on a French road, and we know very well where the curve of his prolonged thought takes in our century. The house where we speak is one of the places where the Proudhonian spirit lives again. Professor Bouglé and M. Herriot can call Proudhon to their aid; it is not among them that Proudhonian thought passes; M. Herriot does democratic politics, M. Bouglé makes books for democracy; what does this have to do with the Proudhonian work?

We are the sons of Proudhon; we who are neither politicians nor bookmakers, we who want to labor and organize our country. It is we who revive these two French virtues, at least one of which animates all the work of the Proudhonians and the other of which reveals this spirit of independence, the republican pride, and this monarchical loyalty which the Flemish, the Breton, the Lyonnais, the Provençal, and any man of the French country at last, would be killed in the defense of the rights and freedoms which ensure his life, because he wants to live by working or dying while fighting, but is ready to die as well, with joy, with happiness, for our Lord the King of France.

Did not fate give birth to Mr. Georges Sorel only to give himself the pleasure of displeasing lovers of mediocre thought? I would be inclined to believe it, and I know of no philosopher before him, except Proudhon, who has similarly known how to exasperate the readers of conservative papers and the preachers of moderate wisdom.

Hence the happy success of his work. Without a certain scandal, the glory of this philosopher mathematician would not have irritated the curiosity of the general public. It took Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, and sabotage, and the denting machine, and the spiked sock of unionism to assert itself to the frightened bourgeoisie as a doctrine capable of delivering action. But once these acts were provided, we tried to trace their cause, and this cause, for the most part, is made up of ideas. These ideas are expressed, developed, commented on in the Sorelian work. Let us contain our smiles by remembering that in the year 1908 the wise and ministerial newspapers attributed to Mr. Georges Sorel, author of Reflections on Violence, had great responsibility for the workers' riots.

Mr. Clemenceau, who is a man of wit, had to doubt chuckling about it with Lucien Métivier; but were the Conservatives completely wrong? The taste for struggle, the courage in resistance. Who had emulated him to the disaffected workers? Their immediate guides, those of the General Confederation of Labor? Without a doubt, but what force for them and for public opinion to be in agreement with a learned philosopher!

Who would dare, moreover, without temerity, distinguish with too much assurance the role of pure ideas in the arrival of acts?

Let us agree that Sorel's work was in its own way an apology for violence and that we can relate to it more than one consequence that appeared at first singular and distant. And furthermore, how can one be surprised that this work naturally arouses an excitement to act, since the transformation of ideas into action is the necessary result of any abstract thought which regulates its deductions, or which guides its intuitions according to the natural order of things?

This realism - in the proper sense of the word - of Sorelian philosophy and, if you will, of metaphysics, presents itself as its first characteristic. Sorel became a true philosopher, not an associate of philosophy, but an engineer. He did not take his system from the University. Perhaps one might think that attending an ideal Sorbonne would have been profitable for him. But the real one, the one judged by Pierre Lasserre and Agathon, was spared him and this great blessing of fate preserved him from verbal vanities.

However, his realism appears to be due more to his moral health than to the vigor of his reason. This is because deep down in Sorel, we must not look for the logician, but discern the moralist. His first revolts against Dreyfusisme came less from his mind and more from his heart. Maurras, I am sure, before any anger against the pathetic champions of Israel, must have smiled in disdain, but neither Sorel nor Gohier could dream of smiling. They had engaged Dreyfusisme with the preserved parts of their sensibilities and became indignant, the day of their disillusionment, like deceived lovers less irritated by the perfidies suffered than by the cowardice of any betrayal.

From The Trial of Socrates, published in 1899 in which he tried to resolve this famous cause in a simple political affair – in a High Court debate – Sorel asserted himself as a moralist. It is not always very fruitful. Very delicately and willingly awarding his praises to the gracious Aspasia, admirable for having known how to combine the Attic spirit with the Milesian pleasure, Sorel is quite wrong to be astonished. Unfortunate still perhaps, but significant, this audacious maxim: "To think without moral end is to prostitute the knowledge, the logic, and the eloquence.” And, more significant of his moralism than any other concern, then appears, in other works, his concern to apply psychophysics to aesthetics.

The very substance of his thought at the time deserves only a mediocre interest. The failure of psychophysics is no longer contested or disputable, but in 1886 and 1890, one could still have some illusion. Georges Sorel took an interest in it and highlighted the purely psychological character of this new technique that was intended to be used in physiology. But what matters more to the understanding of the rest of his work is that, from his works of pure philosophy, a general idea of aesthetics emerges, which joins this one to morality.

"Aesthetics," he roughly said, "is a simple branch of ethics." He proves this by solving the elements of artistic emotion. He distinguishes first of all a satisfaction obtained from the taste which escapes all scientific analysis, then a sensual passion, and finally the moral result of the action that the work of art exerts on our sensitivity. It is this last component which is, for Sorel, the object of the aesthetic. It is by seeking to define it that it seems to him to praise architecture for being chaste and to be wary of music which "extinguishes consciousness and diminishes reason.”

Wouldn't this moral element of artistic emotion, however, be really immoral? Sorel, by asking himself this question, manages to discover the social value of art. In an important study, he retraces in a few pages the history of artistic technique and interprets it. Through his commentary, he still manages to discover in industrial work the glorification of the creative human spirit. This habit of judging works of art as a moralist leads Sorel to the solution of a new aesthetic and sociological problem at the same time: the social value of art.

The history of art, according to him, teaches us that artists originally combined in manufactured objects the utility of the use with the pleasure of the form. But gradually, the craftsman separated from the artist, and art moved away from industry. In addition, the arts used to help each other conquer the same ideal of beauty. All of them contributed to expressing it in a religious or other monument, in a palace, in a temple. On the contrary, starting from the Renaissance, each art in isolation pursues a certain kind of beauty. Like Théodule Ribot, Sorel believes that modern art differs from primitive art by the “passage from the social to the individual.” But, to appreciate this individualized art, a greater knowledge of the technique is essential; aesthetics becomes a science of reasoning and becomes intellectualized. It discovers the role of spirit in matter. The effort of the tool is proof of intelligence; the main social value of art, according to Georges Sorel, is that it is an ennoblement of manual labor.

What we see, in the end, of Georges Sorel's aesthetics reveals a constant tension of the will. It is less a doctrine applicable to all men and in all cases than the morality of a fighter in conflict with adversaries, and who remains in the midst of dangers. He himself grasps the nature of it when he later calls it pessimism, but it is a reasoned pessimism which denies owing anything to instinct.

The three main aspects of Sorel's pessimism are as follows: first of all, there is a sympathy for human suffering which shows all that is Christian in his sensitivity; then there is the conviction that a set of human, and therefore social, ills can only be changed by total destruction and not by successive improvements; it is finally the obstinate idea that the union creates a force with incalculable effects, and that each closer group of suffering men takes an immense step forward in their march towards liberation.

We can suppose in Georges Sorel, by the samples of deep sensibility that this adventurous morality gives us, a decidedly anti-intellectualist. But make no mistake about it, this is the complete opposite of a romantic who abandons himself to feeling out of the weariness of reason, he's a critic of the sciences who knows both the value and the impotence of their method and who wants to, in his understanding of the world, give a part to intuition.

Mr. Michel Darguenat, in his response to Georges Valois' inquiry on the monarchy and the working class, perfectly defined the benefits of this critique of "scientism.” It showed us, he said, by analyses that were not arguments of seminary that this famous science, substituted for religionby the century of Comte, Renan, and Taine, was partly built by our mind and that the most artificial scientific laws were precisely the famous
principles and dogmas of the new religion. Mr. Sorel's school helped to get rid of democratic prejudices: it gave us back our freedom, after which we made our freedom what we wanted. This is our business. However, the criticism of science and the anti-intellectualism that it engendered in Sorel made him a disciple of Bergson. Georges Sorel's disciples are also Bergsonians; the best known of them, Mr. Edouard Berth, is an enthusiastic follower of intuitive philosophy. Anti-intellectualism and Bergsonism are therefore two terms in Sorel with very similar meanings. It is all the more important to mark the purely critical origin of Sorelian anti-intellectualism.

In 1881, analyzing the use of the notion of cause in the physical sciences, Sorel showed how current science admits the autonomy of causes and why it rejects the principle of the mutual action of all substances formulated by Kant. A little later, he showed the exaggerated importance given to postulates in contemporary mathematics. To promote the Kantian theses, it is made a science outside of nature, founded on pure data of the mind. But how the Ancients, creators of geometry, who must, after all, know about it, had a different notion of it.

Ancient science - Sorel proves this in various places in his work - was originally taken from the practice of the arts. Geometry, for Euclid, was the doctrine of the graphic functions of straight lines and of circles, and quite naturally he supposes that one is armed to subject the circles and the straight lines to the operations which exhaust their nature in the isolated state, of the processes used by this same practice of the arts. It is a pattern of technical images borrowed from architecture which made the surface more interesting to the ancient surveyors than the line and conceived the line itself as the intersection of two surfaces involving the consideration of quantities whose sum is constant and which vary continuously. Our intuition guides us, itself guided by the memory of carved stones and stereotomic images. As for the number, of which Sorel admits, like Bergson, the spatial origin, it results from groups of rigid figures stripped of their expansive character. Finally, he shows that the starting point in the consciousness of mathematical reasoning explains the use of algebraic symbols, empty cells on which one operates freely, but where one can at will replace the real quantities.

In another essay, Sorel untangles the metaphysical concerns of contemporary physicists. He regards the rupture between physics and the philosophy of nature as a consequence of the infinitesimal calculus. When we want to express the speed of the variation of two quantities, we only determine the differences which exist between the two quantities considered at any two times, as far apart as we want.

There are therefore only extensive quantitative differences over the course of time and never a specific determination at any given moment. Science was not only a forecast, but a search for the essence of things; his first ambition was to talk about natura rerum. But today, the skepticism of physicists - sometimes excessive - makes them renounce these claims or at least gives them more. The main cause of this skepticism, as Sorel points out, is the frequently observed possibility of arriving at the same result by different assumptions. The Optical theories use two vectors, one of which represents a speed, the other a vortex. Replace the meaning of one vector for another and the conclusions remain identical. Finally, practically usable calculations can be caused by eccentric hypotheses that are aware of being. Should we recall the atomic gyroscopes of which Lord Kelvin composed matter, and Maxwell’s representation of the improper conductors of electricity in conductive cells locked in insulating walls? The general consequence is that we tend to look at the real world, not that of scientific experience, but that of our life, as constituted according to principles opposed to those which govern the artificial world of science. There is a rigorous determinism in scientific systems; it is almost absent in nature.

His anti-intellectualism alone would have made Sorel a defender of liberty. But the natural movement of his mind which led him there was accelerated by his social studies and by meeting Bergson. "Georges Sorel is, it seems to me, too original and too independent a mind," said Mr. Bergson, "to enlist under anyone's banner; he is not a disciple. But he accepts some of my views and when he quotes me he does so as a man who has read me carefully and understood me perfectly.” No doubt, Mr. Bergson reduced his share of influence on Sorel's mind out of modesty, but it is certain that his Theory of Myth, reinforced afterwards by Bergsonian considerations, is found exposed or rather suggested from its first principles.

The origin is in his works of history.

The main reason for Sorel's meditation is that one cannot infer the consequences of a fact from its own value; the interpretation of this fact by its witnesses or their listeners must be taken into account. Formerly, he writes about the Trial of Socrates, the main concern was to solve (in front of a historical event) the problem of his reality… it does not have much importance. For example, in the history of the Order of Saint Francis of Assisi, what does the exact and scientific nature of the phenomenon of stigmas matter to us? Even admitting that it was a complete fraud, it would still be true that the belief in stigma had a considerable influence on the history of the Middle Ages. What the philosopher is interested in is the idea that contemporary people have of the matter. “We have often rehearsed,” he adds, “that Islam originated from the hysteria of Muhammad. This is not correct. We readily admit that the Arab prophet was ill, but many others suffered from the same affliction without founding a religion. The engine of this great movement was the belief in the inspiration of Muhammad.” Sorel, very respectful of the Catholic religion, even tried to prepare on ideas of the same kind a "concordat between theology and science.” “The facts which have provoked abundant disputes,” he said, “do not matter at all to history. The consequences attributed to them might just as well have existed without them. Theologians do not want to be satisfied with what they call appearances or the external side of things. It is on the divine aspect that they bring their reasoning to bear, and as a result they pose problems that are unrelated to history. As for historians, they never need to enter this specific field of theology.”

Therefore, the erroneous interpretation of a fact can lead to a fruitful effort. Likewise, a false prediction of the present action can lead its results far beyond the intended effects. But still, certain conditions are necessary; this is why the Theory of Myth is going to be established and why Bergsonian philosophy brings its assistance.

"During my studies," writes Sorel, "I had observed something which seemed to me so simple that I did not think I had to insist much: the men who take part in great social movements represent their imminent action in the form of battle images to ensure the success of their cause.” Georges Sorel calls these constructions myths: for him, the general strike of the trade unionists and the catastrophic revolution of Marx are myths. The effective role of these myths is indisputable; to understand it, and with it the nature of these, Sorel uses Bergson's psychology.

Moralists who seek to explain the reasons for our actions almost never reason about what is truly fundamental in our individual selves. “They usually seek to project our accomplished actions onto the field of judgments that society has drafted in advance for the various types of action that are most common in contemporary life.” On the contrary, Bergson shows to us two different selves, one of which would be the external projection of the other, its spatial and social representation. The true self, made up of our intimate states, presents them to us as refractory to measurement, constantly in the process of being formed. But this true self is rarely perceived by us; we only make ourselves masters of it in free action, because it is necessary to place ourselves in sheer duration for an act to escape the determinism of the spatial world. “It is obvious,” says Sorel, “that we enjoy this freedom, especially when we make an effort to create within ourselves a new man in order to break the historical frameworks which surround us. Then he shows how this free action should be represented. “When we act freely, we have created a completely artificial world placed in front of the present, formed by movements which depend on us. Freedom then becomes perfectly intelligible. Its first act, the antecedent of all the others, is the creation of an artificial world. These artificial worlds generally disappear from our mind without leaving any memories, but when the masses get excited, then a picture can be described which constitutes a social myth.”

A myth is quite different from a utopia. It is an expression of will which condemns individual activities. Utopia is the product of intellectual work: "it is the work of theorists who, after having observed and discussed the facts, seek to establish a model with which to compare existing societies to measure the good and the evil they contain; it is a composition of imaginary institutions, but offering analogies with real institutions large enough for the jurist to be able to reason about them; it is a dismountable construction, some parts of which have been cut in such a way that they can be used (with some adjustments) in future legislation. “A myth… is basically identical to the convictions of a group… It is the expression of these convictions in the language of movement and… consequently it cannot be broken down into parts which can be applied on a level of historical descriptions.” Liberal political economy, social peace, the first socialisms, these are utopias; the Napoleonic epic and the general strike are, on the contrary, myths.

We can say that the syndicalist metaphysics of Sorel is produced by the meeting of his anti-intellectualism, which provides him with the theory of myth, and his moralism, which generates that of violence. The crux of the matter lies in his rejection of any idea of natural law. To fight the doctrine, Sorel relies on Pascal. "There are undoubtedly natural laws," said the latter, "but this beautiful corrupted reason has corrupted everything." Or again: "Three degrees of elevation of the pole reverse all jurisprudence, a meridian decides the truth... law has its epochs. Pleasant justice that a river confines! Truth below the Pyrenees, error beyond..." Finally Pascal, always followed by Sorel, makes justice practically depend on force. Sorel criticizes only the Pascalian notion of it, which includes all kinds of force, while, according to him, we must seek in economics the type of force which has arrived at a completely automatic regime and can thus be identified naturally with the law.”