Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason, by Georges Sorel

[p030] Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason. The Social Theories of Georges Sorel. With a translation of his essay on The Decomposition of Marxism. Irving L. Horowitz. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 30s. The turn of the century was marked by a crisis of socialist theory as well as of bourgeois philosophy and social thought. The work of Georges Sorel reflects the two crises, but con- tributes nothing to their solution or their understanding. Hig stress on the spontaneous consciousness of the masses was not the predominantly healthy reaction against bureaucracy and opportunism which expressed itself in a similar stress among the German Spartacists (as Horowitz suggests, p. 65). It was the basis for imposing on the masses the ‘myth’ developed by some outside political leadership. Since the masses are irrational, the programme which unites them need not be a true reflection of their class interests; it need only express some emotional whole which attunes social action to these interests. Horowitz does manage to point out, if a little laboriously, the contradiction between this outlook and the possibility of a tational social science. Despite his attacks on the bureau- cratic degeneration of Marxism in the old Social Democratic parties, Sorel ended up with an _ exactly parallel attitude to the masses. Their consciousness was to remain an amalgam of immediate impressions from their environment and the un- conscious, irrational springs of human action. The only men who would really grasp what was going on would presumably be the ‘myth-makers’. Just how their consciousness sepa- LABOUR REVIEW —Winter, 1961-62 rates itself out from the irrationalities of the mass is unexplained, as it is in all bourgeois sociology, even in its best representatives like Mannheim. This is the real weakness of Horowitz’s analysis: the crisis in bourgeois social theory and the anticipations of the split in the inter- national Marxist movement at the turn of the century were part of a single process, the entry of capitalism into its final, imperialist phase. In Social Democracy, this phase ex- pressed itself through the oppor- _ tunism of the labour aristocracy; in bourgeois sociology, in the triumph of pessimism and the collapse of any unified historical outlook. Sorel reacts to both of these with- out understanding their basis. Con- sequently he ends by combining many of the worst features of both. He was unable to develop a_ theory related to the actual course of struggle of the proletariat. His ideas were essentially those of the helpless petty bourgeois in the imperialist world. This, combined with the extreme stress On irrationality, made his theories so welcome to Mussolini. Unfortunately Horowitz is firmly in the stylistic tradition of modern sociology. The many quotations are welcome oases, though they do not seem to have provided sufficient re- freshment to the proof-readers. CS. New model army