(RV, 62). The ruling classes have surrendered their historical mission as “creators of productive forces” for the pacific “noble profession of educators of the proletariat.” The consolidation of statism, decadence, and the loss of heroism by abstract philosophy—this is the objective situation and it is by all accounts a dim one. This objective situation for evinces a subjective side: it enervates and paralyzes our collective will. Rationalism and its belief in progress, born in the Enlightenment and now the credo of the Republic, gives rise to an intellectual culture that denigrates the practical bases of knowledge and privileges abstract reasoning. And like Péguy’s claim in Notre jeunesse that all things begin as “mystique” and are debased into “politique,” Sorel sees in this culture a fall from intuition and feeling into abstract formalism and prediction, that is, the emergence of a utilitarian culture he calls “probabilism.” This degeneration of thought—the subjective side of actors because it substitutes for the unconditional will a form of cognitive and moral reasoning fit only for deadened workers in capitalism, not citizens in a free society. Why, after all, would people commit to a revolution if they predicted that their actions would likely fail, particularly if their opponent was a social order backed by the state? “Theoreticians of democracy,” with their subsequent calls for reasonable and practical action, “greatly restricted the field upon which this absolute man may extend the action of his free will” (RV 262). According to Sorel, Marx is the thinker who best grasps the consequences of orienting our wills towards prediction and calculation: a collection of free individuals maximizing will produce, in the aggregate, laws of social tendency, thereby dialectically transforming the sum of free actions into a determinate system governed by social compulsion. As Marx teaches us, When we reach the last historical stage, the action of independent wills disappears and the whole of society resembles an organized body, working automatically; observers can then establish an economic science which appears to them as exact as the sciences of physical nature. The error of many economists consisted
and its withering skepticism. It was a fact neither Durkheim nor Renan could ever grasp no matter how much they sought to demystify religion by writing their histories. Indeed, Marxism contained a mythic aspect too, and in Sorel’s view the goal of revisionism was to recover that mythic core—the vision of catastrophe and revolutionary deliverance—from its disenchantment by the “scientific” Marxists of his day (RV, 122-9). After all, the falsity of myths “does not prevent us from continuing to make resolutions,” to act on their behalf (RV, 116). What is important to Sorel is not the true but banal claim that humans can be motivated by the irrational or the fictitious. What matters, rather, is that an appeal to the aesthetic is the means by which a voluntarist freedom is redeemable. When we act on mythic grounds, “our freedom becomes perfectly intelligible” (RV, 27). To act independently of rational or cognitive considerations is to come to know the deep psychology of our inner life, “our willing activity” and its “creative moment” that rationalist sciences confuse and obscure by viewing our actions from the outside and the standpoint of their completion (RV, 25-27). Or he put in Humanité nouvelle around the same time, “to organize does not consist in placing automatons on boxes! Organization is the passage from order which is mechanical, blind and determined from the outside, to organic, intelligent and fully accepted differentiation; in a world, it is a moral development.” The moral regeneration of society requires wrestling a politics of will out of a deterministic and atomized social order. While Sorel draws this redefinition of freedom as an inner subjective experience, as willing and invention, largely on the basis of his reading of Bergson, modeling freedom on creativity was also Sorel’s way of insisting on the moral superiority of the productive classes over intellectual ones. And because creative production was a mystery of the interior life, it made sense that socialism had mythic elements since it was a doctrine for producers.