religion, as if men could find salvation in the class struggle. But if Sorel stands convicted on all these counts, and probably on the count of anti‐ Semitism as well, the other charges against him have to be thrown out, since they arise either from misunderstanding, sometimes from deliberate misrepresentation of his views, or simply from the enlightened prejudice against "pessimism." His attack on the idea of progress can hardly be taken as evidence of mental instability. Nor can we accept Horowitz's contention that his championship of small-scale production betrays "nostalgia" and "economic provincialism." Even his scorn for parliamentary democracy has to be removed from the indictment against Sorel, unless we can show that democracy embodies a demanding, morally elevating standard of conduct. If democracy means no more than a "reduction of the work day," in Horowitz's formulation, "improved automatic techniques in production," and "abundance of commodities," it is not worth defending. How can such a paltry vision, as William James said, inspire anything but contempt?

As for the crowning charges—Sorel's advocacy of "irrationalism," his "cult" of violence—these arise from a hasty and superficial reading of his work. Modern liberals, with their rather narrow conception of rationality and their visceral reaction against the merest hint of violence and coercion, cannot be expected to do justice to someone like Sorel, who did not share the dominant prejudices of the age. Liberals' obsession with fascism, moreover, leads them to see "fascist tendencies" or "proto-fascism" in all opinions unsympathetic to liberalism, just as the far right detects "creeping socialism" in liberalism itself. If liberals have been victimized by red-baiting, they have perfected their own technique of dismissal by expanding the concept of fascism to embrace everything that falls outside the tradition of the Enlightenment.

Sorel provides an easy target for this kind of abuse, since opposition to the Enlightenment was the one position from which he never deviated. Progress, humanitarianism, the Cartesian ideal of certitude, utilitarianism, positivism, sexual freedom—Sorel rejected them all. He inherited from his intellectual masters—Pascal, Proudhon, Tocqueville, Le Play—a profound suspicion of the modern mind: of its shallowness and complacency, its unmerited sense of superiority to the past, its fascination with the future, its underlying indifference to the future. He took Pascal's part against Descartes, who tried to reduce everything to formu

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