las, with consequences equally deplorable, Sorel thought, for a theory of knowledge and a theory of morals. Strictly speaking, "there is no Cartesian morality" at all, he wrote in The Illusions of Progress, only a "rule of propriety prescribing respect for the established usages." It was a mark of his Pascalian, "Protestant-like view of life" (as an Italian admirer, Giuseppe Prezzolini, put it) that Sorel criticized Descartes on the grounds that he "never seemed to have been preoccupied with the meaning of life."

The "great preoccupation" of his own life, he told Croce in 1907, was the "historical genesis of morality," which he traced neither to the French nor to the Athenian enlightenment but to the pastoral, "warlike tribes living in the mountains" of ancient Greece, whose sense of the "grandeur and beauty of creation," preserved in the Iliad and the Odyssey, "provided the republics of antiquity with the ideas which form the ornament of our modern culture." In modern times, peasants and small proprietors most clearly approximated the Homeric virtues, in Sorel's view. He thought Proudhon's incorruptible peasant morality—his respect for "temperance, frugality, the daily bread obtained by daily labor, a poverty quick to punish gluttony and laziness"—underlay his achievements as a social theorist. Like Le Play, he attached great importance to the family and to the continuity between generations. "The world will become more just," he wrote, "to the extent that it becomes more chaste." He deplored the growing acceptance of divorce, the heavy taxes on inherited property, and the contractual theory of the family that animated these reforms, as a result of which the family came to be seen merely as a collection of individuals.

Sorel's highly original attack on the idea of progress owed a good deal to Tocqueville's insight that the old regime, by consolidating the power of the state and weakening intermediate institutions, had laid the groundwork for the revolution and for the identification of the state with the highest form of reason. The whole structure of modern politics and thought, Sorel argued, rested on the dubious innovations of the age of absolutism. The Cartesian spirit in philosophy, the idea of absolute rights in property, and the theory of enlightened despotism had a certain affinity for each other and for the idea of progress—"the adornment of the mind that, free of prejudice, sure of itself, and trusting in the future, ... created a philosophy assuring the happiness of all who possess the means

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