Just as progressive ideology concealed indifference to the future beneath apparent concern, so its humanitarian horror of violence concealed the "sanguinary frenzies" of disappointed optimism. Hence the revolutionary terror—perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Enlightenment. Heroic pessimism, Sorel argued, had nothing in common with the bitter disillusionment experienced by those who blindly trust in the future only to stumble against unexpected obstacles to the march of progress. The pessimist understood that "our natural weakness" obstructed the path of social justice. The optimist, "maddened by the unexpected resistance that his plans encounter," sought to assure the "happiness of future generations by butchering the egoists of the present." Humanitarians condemned violence on principle but resorted to a particularly brutal and vindictive form of violence when their plans went awry.

Pessimism rested on a love of life and a willingness to part with it. It expressed an awareness of the "grandeur and beauty of the world," including man's own powers of invention, together with a recognition of the limits of those powers. What Sorel called pessimism was close to what Carlyle, Emerson, and James called wonder—an affirmation of life in the teeth of its limits. Sorel understood that the modern mood is one of revolt, born of the growing impatience with limits that stubbornly persist in spite of all the celebrated advances in science, technology, and organized benevolence. This is why he took so much trouble to distinguish his doctrine of class warfare both from the revolutionary terror carried out by intellectuals armed with a blind faith in progress and from popular insurrections animated by envy and resentment of the rich. Envy and resentment were marks of a slavish disposition, and the bloody revolts they inspired left things very much as they were. French politics in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, Sorel thought, were dominated by an alliance between progressive intellectuals and the rebellious masses. The intellectuals, themselves envious of the power exercised by the army, the church, and the financial establishment, played on the envy of the masses. The idealism originally associated with the campaign on behalf of Colonel Dreyfus, wrongly accused of treason in the hope of keeping Jews in

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