their place, had turned sour. In the I890s, Sorel had taken up socialism, but he soon came to see the socialist movement as the principal embodiment of slavish envy and resentment. Now he took the position that a socialist state would only bring about a change of masters. Jean Jaurès, the socialist champion, became Sorel's prime example of political self‐ righteousness. Jaurès, he said, was "capable of every ferocity against the vanquished," because "in his eyes the vanquished are always in the wrong." Socialists worshiped success; if they came to power, they would "prove to be worthy successors of the Inquisition, of the Old Regime, and of Robespierre." Experience—always the best guide—showed that "revolutionaries plead 'reasons of state' as soon as they get into power."

Socialists, moreover, had no intention of getting rid of the conditions that required a class of supervisors in the workplace. A socialism that deserved to be taken seriously, according to Sorel, would seek to make workmen their own masters. Jaurès and his kind, however, sought merely to become masters in their own right. The "only difference which would exist between this sham socialism and capitalism" would lie in the "employment of more ingenious methods of procuring discipline in the workshop." Sorel's indictment of socialism did not stop with the reformist school; it extended to revolutionary socialism as well. Syndicalism has often been misrepresented as a movement that began and ended with the demand that parliamentary methods give way to revolutionary violence, as if the issue turned solely on tactics. Sorel's emphasis on violence encouraged this misrepresentation; but even causal readers might have been expected to catch his condemnation of revolutionary terror, which in itself showed that his objection to socialism was not primarily tactical at all but substantive. He wanted a social order in which industry was governed by the workers themselves, not by a managerial class that would always oppress workers whether it owed its influence to capitalists or to the state. Revolutionary movements should first of all seek to make the workers independent, fearless, and resourceful, according to Sorel; instead of which socialists exploited their weakness, encouraging extravagant expectations they would never be able to fulfill. Sorel had no illusions about what would happen if an undisciplined class of workers suddenly took power and tried to impose its slave morality on the state. Lacking both the moral independence and the technical knowledge to organize industry on their own, the workers would soon find themselves

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