in the same old predicament. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" would turn out to be the dictatorship of the intellectuals—the worst form of tyranny imaginable, in Sorel's view.

The only way to avoid this outcome was to provide workers with the moral and technical resources required for a life of freedom—to make them soldiers, in short. Sorel's defense of the military virtues shocked the sensibilities of his age and continues to stand in the way of a sympathetic understanding of his thought. Even if some of his contemporaries, maddened by the injustice and poverty they saw all around them, could swallow the idea of revolutionary violence, they found it impossible to swallow military discipline. Sorel's praise of warfare, however, is easily intelligible as the product of a long tradition of republican thought in which citizenship had once been closely tied to the profession of arms. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as we have seen, republicans substituted proprietorship for military prowess as the social basis of citizenship, and the republican tradition mingled with others in a broad current of populist ideology that glorified the small producer. Sorel inherited this populism, along with a "peasant morality," from Proudhon; his originality—a response to the difficulty that small producers appeared by his time to be a vanishing breed—lay in his return to the military model of citizenship, which other republicans had long since renounced. The working class would learn to be free, he argued, only by acting like an army. Class warfare would become the school of modern virtue.

Unlike Bellamy, for whom military discipline implied an intricate division of labor and the efficiency provided by complete regimentation, Sorel believed that war nourished a "passionate individualism." In the wars of the French revolution—his favorite example, next to Homeric Greece, of military life at its best—"each soldier considered himself as an individual having something of importance to do in the battle, instead of looking upon himself as simply one part of the military mechanism committed to the supreme direction of the leader." Sorel's conception of warfare did not imply the blind obedience singled out by Oliver Wendell

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