tion of external goods (plunder, personal ambition) on the goods internal to its practice. Imperialism had stripped war of its moral value, he thought. The "object of war" was "no longer war itself." "Its object is to allow politicians to satisfy their ambitions"—to exploit subject populations and to pacify their own populations by giving them easy victories to celebrate. "It is hoped that the citizens will be so intoxicated by the spell of victory they will overlook the sacrifices which they are called upon to make." Under these conditions, the internal goods specific to the military calling could no longer provide a source of civic virtue. But that only strengthened the case for a moral alternative in the form of class struggle. ^*

Sorel's idea of revolutionary violence bore little resemblance to the ideas advanced by later theorists of violence like Franz Fanon and Jean Paul Sartre, who stressed the purifying force of hatred. Sorel understood that although "hate is able to provoke disorder, to ruin a social organization, to cast a country into a period of bloody revolutions, ... it produces nothing." Like Emerson, a writer he probably never read, he believed that virtue alone makes something new. In the passage castigating Napoleon's ill-conceived army reforms, he added this eminently Emersonian thought: "The striving towards perfection, which manifests itself, in spite of the absence of any personal, immediate, and proportional reward,

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Sorel drew an analogy between the mercenaries who fought the battles of imperialism and the proletarian army as conceived by socialist politicians. For the politicians, he said, "the proletariat is their army, which they love in the same way that a colonial administrator loves the troops which enable him to bring large numbers of Negroes under his authority." By means of the same promises—plunder and revenge—they hoped to conscript the workers into their campaign to gain control of the state. The old distinction between mercenary armies and citizen armies, always a staple of republican thought, underlay this analysis. Sorel wanted the workers to become citizen soldiers instead of hirelings, as it were.

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