constitutes the secret virtue which assures the continued progress of the world" (his italics). He found this virtue in soldiers, in inventors, in artists and craftsmen, and also in exemplary religious figures, whom he extolled with a fervor that may seem surprising in the author of Reflections on Violence.

If there is any lingering doubt about the spiritual significance he attached to class warfare, it should be dispelled by his frequent comparisons between the working-class movement and the early history of the Christian church. The early Christians thought of themselves as a "holy army" at war with the devil, according to Sorel, and although their dreamed-of "deliverance did not take place," the dream itself (like the "myth" of the general strike in his own time) "produced many heroic acts, engendered a courageous propaganda, and was the cause of considerable moral progress." The analogy between the Christian apocalypse and the general strike clarifies the meaning Sorel attached to social myths. He did not see them simply as convenient fictions, let alone as illusions or outright falsehoods. They were guiding beliefs about the world that combined moral insight and moral aspiration, and their cash value, as James would have said, lay in their capacity to call up unflagging devotion, to discipline resentment, and thus to change the world for the better. Sorel reserved the term "myth" for ideologies that elicited qualities once associated with the concept of virtue. Progress, on the other hand, was an "illusion," because it elicited only complacency, alternating with the "frenzies" of disappointed optimism.

In one of the many allusions to primitive Christianity in Reflections on Violence, Sorel pointed out that Roman persecution of the Christians was fairly mild, on the whole, that torture and execution occurred infrequently, that the Romans themselves paid little attention to these incidents, and that the significance of persecution lay in the Christians' belief that it foreshadowed a decisive struggle between good and evil. Persecution acquired its "dread and dramatic character" only in the context of Christian mythology, which meant nothing to the Romans. In the same way, Sorel suggested, the struggle between capital and labor might lead only to a "few short conflicts," inconsequential from capital's point of view. What mattered was that conflicts between capital and labor evoke in the worker's mind the "idea of the general strike," which would discourage accommodation between the opposing forces in the same way the

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