expectation of the end of the world prevented accommodation between Christianity and Rome. Even when Christianity became the official religion of the empire, the church regarded the new arrangement as strictly provisional, and a sense of the radical cleavage between Christians and pagans persisted through all the subsequent ages of compromise and conciliation, to be revived whenever the church sank too completely into the ways of the world.

Clearly Sorel expected the working-class movement, disciplined by the austere rigors of the class struggle, to inherit the rejuvenating role of Christian sectarians. The church in his own day, like the army—that other source of strenuous ideals—had finally lapsed into a terminal state of moral fatigue, in Sorel's view. He endorsed Ernest Renan's judgment—all the more astute, he thought, for having been offered at a time when so many people "were announcing the renascence of idealism and foreseeing progressive tendencies in a Church that was at length reconciled with the modern world"—that "the two things which alone until now have resisted the decay of reverence, the army and the church, will soon be swept away in the torrent." The defection of the army and the church left "only one force" capable of sustaining an "entirely epic state of mind," according to Sorel—the labor movement, organized around demands not for higher wages but for control of production by the producers.

We are now in a better position, I think, to appreciate both the value and the limitations of Sorel's political vision. The limitations do not lie in his "cult of violence." He expected the working-class movement to "refine the conception of violence." Sorelian violence was so broadly imagined, as Jack Roth observes, as to be quite "compatible" with "Christian non-violent resistance." The trouble with Sorel's approach to politics was not that it exalted raw passions and "irrationalism" and thus prepared the way for totalitarianism but that it was much too refined for daily use—too rigidly divorced from any practical objectives the workers could hope to attain.

More sympathetic critics of Sorel made this point. "What attracted him," as G. D. H. Cole correctly observed, "was the struggle, not the victory." It is true that he envisioned workers' control of the means of production; but even this seemed to figure in his scheme of things not so much as a goal but as a by-product of class warfare. Once the workers had

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