(RV, 62). The ruling classes have surrendered their historical mission as of productive “creators forces” for the pacific profession of educators of the proletariat.” The consolidation of “noble statism, decadence, and the loss of heroism by abstract philosophy—this is the objective situation and it is by all accounts a dim one. This objective situation for evinces a subjective side: it enervates and paralyzes our collective will. Rationalism and its belief in progress, born in the Enlightenment and now the credo of the Republic, gives rise to an intellectual culture that denigrates the practical bases of knowledge and privileges abstract reasoning. And like Péguy’s claim in that all Notre jeunesse things begin as and are debased into Sorel sees in this culture a fall from “mystique” “politique,” intuition and feeling into abstract formalism and prediction, that is, the emergence of a utilitarian culture he calls This degeneration of thought—the subjective side of “probabilism.” actors because it substitutes for the unconditional will a form of cognitive and moral reasoning fit only for deadened workers in capitalism, not citizens in a free society. Why, after all, would people commit to a revolution if they predicted that their actions would likely fail, particularly if their opponent was a social order backed by the state? of “Theoreticians democracy,” with their subsequent calls for reasonable and practical action, restricted “greatly the field upon which this absolute man may extend the action of his free will” (RV 262). According to Sorel, Marx is the thinker who best grasps the consequences of orienting our wills towards prediction and calculation: a collection of free individuals maximizing will produce, in the aggregate, laws of social tendency, thereby dialectically transforming the sum of free actions into a determinate system governed by social compulsion. As Marx teaches us, When we reach the last historical stage, the action of independent wills disappears and the whole of society resembles an organized body, working automatically; observers can then establish an economic science which appears to them as exact as the sciences of physical nature. The error of many economists consisted
(RV, 62). The ruling classes have surrendered their historical mission as “creators of productive forces” for the pacific “noble profession of educators of the proletariat.” The consolidation of statism, decadence, and the loss of heroism by abstract philosophy—this is the objective situation and it is by all accounts a dim one. This objective situation for evinces a subjective side: it enervates and paralyzes our collective will. Rationalism and its belief in progress, born in the Enlightenment and now the credo of the Republic, gives rise to an intellectual culture that denigrates the practical bases of knowledge and privileges abstract reasoning. And like Péguy’s claim in Notre jeunesse that all things begin as “mystique” and are debased into “politique,” Sorel sees in this culture a fall from intuition and feeling into abstract formalism and prediction, that is, the emergence of a utilitarian culture he calls “probabilism.” This degeneration of thought—the subjective side of actors because it substitutes for the unconditional will a form of cognitive and moral reasoning fit only for deadened workers in capitalism, not citizens in a free society. Why, after all, would people commit to a revolution if they predicted that their actions would likely fail, particularly if their opponent was a social order backed by the state? “Theoreticians of democracy,” with their subsequent calls for reasonable and practical action, “greatly restricted the field upon which this absolute man may extend the action of his free will” (RV 262). According to Sorel, Marx is the thinker who best grasps the consequences of orienting our wills towards prediction and calculation: a collection of free individuals maximizing will produce, in the aggregate, laws of social tendency, thereby dialectically transforming the sum of free actions into a determinate system governed by social compulsion. As Marx teaches us, When we reach the last historical stage, the action of independent wills disappears and the whole of society resembles an organized body, working automatically; observers can then establish an economic science which appears to them as exact as the sciences of physical nature. The error of many economists consisted
The%20Cunning%20of%20Violence.docx