"slave morals" and virile youth should be taught to despise them.
It is because the State stands for organized external force, using for its own ends armies, laws, courts, education, churches, flags, that it too becomes, as it does with the Anarchist, the arch enemy.
Sorel not only strikes at capitalism and at politics that is its handmaid, he strikes also at the high priest of scientific Socialism, Karl Marx. Sorel sees in Marx a fatalistic optimism about the future of capitalism with its industrial units growing ever bigger because they cannot help it. An inexorable evolution is crowding the victors into more compact bodies, until by very over-weight they fall like ripened fruit into collectivist possession. This is all too easy for Monsieur Sorel and he will have none of it. Marxism is already in a state of "decomposition," and to this effect he writes his little book.[1]
Not so blithely do things go just where we want them in this world. They move toward these desired ends, not of their own impelling, but only as we urge and direct them by our own will and creative energies. Thus the Philosopher Bergson appears upon the scene:—he of the "world that we ourselves create," with la volenté créatrice.
Rousseau is again revived. The real tyrant is the majority rule. To submit even for a year to an elected person is to submit for that year to tyranny, therefore, we will none of it. It is Walt Whitman's "never ending audacity of elected persons." It is Thoreau jailed in Concord for non-payment of taxes. It is Tolstoi with
- ↑ La Decomposition du Marxism.
