Reflections on violence

For to M. Sorel violence is good, both as an end and as a means: violence is at once the condition and the essence of the higher morality or "the sublime in ethics." This sublimation of violence as a kind of moral tonic and renewer of "lost energies" raises questions which would carry us rather far afield into the domains of psychology and ethics, of religion and philosophy: and this is hardly the occasion for such an attractive excursion. What is peculiar to M. Sorel is the new or at any rate rather unfamiliar setting which he gives to the idea of violence-the spiritual affinities, for instance, which he finds between proletarian violence and the philosophy both of Proudhon and of Bergson. But M. Sorel is equally notable for the violence he himself does to analogies. It may be said, indeed, of him what he himself says in a particular context of Renan to such an extent indeed that an element of truth becomes distorted into an untruth, into a falsity of extremes. On the other hand, the discerning reader will be able to sift the grain from the chaff, and may then that M. Sorel's polemic against "moderation" and "compromise," "arbitration" and "opportunism," has more than a negative value; that his argument, stripped of the extravagance of its trappings, has a really arresting and illuminating quality; and that in any cas it has the rare and supreme merit of forcing the reader to think-and to think furiously. His book is at once original and thought-provoking. Sidney Ball, The Economic Journal, Vol. 26, No. 103 (Sep., 1916), pp. 337-341