Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/177

Rh declared that he had not studied political economy, having "a certain mistrust for that conjectural science." We must doubtless understand from this that it is more difficult to argue about production than it is to diagnose syphilis.

The little science has engendered a fabulous number of sophistries which we continually come across, and which go down very well with the people who possess the stupid and mediocre culture distributed by the University. These sophistries consist in putting very different things on the same plane from a love of logical simplicity; thus sexual morality is reduced to the equitable relations between contracting parties, the family code to that regulating debts and agreements, and production to exchange.

Because, in nearly every country and in every age, the State has undertaken to regulate circulation, both of money and of banknotes, or has laid down a legal system of measures, it does not by any means follow that there would be the same advantage in entrusting to the State, for mere love of uniformity, the management of great enterprises: yet this argument is one of those which appeal most strongly to many medical students and nurslings of the School of Law. I am convinced that Jaurès is even now unable to understand why industry has been abandoned by lazy legislators to the anarchical tendencies of egotists; if production is really the base of everything, as Marx says, it is criminal not to place it in the front rank, not to subject it to a great legislative action, conceived on the same lines as those parts of legislation which owe their clearness to their abstract character, i.e. not to order and arrange it so that it rests