Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/58

44 I do not believe that this question has yet been approached with the care it admits of; I hope that these reflections will lead a few thinkers to examine the problems of proletarian violence more closely. I cannot too strongly recommend this investigation to the new school which, inspired by the principles of Marx rather than by the formulas taught by the official proprietors of Marxism, is about to give to Socialist doctrines a sense of reality and a gravity which it certainly has lacked for several years. Since the new school calls itself Marxist, syndicalist, revolutionary, it should have nothing so much at heart as the investigation of the exact historical significance of the spontaneous movements which are being produced in the working classes, movements which may possibly ensure that the future direction of social development will conform to Marx's ideas.

Socialism is a philosophy of the history of contemporary institutions, and Marx has always argued as a philosopher of history when he was not led away by personal polemics to write about matters outside the proper scope of his own system.

The Socialist imagines, then, that he has been transported into a very distant future, so that he can consider actual events as elements of a long and completed development, and he can attribute to them the colour that they might take for a future philosopher. Such a procedure certainly presupposes a considerable use of hypothesis; but without certain hypotheses about the future there can be no social philosophy, no reflection on evolution, and no important action in the present even. The object of this study is a more thorough investigation of customs, and not a discussion of the merits or faults of certain important people. I want to find out how the feelings by which the masses are moved form themselves into groups; all the discussions of the moralists about the motives for the actions of prominent men, and all