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From International Socialism (1st series), No.6, Autumn 1961, p.32.
Thanks to Ted Crawford & the late Will Fancy.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory
Don Martindale
Routledge.
Radicalism and the Revolt against Reason
I.L. Horowitz
Routledge, 30s.
God-substitute or dogmatism, from flirtatious suggestion to hen-pecked slavery, theory is a whore. Sociology is a brothel. Professor Martindale with crippling thoroughness, is determined to visit every room, even if all the girls are off duty or madame long ago died. Anything and everything goes – and we dash headlong through a catalogue of names, quotations and categories that leaves an impression merely of mess. Signally, Mr Martindale describes theory, without suggesting why theory: we never hear the sociology of sociological theory. A stream of ‘ideas’, like particles, flies out of each page, and is gone: ‘minds’, almost alone and autonomous, produce ‘ideas’, ideas have a logic all their own; men and history coexist uncomfortably with their thoughts. To socialists, then, the book is unlikely to be very helpful; to students, some idea might be conveyed of the volume of sheer nonsense which has at one time or another been masqueraded as sociology.
The second book is much more interesting and Professor Horowitz is to be congratulated on this intellectual portrait of the paradox, Georges Sorel. His emphasis on the non-intellectual formation of Sorel is somewhat weak, and his analysis of the role performed by Sorel is almost non-existent: but as an internal critique, this book is excellent. Sorel was an intellectual who loathed intellectualism, a Catholic manqué who created a mystical working-class, a man detached from any political activity who urged that activity alone determined the future, a socialist who believed violence was a therapy and destruction the cure of class society, a forerunner of fascism who substituted the working-class for the volk. Early in his life he was a powerful advocate of syndicalism, thinking of revolution and conflict as desirable ends in themselves. Late in life, he refined the notion of an elite, and the charisma of leadership. As a figure, in fact, regardless of the contradictions in his position, he suggested many of the ideas later to be current more or less explicitly in both Stalinism and Fascism. He is of interest in showing some of the intellectual derivation of ideas current today, some of the voluntarism of the desperate and those detached from the Labour movement. Professor Horowitz, weak in his positive defence of positions attacked by Sorel (cf. his defence of Parliamentary democracy) is clear and incisive if outlining; the inconsistencies in Sorel’s work, and especially the retreat from politics – from the world to the soul, the source of certainty, from the soul to the elite, emitting signals that the masses pursue into the nobility of anarchy, from the elite to the charisma, who relieves even the elite of responsibility and thought. Revolutionary conservatism, romantic feudalism, mysticism of an entirely imaginary proletariat: a civilisation decays in the work of Sorel; no final dissolution has cleared the rot away yet.
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