Fragments of the preface

1 [4.7f Ziegler]. Augustine, Epist. 91.3: Take a brief look at that book On the Commonwealth, from which you drank up that attitude of a patriotic citizen, that there is for good men no limit or end of looking out for one's country.

2 [fr. 1a]. Thus, since our country provides more benefits and is a parent prior to our biological parents, we have a greater obligation to it than to our parents. (+ Nonius 426.8)

3 [fr. 1d]. From which those people call <us> away. (+ Arusianus 7.457.14k).

4 [fr. 1b]. Pliny, Natural History, praef. 22: Cicero is honest: in On the Commonwealth he announces that he is Plato's companion.

5 [fr. 1c]. Pliny, Natural History, praef. 7: There is also a kind of public rejection of the learned. Even Cicero uses it, although his genius is beyond all doubt; more surprising is that he does so through a spokesman: “and not for the very learned: I don't want Persius to read this, I do want Iunius Congus to.” If Lucilius, the creator of verbal wit, thought that he had to speak this way, and Cicero thought that he had to borrow it, especially when writing about the commonwealth, how much more do I have a reason to defend myself from some judge?

[1] ATTICUS: Since we have already walked enough and you have to make a start on a new topic, why don't we move and sit down for the rest of the conversation on the island in the Fibrenus – I think that that is the name of the other river?

MARCUS: Certainly. I use that spot regularly with great pleasure, whether I am thinking something over or reading or writing something.

[2] ATTICUS: For my part, since I have just now come here, there are no bounds to my pleasure, and I have only contempt for grand villas and marble pavements and paneled ceilings. Those water channels that some people call “Nile” or “Euripus” can only arouse laughter when you have seen this spot. And just as you, in speaking of law and justice a little while ago, made nature the standard for everything, so too in seeking aids for mental relaxation and pleasure nature is best. I used to wonder – I thought that there was nothing here but rocks and mountains, basing my opinion on your own speeches and poetry – I wondered, as I said, why you took such pleasure in this place. Now I wonder why when you are away from Rome you ever go anywhere else.

[3] MARCUS: When I have enough free time, particularly at this season, I seek out the beauty and the healthfulness of this place – though that is not very often.

The translation of On the Commonwealth is based on C. [K.] Ziegler (ed.), M. Tullius Cicero: De re publica (7th ed., Leipzig, 1969), and (for the continuous portions of the palimpsest and the Dream of Scipio). J. Zetzel (ed.), Cicero: De re publica: Selections (Cambridge, 1995). The translation of On the Laws is based on K. Ziegler (ed.), M. Tullius Cicero: De legibus (3rd ed., rev. by W. Goerler: Heidelberg, 1979). Most departures from these editions are indicated in the notes. It should be noted that a new critical edition of both texts is being prepared by J. G. F. Powell for Oxford Classical Texts.

On the Commonwealth differs in the format of the dialogue from On the Laws in that the latter is pure dialogue, with no narrator, and changes of speaker are marked (by convention) with the name of the speaker followed by a colon, as in dramatic texts; in On the Commonwealth, by contrast, there is a narrator, and in the Latin text speakers are often introduced by phrases such as “Then Scipio said.” To avoid extremely stilted translation, these phrases have been replaced here by the same dramatic convention as is used in On the Laws.

With respect to the order and presentation of the fragments of On the Commonwealth, there have been many departures from Ziegler's text.

I. The confusion of parliamentary socialism and the clarity of the general strike. – Myths in history. – Experimental proof of the value of the general strike.

II. Research carried out to perfect Marxism. – Means of throwing light upon it, starting from the general strike: class struggle; – preparation for the revolution and absence of utopias; – irrevocable character of the revolution.

III. Scientific prejudices against the general strike; doubts about science. – The clear and obscure parts in thought. – Economic incompetence of parliaments.

Every time that we attempt to obtain an exact conception of the ideas behind proletarian violence we are forced to go back to the notion of the general strike; but this same notion may provide many other services and throw an unexpected light on all the other obscure parts of socialism. In the last pages of the first chapter I compared the general strike to the Napoleonic battle which definitively crushes an adversary; this comparison will help us to understand the ideological role of the general strike.

When today's military writers discuss the new methods of war necessitated by the employment of troops infinitely more numerous than those of Napoleon and equipped with weapons much more deadly than those of the time, they nevertheless imagine that wars will be decided in Napoleonic battles. The new tactics proposed must fit into the drama Napoleon had conceived; no doubt the detailed development of the combat will be quite different from what it used to be; but the end must always be the catastrophic defeat of the enemy.

I have often been asked lately if since 1906 I have observed any facts that invalidate some of the arguments set forth in this book. On the contrary, I am more than ever convinced of the value of this philosophy of violence. I have even thought it useful to add to this reprint an ‘apology for violence’ that I published in Le Matin on 18 May 1908, at the time when the first edition appeared.

This is one of the books that public opinion does not allow an author to improve; I have only allowed myself to change a few words here and there in order to make certain phrases clearer.

Sorel's early writings

Born in 1847, Georges Sorel came late to writing about politics. A provincial and bourgeois upbringing was completed by an education in Paris and then by over twenty years working as a civil engineer for the French State. Most of that time was spent in the southern town of Perpignan, far from the intellectual and political excitement of Paris. Yet it was here that Sorel began to write.

Sorel's first articles appeared in the mid–1880s. For the most part these were concerned with obscure scientific subjects, but many were devoted to studying the impact of the French Revolution upon the Pyrénées–Orientales region where he worked. Then, in 1889, came the publication of two books: Contribution à l'étude profane de la Bible and Le Procès de Socrate. Both dealt only indirectly with politics, but where they did so they conveyed a message of moral conservatism. The France of the Third Republic was thought to be in a state of moral decline. To reverse this process, Sorel recommended the values of hard work, the family and those of a rural society.

Sorel's retirement from government service in 1892 and move to the suburbs of Paris coincided with his first interest in Marxism. Upon the basis of a limited acquaintance with the texts of Marx, Sorel initially saw Marxism as a science. This, however, was quickly to change as he perceived the inadequacies of the economic determinism associated with Marxist orthodoxy.

My dear Halévy,

I would no doubt have left these studies buried in the bound volumes of a review if friends, whose judgement I greatly value, had not thought that it would be a good idea to bring to the attention of a wider public reflections which serve to make better known one of the most singular social phenomena that history records. But it seemed to be that this public deserves some explanations, since I cannot often expect to find judges as indulgent as you have been.

When in Le Mouvement socialiste I published the articles that are now to be brought together in a volume, I did not have the intention of writing a book. I wrote these reflections as they came to my mind, knowing that the subscribers to that review would have no difficulty following me as they were already familiar with the theories that had there been developed by my friends over several years. But I am convinced that the readers of this book will be bewildered if I do not submit a kind of defence that will better enable them to see things from my own point of view. In the course of our conversations you have made critical comments which fitted so well into the system of my own ideas that they have led me to investigate certain interesting questions more thoroughly.

I. Morality and religion. – Contempt of democracies for morality. – Ethical preoccupations of the new school.

II. Renan's uneasiness about the future of the world. – His conjectures. – The need of the sublime.

III. Nietzsche's ethics. – The role of the family in the genesis of morality; Proudhon's theory of morality. – The ethics of Aristotle.

IV. Kautsky's hypotheses. – Analogies between the spirit of the general strike and that of the wars of Liberty. – Fear inspired in the parliamentarians by this spirit.

V. The worker employed in the factory of advanced production, the artist and the soldier in the wars of Liberty: desire to surpass previous models; care for exactitude; abandonment of the idea of exact recompense.

Fifty years ago Proudhon pointed out the necessity of giving the people a morality that would fit new needs. The first chapter of the preliminary discourses placed at the beginning of De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l'Eglise is entitled: ‘The state of morals in the nineteenth century. Invasion of moral scepticism; society in danger. What is the remedy?’ There one reads these striking sentences: ‘France has lost its morals. Not that, as a matter of fact, the men of our generation are worse than their fathers … When I say that France has lost its morals I mean something very different, that it has ceased to believe in her own principles. She no longer has either moral intelligence or conscience, she has almost lost the idea of morals itself. As a result of continual criticism we have come to this sad conclusion: that right and wrong, between which we formerly thought we were able to distinguish, are now vague and indeterminate conventional terms; that all these words, Right, Duty, Morality, Virtue, etc., of which the pulpit and the school talk so much, serve to cover nothing but pure hypotheses, vain utopias and unprovable prejudices; thus that social life, governed by some sort of human respect or by convention, is in reality arbitrary.’

Men who address revolutionary words to the people are bound to submit themselves to high standards of sincerity, because the workers understand these words in their exact and literal sense and never indulge in any symbolic interpretation. When in 1905 I ventured to write in some detail on proletarian violence I was fully aware of the grave responsibility I assumed in trying to show the historic bearing of acts that our parliamentary socialists try to cover up with so much skill. Today I do not hesitate to declare that socialism could not continue to exist without an apology for violence.

It is through strikes that the proletariat asserts its existence. I cannot be persuaded to see in strikes something analogous to the temporary rupture of commercial relations which is brought about when a grocer and his supplier of prunes cannot agree about the price. The strike is a phenomenon of war; it is therefore a serious misrepresentation to say that violence is an accidental feature destined to disappear from strikes.

The social revolution is an extension of this war in which each great strike is an episode; this is why the syndicalists speak of this revolution in the language of strikes; for them socialism is reduced to the conception, the expectation of and the preparation for the general strike, which, like the Napoleonic battle, is to annihilate completely a condemned regime.