The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch

Author:Christopher Lasch [Lasch, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Philosophy, General, United States, History, Social sciences, Social, Social Science, Sociology, Social history, Criminology, Progress
ISBN: 9780393307955
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1991-05-15T19:49:11+00:00

begun to think for themselves, it was almost irrelevant whether they institutionalized their achievement. The "epic state of mind," in fact, was inherently resistant to institutionalization. Moral heroism and the restoration of craftsmanship—the two great objectives of the syndicalist movement, as Sorel understood it—were not completely compatible, not at least in the Sorelian view of syndicalism.

"Art," he wrote, "is an anticipation of the kind of work that ought to be carried on in a highly productive state of society." Workers' collective control of their work would make everyone an artist and thereby revive the pride of workmanship formerly associated with small-scale private ownership. According to Sorel, the superiority of syndicalism to socialism consisted, in part, of its appreciation of proprietorship, dismissed by Marxists as the source of "petty-bourgeois" provincialism and cultural backwardness. Unimpressed by Marxist diatribes against the idiocy of rural life, syndicalists, he thought, valued the "feelings of attachment inspired in every truly qualified worker by the productive forces entrusted to him." They respected the "peasant's love of his field, his vineyard, his barn, his cattle, and his bees."

That Sorel spoke of these possessions as things "entrusted" to man shows how radically he differed from Marxists, who shared the liberal view of nature as so much raw material to be turned to the purpose of human convenience. But he differed also from conservatives, who made a fetish of property ownership as such, not seeing that its value lay only in the encouragement it gave to craftsmanship, which could be encouraged in other ways. "All the virtues attributed to property would be meaningless without the virtues engendered by a certain way of working." It was not ownership so much as the opportunity for invention and experimentation that made work interesting, and the same advantages could be re-created in factories once the workers themselves began to exercise responsibility for the design of production.

This was clear enough; the difficulty lay in reconciling the practical demands of workmanship with an "epic state of mind." On the one hand, Sorel argued that "modern technical education should have as its goal to give the industrial worker" the qualities of an artisan or a successful farmer—to make him "an observer, a reasoner," a person who was "curious about new phenomena." On the other hand, he told workers not to be "reasonable, as the professional sociologists wish them to be," or to confine

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