131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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pulpits of the sophists — all of these are opinions of Donoso-Cortés, which might have come
word for word from Sorel, except that the anarchist stood on the side of the people's instinct.
For Donoso-Cortés radical socialism was something enormous, greater than liberal
moderation, because it went back to ultimate problems and gave a, decisive answer to radical
questions—because it had a theology. The opponent here was precisely Proudhon, not
because he was the best-known socialist in 1848, against whom Montalembert had delivered
a famous parliamentary speech, 13 but because he was a radical representative of radical
principle. The Spaniard was dismayed in the face of the stupidity of the legitimists and the
cowardly slyness of the bourgeoisie. Only in socialism did he still see what he called instinct
(el instinto), and from that he concluded that in the long run all the parties were working for
socialism. Thus the contradictions again assumed intellectual dimensions and often an
obviously eschatological tension. In contrast to the dialectically constructed tensions of
Hegelian Marxism, here it was a matter of the direct, intuitive contradiction of mythic
images. Marx could regard Proudhon from the peak of his Hegelian education as a
philosophical dilettante and show him how grossly he had misunderstood Hegel. 14 Today a
radical socialist would be able to show Marx, with the help of a contemporary modern
philosophy, that he was only a schoolmaster and remained trapped in an intellectual
exaggeration of West European bourgeois education, whereas the poor, reprimanded,
Proudhon at least had an instinct for the real life of the working masses. In the eyes of
Donoso-Cortés, this socialist anarchist was an evil demon, a devil, and for Proudhon the
Catholic was a fanatical Grand Inquisitor, whom he attempted to laugh off. Today it is easy
to see that both were their own real opponents and that everything else was only a provisional
half-measure. 15
The warlike and heroic conceptions that are bound up with battle and struggle were taken
seriously again by Sorel as the true impulse of an intensive life. The proletariat must believe
in the class struggle as a real battle, not as a slogan for parliamentary speeches and dem-
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