131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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ocratic electoral campaigns. It must grasp this struggle as a life instinct, without academic
construction, and as the creator of a powerful myth in which it alone would find the courage
for a decisive battle. For socialism and its ideas of class struggle there is no greater danger
than professional politics and participation in parliamentary business. These wear down great
enthusiasm into chatter and intrigue and kill the genuine instincts and intuitions that produce
a moral decision. Whatever value human life has does not come from reason; it emerges from
a state of war between those who are inspired by great mythical images to join battle, and
depends upon "a state of war that the people agree to participate in, which is reflected in a
certain myth." 16 Bellicose, revolutionary excitement and the expectation of monstrous
catastrophes belong to the intensity of life and move history. But the momentum must come
from the masses themselves; ideologists and intellectuals cannot create it. So the
revolutionary wars of 1792 originated, as well as the epoch that Sorel along with Renan
celebrated as the greatest peak of the nineteenth century, namely, the German war of
liberation of 1813: 17 Its heroic spirit was born of the irrational life energy of an anonymous
mass.
Every rationalist interpretation falsifies the immediacy of life. The myth is no utopia. For
this, a product of rational thought leads at best to reforms. Nor should one confuse a martial
élan with militarism; above all the use of force in this irrationalist philosophy was to be
something other than a dictatorship. Sorel hated all intellectualism, all centralization, all
uniformity, as did Proudhon, but he demanded nevertheless, like Proudhon, the strictest
discipline and morale. The great battle will not be the work of an academic strategy, but an
"accumulation of heroic exploits" and a release of the "individualistic forces within the
rebelling mass." 18 Creative force that breaks loose in the spontaneity of enthusiastic masses is
as a result something very different from dictatorship. Rationalism and all monisms that
follow from it, like centralization and uniformity and even the bourgeois illusion of a "great
man," belong to dictatorship, according to Sorel.
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