Author's Preface to the French Edition

Rome, December 31, 1898.

This little booklet of mine, as the postcript also shows, was scheduled to appear in Paris in September of this year. Accidental causes retarded its publication.

In the meantime Sorel has delivered himself body and soul to the crisis of Marxism, treats of it, expounds it, comments on it with gusto wherever he gets an opportunity, for instance in the Revue Parlementaire of December 10, pages 597–612 (where he converts this crisis into one of socialism) and in the Rivista Critica del Socialismo, Rome, Number I, pages 9-21. And he establishes and canonizes it still more in his preface to Merlino's Formes et Essence du Socialisme. We are ultimately threatened with a congress of thinking secessionists.

There we have evidently a war of the Frond before us! What was I to do? Begin all over again? Write an anti-Sorel after I had written an avec-Sorel? I did not yield to the temptation. It is true that I had named my composition of a somewhat unusual make-up a Discourse. But a man discourses when he feels like it, not when he is commanded.

I merely ask the reader to look at the dates of these letters, or these little monographs in loose style, which I addressed to Sorel. These dates run from April 20, to September l5, 1897. I was writing to that Sorel. not to this new one. I was addressing the old Sorel, whom I had known in the pages of Le Devinir Social, who had introduced me to the French readers in the quality of a Marxist, who had sent me letters full of fine observations and interesting critical reflections. It is true, he was full of doubts, and seemed at times impregnated with the spirit of a frondeur, but when I wrote with a mind intent on him, I did not think, in 1897, that he would so shortly become the herald of a war of secession. O how glad it will make the small lights of intellectualism, or those who need a testimonial to prove that they are not cowards! Sorel leaves at least a little ray of hope for us, when he writes: "I and some friends of mine shall try hard to utilize the treasures of reflexion and hypotheses collected by Marx in his books. This is the best way to derive advantage from a work of genius which has remained unfinished." (Revue Parlementaire, same issue, page 612). Well, there are thus many auguries for the new year, which commences tomorrow, in this benign and pitiful work of salvage, which, by the way, neither I nor a good many others like myself feel in need of.

I feel no rancor, but I certainly cannot help feeling some mortification. In offering these pages of somewhat unconventional composition to the French reading public, I fear that intelligent readers – and France has a greater abundance of them than any other country – will say to me: You are a pretty tolerable conversationalist, but a very poor teacher. You open your didactic dialogue with a friend like an erudite man, and now this friend runs over to the other side! Is it not so, Mr. Sorel? Well, then, let us accommodate all parties. This dialogue has been only a monologue. I wish it were otherwise.