e aid of syndicalism. Its savage vigor appeals to some
artists, decadents, and _declasses_. Neurotic as a rule, they seem to
hunger for the stimulus which comes by association with the merely
physical power and vigor of the working class. The navvy, the
coalheaver, or "yon rower ... the muscles all a-ripple on his back,"[12]
awakens in them a worshipful admiration, even as it did in the effete
Cleon. Such a theory as syndicalism, declares Sombart, "could only have
grown up in a country possessing so high a culture as France; that it
could have been thought out only by minds of the nicest perception, by
people who have become quite _blase_, whose feelings require a very
strong stimulus before they can be stirred; people who have something of
the artistic temperament, and, consequently, look disdainfully on what
has been called 'Philistinism'--on business, on middle-class ideals, and
so forth. They are, as it were, the fine silk as contrasted with the
plain wool of ordinary people. They detest the common, everyday round as
much as they hate what is natural; they might be called 'Social
Sybarites.' Such are the people who have created the syndicalist
system."[13] On one point Sombart is wrong. All the essential doctrines
of revolutionary syndicalism, as a matter of fact, originated with the
anarchists in the unions, and the most that can be said for the
"Sybarites" is that they elaborated and mystified these doctrines.

There are those, of course, who maintain that syndicalism is wholly a
natural and inevitable product of economic forces, and, so far as the
actual syndicalist movement is concerned, that is unquestionably true.
But in all the maze of philosophy and doctrine that has been thrown
about the actual French movement, we find the traces of two extraneous
forces--the anarchists who availed themselves of the opportunity that an
awakening trade unionism gave them, and those intellectuals of leisure,
culture, and refinement who found the methods of political socialism too
tame to satisfy their violent revolt against things bourgeois. And the
philosophical syndicalism that was born of this union combines
utopianism and anarchism. The yearning esthetes found satisfaction in
the rugged energy and physical daring of the men of action, while the
latter were astonished and flattered to find their simple war measures
adorned with metaphysical abstractions and arousing an immense furore
among the most learned and fashionable c