SOURCE: "Myth and Politics in the Works of Sorel and Barthes," in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 47, No. 4, October-December, 1986, pp. 625-39.

In the following excerpt, Tager compares the theses of Roland Barthes and Sorel.

I. Roland Barthes once argued that in France the bourgeoisie lost its cultural voice during the Dreyfus Affair, when its writers and intellectuals released it.¹ In the eighteenth century intellectuals had championed the cause of the bourgeois individual against aristocratic privilege, but grew increasingly ambivalent about the triumphant bourgeoisie during the nineteenth century, and finally at the end of the nineteenth century were decisively detached from their native class by the aftershocks of the Dreyfus Affair. With the opening of the twentieth century landowners, employers, senior civil servants, and executives no longer had congenial access to intellectual culture because it called their very existence as a class into question. That the antibourgeois...