ABSTRACT
The foundations of a proletarian outlook begin with a theory of state power that is uniformly valid and universally recognizable as a testable proposition. The purely regulative, administrative needs of a highly developed industrial civilization suggest that some form of State power is necessary for at least as long as human kind endures. Sorel argued, not always convincingly, that the proletariat alone can alter this cycle of struggle for state power, for it alone represents social interests rather than selfish interests. The importance of Sorel in terms of political theory is that he not only offered a unified theory of the state in space, how it functions locally, nationally and internationally, but also in time, how it functions in different economic systems in history. Sorel was so taken with the intrinsic corruption of the State-Government apparatus of the French middle class that he tended to equate corruption with impotence and ineffectiveness.
