power. But there are still some honest people left in France, and it is for them alone that I have always written.
The greater my experience the more I have recognised that in the study of historical questions a passion for truth is worth more than the most learned methodologies; it enables one to break through conventional wrappings, to penetrate to the foundations of things, and to grasp reality. There has never been a great historian who has not been altogether carried along by this passion; and looking at this matter closely, one sees that it is this passion which has given rise to so many happy intuitions.
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I do not claim that I have, in this book, said everything that there is to say about violence, and still less to have produced a systematic theory of violence. I have merely reunited and revised a series of articles which appeared in an Italian review, Il Divenire sociale,[1] a review which maintains, on the other side of the Alps, the good fight against the exploiters of popular credulity. The articles were written without any fixed plan; I have not tried to rewrite them, because I did not know how to set about giving a didactic appearance to such an exposition; it even seemed to me better to preserve their untidy arrangement, since in that form they will perhaps more easily awake thought. We should always be careful in opening up a little-known subject, not to trace its boundaries too rigorously, for in this way the door is closed to the many new facts which arise from unforeseen circumstances. Time after time the theorists of Socialism have been embarrassed by contemporary history. They had constructed magnificent formulas, clear-cut and
- ↑ The last four chapters have been much more developed than they were in the Italian text. I have thus been able to give more space to philosophic considerations The Italian articles have been collected in a brochure under the title Lo Sciopero generale e la violenza with a preface by Enrico Leone.
