Georges Sorel

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Georges Eugène Sorel (1847-1922)

Georges Eugène Sorel (2 November 1847–29 August 1922) was a French philosopher and theorist of revolutionary syndicalism.

1 Biography
2 Politics
3 Works
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Biography

Sorel was born in Cherbourg, son of a bankrupted wine merchant. He studied in the École Polytechnique in Paris. He became chief engineer with the Department of Public Works and retired in 1892. He was active on the side of Dreyfusards during the Dreyfus Affair.

Sorel had ties of friendship to Antonio Labriola and wrote a preface to the French translation of Labriola's Essays on the Materialist Conception of History. Although Labriola attacked Sorel's work, his books were praised by other Italian thinkers such as Vilfredo Pareto and Benedetto Croce, and he had links to the Italian nationalist-syndicalist movement which was a precursor to Fascism.

[edit] Politics

Sorel had been politically monarchist and traditionalist before embracing orthodox Marxism in the 1890s, but throughout his career continued to support values more commonly associated with conservatism. In his earliest writings he attempted to fill in what he believed were gaps in Marxist theory, but ultimately created an extremely heterodox variation of the ideology. He criticised what he saw as Marx's rationalist and utopian tendencies, believing that at its heart Marxism was a pessimistic and irrationalist philosophy closer in spirit to early Christianity than to the French Revolution. He rejected Marxist theories of historical materialism, dialectical materialism, and proletarian internationalism. He did not see Marxism as 'true' in a scientific sense, as orthodox Marxists did; rather, it was 'true' in that it promised a redemptive role for the proletariat within a terminally decadent society.

Sorel came to favour the anarcho-communism of Bakunin. Like Proudhon, he saw socialism as primarily a moral question. He was also heavily influenced by Henri Bergson who developed the importance of myth and criticized scientific materialism, by the cult of greatness and hatred of mediocrity found in Nietzsche, and by the ability to recognise the potential corruption of democracy found in liberal conservatives such as Tocqueville, Taine and Renan. Despite his disdain for social democracy, Sorel also held great respect for Eduard Bernstein, and agreed with many of his criticisms of orthodox Marxism.

Sorel's was a voluntarist Marxism: he rejected those Marxists who believed in inevitable and evolutionary change, emphasising instead the importance of will and preferring direct action. (He may even have coined the phrase, "direct action".) These approaches included general strikes, boycotts, sabotage, and constant disruption of capitalism with the goal being to achieve worker control over the means of production. Sorel's belief in the need for a deliberately-conceived "myth" to sway crowds into concerted action was put into practice by mass fascist movements in the 1920s. The epistemic status of the idea of "myth" is of some importance, and is essentially that of a working hypothesis, with one fundamental peculiarity: it is an hypothesis which we do not judge by its closeness to a "Truth", but by the practical consequences which stem from it. Thus, whether a political myth is of some importance or not must be decided, in Sorel's view, on the basis of its capacity to mobilize human beings into political action; the only possible way for men to ascend to an ethical life filled by the character of the sublime and to achieve deliverance. Sorel believed the "myth" of the general strike would serve to enforce solidarity, class consciousness and revolutionary élan amongst the working-class. The "myth" that the Fascists would appeal to, however, was that of the nation.

He echoed the Jacobin tradition in French society that held that the only way for change to occur was through the application of force. Sorel praised Charles Maurras, Action Française, Lenin and Mussolini for attacking bourgeois democracy. At the time of his death, in Boulogne sur Seine, he had an ambivalent attitude toward both Fascism and Bolshevism. Whether Sorel is better seen as a left-wing or right-wing thinker is disputed: the Italian Fascists praised him as a forefather but the dictatorial government they established ran contrary to his beliefs, while he was also an important touchstone for Italy's first Communists, who saw Sorel as a theorist of the proletariat. His ideas have contributed significantly to anarchosyndicalism.

Sorel is an important component of the history of European politics in that his thought reflects the cross-fertalization (and even confusion) of ideas among anarchists, socialists, syndicalists, communists, Marxists and nationalists in the time period of about 1830-1930.

[edit] Works

Contribution à l'étude profane de la Bible (Paris, 1889)
Le Procès de Socrate, Examen critique des thèses socratiques (Paris: Alcan, 1889)
Fondements scientifiques de l'entendement (Paris, 1893)
La Ruine du monde antique: Conception matérialiste de l'histoire (Paris, 1898)
Questions de morale (Paris, 1900)
Introduction à l'économie moderne (Paris, 1903)
La crise de la pensée catholique (Paris, 1903)
Le Système historique de Renan (Paris, 1905-1906)
Les préoccupations métaphysiques des physiciens modernes (Paris, 1907)
La Décomposition du Marxisme (Paris, 1908); translation as The Decomposition of Marxism by Irving Louis Horowitz in his Radicalism and the Revolt against Reason; The Social Theories of Georges Sorel (Humanities Press, 1961; Southern Illinois University Press, 1968).
Les illusions du progrès (1908); Translated as The Illusions of Progress by John and Charlotte Stanley with a foreword by Robert A. Nisbet and an introduction by John Stanley (University of California Press, 1969, ISBN 0-520-02256-4)
Réflexions sur la violence (1908); translated as Reflections on Violence first authorised translation by T. E. Hulme (B. W. Huebsch, 1914; P. Smith, 1941; AMS Press, 1975, ISBN 0-404-56165-9); in an unabridged republication with an introduction by Edward A. Shils, translated by T.E. Hulme and J. Roth (The Free Press, 1950; Dover Publications, 2004, ISBN 0-486-43707-8, pbk.); edited by Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-521-55117-X, hb)
La révolution Dreyfusienne (Paris, 1909)
Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat (Paris, 1919)
De l'utilité du pragmatisme (Paris, 1921)
Lettres à Paul Delesalle 1914-1921 (Paris, 1947)
D'Aristotle à Marx (L'Ancienne et la Nouvelle Metaphysique) (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1935)
From Georges Sorel: Essays in Socialism and Philosophy edited with an introduction by John L. Stanley, translated by John and Charlotte Stanley (Oxford University Press, 1976, ISBN 0-19-501715-3; Transaction Books, 1987, ISBN 0-88738-654-7, pbk.).
From Georges Sorel: Volume 2, Hermeneutics and the Sciences edited by John L. Stanley, translated by John and Charlotte Stanley (Transaction Publishers, 1990, ISBN 0-88738-304-1).
Commitment and Change: Georges Sorel and the idea of revolution essay and translations by Richard Vernon (University of Toronto Press, 1978, ISBN 0-8020-5400-5)
Social foundations of contemporary economics translated with an introduction by John L. Stanley from Insegnamenti sociali della economia contemporanea (Transaction Books, 1984, ISBN 0-87855-482-3, cloth)

[edit] References

Georges Sorel and the sociology of virtue by Arthur L. Greil (University Press of America, 1981, ISBN 0-8191-1988-1, ISBN 0-8191-1989-X pbk.)
Georges Sorel, Prophet without Honor; A study in anti-intellectualism by Richard D. Humphrey (Harvard University Press, 1951)
Georges Sorel: The Character and Development of his Thought by J.R. Jennings; foreword by Theodore Zeldin (St. Martin's Press, 1985, ISBN 0-312-32458-8)
The Genesis of Georges Sorel : an account of his formative period, followed by a study of his influence by James H. Meisel (G. Wahr Pub. Co., 1951; Greenwood Press, 1982, ISBN 0-313-23658-5)
Georges Sorel by Larry Portis (Pluto Press, 1980, ISBN 0-86104-303-0, pbk.)
The Cult of Violence : Sorel and the Sorelians by Jack J. Roth (University of California Press, 1980, ISBN 0-520-03772-3
Radicalism and the Revolt against Reason: The Social Theories of Georges Sorel by Irving Louis Horowitz. With a translation of his essay on The decomposition of Marxism (Humanities Press, 1961). A later edition contains a preface relating Sorel's theories to American thought in the 1960's (Southern Illinois University Press, 1968).
Three against the Third Republic : Sorel, Barrès, and Maurras by Michael Curtis (Princeton University Press, 1959; Greenwood Press, 1976, ISBN 0-8371-9048-7)
The Birth of Fascist Ideology by Zeev Sternhell with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, (Princeton University Press, 1994; ISBN 0-691-03289-0), esp. Chapter 1: Georges Sorel and the Antimaterialist Revision of Marxism
Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 edited by Philip Rees, (Simon & Schuster, 1991, ISBN 0-13-089301-3)
Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 2: The Golden Age by Leszek Kolakowski (Oxford University Press, 1978)
Berlin, Isaiah, Georges Sorel, in Against The Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, London: Pimlico, 1997
L'illusion du politique. Georges Sorel et le débat 1900, by Shlomo Sand, Paris, La Découverte, 1984.
Georges Sorel en son temps, by Jacques Julliard, Shlomo Sand (eds.), Paris, Le Seuil, 1985,
Georges Sorel, Cahiers de l'Herne, 1986.
Naissance du mythe moderne. Georges Sorel et la crise de la pensée savante (1889-1914), by Willy Gianinazzi, Paris, Ed. de la Maison des sciences de l'Homme, 2006.