Georges Sorel

French socialist and writer

• Born: November 2, 1847
• Birthplace: Cherbourg, France
• Died: August 30, 1922
• Place of death: Boulogne-sur-Seine, France

Sorel was the leading spokesperson for revolutionary syndicalism, or trade unionism, in the first two decades of the twentieth century. He is also known for his theory of the creative role of myth and violence in radical politics.

Early Life

Georges Sorel (jawrzh soh-rehl) was born in Cherbourg, Normandy, in the coastal region of western France. His parents were Roman Catholic and middle-class; his father was the director of a business concern, and his mother was the daughter of an army officer. Georges, the second of three sons, had a traditional education with an emphasis on the utilitarian rather than the philosophical. School records indicate that he did especially well in mathematics. The capstone of this was his graduation from the École Technique in 1867. He then worked as a civil engineer for the government for the next twenty-five years in the department of roads and bridges. Most of these years were spent outside Paris in Corsica, Algeria, and in Perpignan.

As was the case with most young persons of his generation in France, Sorel was deeply disturbed by the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. The crisis was compounded by the bloodshed and violence of the civil war that followed; the suppression of the Paris Commune had a lasting effect on Sorel’s concept of politics and society.

Sorel took early retirement from his government job in 1892, rejected his pension, and devoted the remainder of his life to writing at his home in Boulogne-sur-Seine near Paris. The ideas expressed by Sorel in the next thirty years were shaped by his own background in engineering, by his twenty-year association with Marie David, and by his reading of the works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Karl Marx. Sorel, the student of the proletariat, got to know the proletariat intimately from 1875 until 1897 in the person of Marie David. She was, he once said, part of his existence as a socialist writer. His first work, published before his retirement, Le Procès de Socrate (1889; the trial of Socrates) was closer to the Tocqueville tradition, but in his second publication, D’Aristote à Marx (1894; from Aristotle to Marx), Sorel was moving toward socialism.

Life’s Work

The major crisis of French politics that attracted the interest of all writers in the 1890’s was the Dreyfus affair . Sorel joined with other radicals and socialists to defend Alfred Dreyfus, who was unjustly accused of selling military secrets to the Germans. After a ten-year struggle in the courts and in the press, Dreyfus was exonerated and his defenders triumphant. Sorel, however, did not see this victory in the same light as did Jean Jaurès and many other socialists. Socialist politicians were, Sorel believed, as corrupt and deceitful as bourgeois politicians. What was needed was a complete transformation of society through class war and the general strike. The working class was now ready to seize power for itself.

By the turn of the century, Sorel was a well-known Parisian, usually seen in the Bibliothèque Nationale, at the Sorbonne, or around the office of the Cahiers de la quinzaine, whose editor and founder was his friend, Charles-Pierre Péguy. The major theme in his own writings had become the decadence of bourgeois society. Sorel considered himself a Marxist but found himself at odds with both the orthodox Marxists and the revisionists. For Sorel, Marxism, though a useful analytical tool, was not a science. It was social poetry, a body of imprecise meanings couched in symbolic forms. The cure for modern society would not come from middle-class intellectuals such as Marx but from the syndicats, or trade unions. These themes are the basis of his two major works: Les Illusions du progrès (1908; the illusions of progress) and Réflexions sur la violence (1908; Reflections on Violence , 1912). Violence for Sorel was not simply method but morality. It was not to be confused with brute force that trampled liberty. Sorel saw violence as a creative force that rejected the immoral concessions made by most politicians.

Reflections on Violence remains the one successful Sorelian work out of some dozen publications. It went through several editions and printings before World War I and had considerable influence. This book stresses the importance of the “social myth” legends of the 1789 revolution, for example, which contain the strongest inclination of a people to act. This he believed was now summed up in revolutionary syndicalism, a heroic struggle in the best interests of civilization. In this book, Sorel also labels his method of analysis, diremption, which is best translated as abstraction. Diremption was used to describe the relationship of institutions and society, keeping in mind that both are continually changing. This allows the investigator to isolate and examine an institution, but the distinctiveness discovered is somewhat artificial since one has to ignore temporarily the institution’s interaction with its social environment to do this. Sorel’s work was closely related to the origins of modern sociology as an independent discipline. He attended Émile Durkheim’s defense of his doctoral dissertation in 1893, and he published critiques of Durkheim, Jean-Gabriel de Tarde, Gustave Le Bon, and Cesare Lombroso.

Sorel’s call for a true social war went unanswered despite the general turmoil in the unions in France and other European countries in the decade before World War I. Instead of a social war among the classes, Europe was plunged into a war between the nations. The internationalism of socialism broke down in the face of a new fanatic wave of patriotism, which took Jaurès’s life and ruined Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism. The revolution that Sorel had hoped for seemed shattered by the war, but he was enthusiastic about events in Russia and applauded the overthrow of the Romanovs in 1917. A new edition of Reflections on Violence was published in 1919 and dedicated to Vladimir Ilich Lenin. In approving Lenin’s Bolshevik Russia (Sorel called Lenin the new Peter the Great), he was going against much of what he had said earlier about working-class leadership. Lenin’s vanguard of the proletariat was not Sorelian, not even good Marxism perhaps, but Sorel was an old man desperate for some kind of change in a bourgeois, chauvinistic Europe, and so he gave the new revolution his wholehearted support.

This kind of support was never tendered to Benito Mussolini. Sorel had followed Mussolini’s career both as a Marxist and as a syndicalist. He had as early as 1912 predicted victory for Mussolini’s faction, but Mussolini’s subsequent identification with Italian nationalism and the war saw their paths diverge. Nevertheless Sorel did not oppose Mussolini in the same sense that his friend and longtime correspondent, Benedetto Croce, did. Sorel did not share Croce’s admiration for the old Italian liberal government and believed that Mussolini, like Lenin, was an extraordinary man. Mussolini claimed at one time that he was a disciple of Sorel, but Sorel never acknowledged this. Whether Sorel would ever have approved the new fascist Italy is impossible to say, since he died two months before Mussolini actually came to power in October, 1922. The considered opinion of most commentators today is that Sorel would not have supported fascism. He may have been a critic of democracy, but he loved liberty and he was careful to make a distinction between the two. Liberty would best be preserved by the syndicats that he had proposed in his earlier writings. The syndicats were designed to help the worker realize his (or her) potential in the political and socioeconomic spheres. The syndicat was at the heart of Sorel’s concept of proletarian socialism; he sometimes compared the role of the syndicats to the role of the monasteries in the early history of the Church. Mussolini’s syndicats were controlled by the middle-class capitalists in union with the fascist state and did not further liberty.

Sorel’s reputation has suffered partly from these suspicions about his link to communism and to fascism but mainly from his attacks on elitists and intellectuals. Unfortunately for Sorel, it was the intellectuals, not the proletariat, who would pass judgment in print on his career and his contribution to society. They were bound to have their revenge. So the legend of the guru of terrorism and totalitarianism was born; the Reflections on Violence was posited as their bible.

Significance

Interpretations of Reflections on Violence and of Sorel’s ideas in general have ranged widely from outright condemnation by many who have been quick to label and to classify, to praise from others who valued Sorel’s insights into the nature of revolution and the relationship between thought and action. Closely related to this is the question of Sorel’s place in the history of political thought. He was certainly closer to the Left than the Right, despite his lukewarm support of the Third French Republic and a brief flirtation with Charles Maurras’s movement called Action Française. Sorel was above all else an independent thinker, a kind of “wild Marxist” who never fully agreed with anyone else. There were two basic themes in all he wrote: first, a rejection of bourgeois society and bourgeois values, and second, a rejection of the supreme role of reason and of the intellect. The anti-intellectualism of Sorel was first developed in his book on Socrates. Socrates was not a hero for the people but a man like John Calvin, who tried to force his ideas on others. Sorel carried this argument over to apply to most of the politicians and the writers of his day. Government by the totality of its citizens was the ideal, not government by the few members of the intelligentsia.

Bibliography

Curtis, Michael. Three Against the Third Republic: Sorel, Barrès, and Maurras. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959. Contrasting the leaders of the Left and the Right, Curtis provides insights into the complexities of Sorel’s views and concludes that Sorel was inconsistent, moving from Marxism to finally ally himself with nationalists and monarchists.

Goldhammer, Jesse. The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005. Analyzes the ideas of Sorel and two other twentieth century French radicals about violence as a means of political renewal.

Horowitz, Irving L. Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason: The Social Theories of Georges Sorel. New York: Humanities Press, 1961. A penetrating analysis of Sorel’s basic ideas, but the book is difficult to read owing to the profusion of names. The inclusion of the author’s translation of Sorel’s La Décomposition du Marxisme (1908; The Decomposition of Marxism) is helpful.

Humphrey, Richard. Georges Sorel: Prophet Without Honour. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951. The author makes a convincing case that Sorel should not be viewed as an advocate of violence or as the ideological source of Bolshevism or fascism. He does an excellent job of presenting the essential Sorel, the “metaphysician of syndicalism,” who searched all of his life for a humane social morality.

Jennings, J. R. Georges Sorel: The Character and Development of His Thought. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. An assessment of Sorel’s ideas and influence. Scholarly study that tries to explain the many transitions in Sorel’s life and work. Sorel, Jennings concludes, had a tendency to pluralize rather than to simplify or unify.

Meisel, James. The Genesis of George Sorel. Ann Arbor, Mich.: George Wahr, 1951. This doctoral thesis turned into a book by an obscure publisher has value if one overlooks the pretentiousness of the author. Especially good on the correspondence of Sorel with Croce, Robert Michels, and other intellectuals of the day.

Portis, Larry. Georges Sorel. London: Pluto Press, 1980. This book was written for a Marxist audience and places Sorel clearly in that tradition. He sees Sorel and Sartre as the most profound French Marxists and calls Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism the most legitimate realization of a Marxist revolutionary strategy.

Roth, Jack J. The Cult of Violence: Sorel and the Sorelians. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Best single volume on the Sorelians syndicalists, integral nationalists, fascists all advocates of violence and direct action, who claimed Sorel as their master.

Vernon, Richard. Commitment and Change: Georges Sorel and the Idea of Revolution. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1978. One of the best discussions of Sorel’s ideas and the influence of Henri Bergson and Proudhon on Sorel. The author fails to examine fully Sorel’s concept of revolution. Albert Camus is seen as Sorel’s successor.