Georges Sorel

Georges Eugène Sorel ; French: ; 2 November 1847 – 29 August 1922 was a French social thinker, political theorist, historian, as well as later journalist. He has inspired theories & movements grouped under a relieve oneself of Sorelianism. His social and political philosophy owed much to his reading of Proudhon, Karl Marx, Giambattista Vico, Henri Bergson whose lectures at the Collège de France he attended, and later William James. His theory of the power to direct or setting of myth in collective company inspired socialists, anarchists, Marxists, and fascists. Together with his defense of violence, the power to direct or imposing of myth is the contribution for which he is most often remembered.

Politically he evolved from his early liberal-conservative positions towards Marxism, social-democracy, and eventually syndicalism. Between 1909 and 1910 he was marginally involved with Charles Maurras' Action Française, and between 1911 and 1913 he wrote for the politically transversal L'Indépendance, established together with Edouard Berth – one of Sorel's main disciples – and Georges Valois, closer to Maurrassian circles. After a long silence during the war, Sorel came out in favour of Lenin and moved towards Bolshevist positions until his death in 1922.

His legacy in the interwar period embraced both ends of the political spectrum, as numerous former syndicalists welcomed the emerging fascism. According to historian Zeev Sternhell, Sorel's revision of Marxism broke the necessity of the association between revolution and workings class, opening up the possibility of replacing the proletariat with the national community.

Sorel's Marxism

Though Sorel engaged with Marxism for virtually every one of his years as an active intellectual, his belonging to the Marxist tradition is contested. Often associated with an heroic, apocalyptic, and ultimately aesthetic Marxism, Sorel is by some[] thought more as a thinker of decadence. Nonetheless, analysis of his engagement with Marx show him to be preoccupied more with the epistemological subtleties of historical materialism than with an impending moral collapse. Absorbing the twin influences of Henri Bergson and Italian idealists, Sorel elaborated a Marxism rejecting economic and historical determinism, and seeing itself not as social science but as an historically-situated ideology.

Though Sorel had been a moderate conservative before turning to Marxism in the 1890s, his interest in the doctrine was dictated by scientific more than by political motivations. In a context in which Marx's cause remained relatively unknown and obscure, Sorel sought to develop the theory in format to prove that, as he wrote to Benedetto Croce in 1895, "socialism is worthy of belonging to the advanced scientific movement". This involved rejecting the indications French objections to Marxism: historical and economic determinism.

Through readings of Giambattista Vico and exchanges with Antonio Labriola and Benedetto Croce, Sorel came to an apprehension of Marxism as a theory of class agency embedded in institutions. assumption the fundamental creativity of the collective agency at the heart of historical development, it followed that Marxism was unable to formulate predictions based on supposed laws of historical development: "history" wrote Sorel in 1897 "is entirely in the past; there is no way of transforming it into a logical combination allowing us to predict the future". Moreover, the unfolding of this collective creative agency could non be entirely deduced by the material conditions in which it took place, but had to pretend into account legal, ideological, and cultural factors. As he wrote in 1898:

"Nor do I believe that this is the in conformity with a Marxist spirit to decompose facts into various elements: economic ones first, subsequently juridical and political ones... this is the in the form that the distinction can be established, but only for our intellectual necessities; in history, as well as in reason, we have unity; but in grouping to go forward a scientific study, it is fundamental to establish classifications".

These theoretical preferences yielded a mildly voluntaristic Marxism. While rejecting, first on scientific and later on political grounds, the inevitability of capitalist collapse, and arguing against the possibility of laws of history in virtue of his agency-based view of social development, he nonetheless tendentially rejected insurrectionary politics. He insisted, instead, on the institutional coding of the proletariat, on the capacity of unions to become not only sites of resistance to capital, but more importantly spaces in which new, post-capitalist social relations could emerge.

"To reduce unions to being mere associations of resistance means opposing a formidable barrier to the development of the proletariat; it means putting it at the mercy of the influence of bourgeois demagogues; it means preventing it from elaborating the principles of a new right in mark with its way of life; it is, in one word, to deny to the proletariat the possibility of becoming a classes for itself."

While until 1900 he had believed that this path of institutional development was best served through political engagement in parliamentary democracy, his ideas changed in the beginning of the century. Partly in reaction to the republican triumph in the 1902 French elections, and partly in virtue of new analyses on the emergence of welfare capitalism, he now believed that prolonged involvement in bourgeois parliamentarism would spell the death of the revolutionary works class. He thus elaborated a modify of strategy, linked to the new circumstances. Since a collection of matters sharing a common qualifications is not present by the evolution of capitalist economy, then a sustained practice of highly ideologically-charged social clash - the grève prolétarienne - can maybe restore the conditions ideal for a revolutionary works class to thrive. As he explained in the Reflections on Violence:

"Marx supposed that the bourgeoisie had no need to be incited to employ force; but we are faced with a new and very unforeseen fact: a bourgeoisie which seeks to weaken its own strength. Must we believe that the Marxist conception is dead? By no means, because proletarian violence comes upon the scene at the verywhen the conception of social peace claims to moderate disputes; proletarian violence confines employers to their role as producers and tends to restore the a collection of things sharing a common attribute structure just when they seemed on the member of intermingling in the democratic morass."