Georges Sorel Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Georges Sorel (1847–1922) was a French social philosopher and political theorist. He was the author of controversial and incendiary works on a range of topics, including the essence of socialism, the decadence of modern society, and the role of violence in politics.

The seeming contradictions in Sorel’s life and work are numerous. He was a socialist who repudiated the most influential forms of socialist and Marxist doctrine. He was a radical proponent of the workers’ movement who embraced, for a time, certain of the royalist doctrines of ultraconservatives such as French author and critic Charles Maurras. He was admired by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and other Fascists but also by many on the far left, and he himself admired, again for a time, both Russian revolutionaries and American captains of industry. If his political ideas reflect, above all, the influence of French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s anarchism and mutualism, his later thought owes much to the pragmatism of William James, the American philosopher and psychologist.

Sorel’s writings are nonetheless underwritten by a set of fundamental philosophical and moral commitments that give his work a distinctive and highly unified character. Primary among these is an emphasis on the idea of the heroic. For Sorel, heroism is a deeply moral quality involving a kind of mysterious and creative pursuit of lofty deeds. It is not an exclusively elitist category. If the protagonists of Homeric epic and the swashbuckling entrepreneurs of American capitalism are, for Sorel, exemplars of the heroic, so too are the warrior/farmers of ancient Athens and the worker revolutionaries of the modern age.

Closely connected to Sorel’s emphasis on heroism is a sharp criticism of bourgeois culture. Such a culture represses the heroic impulse in favor of a decadent preoccupation with abstract, intellectualized notions such as the maximization of utility, the inevitability of social progress, distributive justice, and historical materialism. Sorel’s critique resonates—and explicitly invokes—German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s repudiation of middle-class values and French philosopher Henri Bergson’s embrace of the élan vital or life force. But Sorel also attacks the laxity of bourgeois morals and insists on a mode of social action that is grounded in a conservative, even puritanical conception of moral virtue that emphasizes traditional family values.

Sorel’s political thought endorses socialism, understood, however, not as a theory or program but as a movement of workers. He believed that the social, historical, and economic doctrines of Marxist intellectuals are often irrelevant, even counterproductive. What matters is the spirit of rebellion. That spirit can be activated by the so-called myth of the general strike, that is, the idea of a full-scale workers’ rejection of capitalist domination. The importance of the myth depends less on the possibility that a general strike might actually occur than on its function as a source of inspiration and revolutionary zeal. In this context, Sorel offers a qualified defense of violence, conceived as something sharply different from and opposed to the brutal and calculated force of the state and also as something to be invoked less for strategic reasons than for its connection to the heroic virtues. Sorel’s emphasis on socialism as a movement involves, as well, a rejection not only of the bourgeois state but also of the state per se. The result is a political doctrine that perhaps most closely resembles the standpoint of anarcho-syndicalism.

Bibliography:

Sorel, Georges. From Georges Sorel: Essays in Socialism and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.
The Illusions of Progress. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
Reflections on Violence. New York: Macmillan, 1950.
Stanley, John. The Sociology of Virtue: The Political and Social Theories of Georges Sorel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.

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