MICHAEL LEVIN SOREL, GEORGES (1847–1922)

MICHAEL LEVIN SOREL, GEORGES (1847–1922)

Georges Sorel was a French highway engineer who in middle age turned himself into a social theorist of considerable originality and learning, but also great idiosyncrasy. He is notable as the foremost intellectual interpreter of the syndicalist movement, a student and critic of Marxism, and as an intransigent critic of the Third Republic who had much in common with extremes of left and right, and whose venom was directed against the politicians of the centre. He is best understood, however, as a moralist who saw in

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violence not mere destruction but the potential for regeneration of a decadent bourgeois society.

Sorel was born in Cherbourg in 1847 and educated at the elite Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. He joined the Bridges and Roads Department (Corps des Ponts et Chaussées) and from 1870 to 1892 he was employed as an engineer both in metropolitan France (chiefly in Perpignan) and in Corsica and Algeria. On receipt of a small legacy he was able to retire to the suburbs of Paris and devote himself to writing. He was the author, notably, of three key works published in 1908: La Décomposition du marxisme (The Decomposition of Marxism); Reflections on Violence (Réflexions sur la violence); and The Illusions of Progress (Les Illusions du progrès) . He died in Boulogne-sur-Seine in 1922. A thinker of genuinely European interests, he was particularly well read in Italian social and political theory. Much of his work was first published in Italian, including Reflections on Violence, which first appeared as a series of articles in Il devenire sociale in 1905–6.

Sorel’s name is commonly coupled with syndicalism, the revolutionary brand of trade unionism that flourished briefly on the eve of the First World War, chiefly in Mediterranean Europe. In his best-known work, Reflections on Violence, he espoused the doctrine of the ‘general strike’ as the instrument for the overthrow of the state apparatus. But he had no real connection with the syndicalist movement and is better understood as the interpreter of syndicalism rather than its theorist. His syndicalist phase was in fact short-lived, and formed part of a bewildering political odyssey. He was a Marxist at the outset of his literary career in the 1890s, though he felt the attraction of BERNSTEIN’s revisionism. The Dreyfus Affair, which had a deep impact on his thinking, made him first into a reformist socialist who backed ‘Millerandism’, or the participation of socialist ministers in Government; it was his disillusionment with the failure of the ‘Dreyfusard revolution’ that precipitated his syndicalist phase, in which he bitterly denounced Millerandism. Thereafter he flirted briefly with the royalist nationalism of the Action Française. In 1919 he hailed LENIN as the new champion of his values. The same year saw the foundation of the Italian Fascist movement, whose leader, Mussolini, claimed Sorel—not wholly without reason—as the forerunner of Fascism. Nevertheless we can try and make sense of his intellectual journey by identifying certain continuing threads in his outlook.

Sorel was perhaps the quintessential representative of the pre-war attack on rationalism. Like BERGSON and other critics of rationalism, he deprecated the ‘spirit of system’ that his generation associated with thinkers such as TAINE, whose outlook was shaped by Darwinism (see DARWIN, CHARLES) and by faith in science: in a word, by Positivism. Sorel explicitly proclaimed that inconsistency was a virtue: an aid in achieving a more rounded understanding of society, precisely because of the fluid character of social reality. It would be a mistake, therefore, to look for the kind of consistency in Sorel that we seek in systematizers such as Hegel or Marx.

Sorel was essentially a moralist, concerned at the degeneration of the bourgeois society in which he lived. Whether on the far left or the far right in politics, he was consistently and vehemently anti-bourgeois. History, for Sorel, was an endless struggle against decadence. He followed Vico in seeing historical change as a cyclical process, a recurrent process of rise and decline. The practical problem was therefore how to stave off the onset of decline. In his political writings Sorel did not aim at the creation of a systematic social theory, but at the identification of a political force that might act as the

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agent of the regeneration of society. This political force might be socialism or syndicalism or royalism or Bolshevism or Fascism. The precise political doctrine did not matter: the point was that he invested it with the capacity to reverse the process of decay.

There was a strong puritan strain in Sorel, as in many socialist thinkers of the nineteenth century, such as PROUDHON, with whom he had a great deal in common. So

he praised the virtues of chastity, loyalty, duty, discipline, family life and pride in work. For a thinker who was so vociferously anti-bourgeois these sound like bourgeois values, but this somewhat ascetic morality coexisted in Sorel’s mind with a heroic ethic. The bourgeoisie, he thought, had become a symbol of degeneration, devoted to comfort and ordinary pleasures. Sorel sought another class, a more vigorous and uncorrupted class, to overturn existing society. This was the role he attributed to the proletariat in his Marxist and syndicalist phases. The prospect of a victory for the working class over the bourgeoisie would depend, he thought, on the austerity of its sexual morals.

There is an interesting comparison to be drawn with NIETZSCHE here. Nietzsche thought that socialism, like Christianity, constituted a slaves’ revolt against the creative forces in society. Sorel responded by distinguishing between the eternal rebellion of the working class proper, of which he disapproved, and true socialism, which he saw as a battle waged by a dedicated elite of skilled producers capable of forging a new civilization. He saw in these skilled producers the embodiments of a new morality grounded in the virtues of medieval craftsmen; and there is a striking affinity here with English social critics and moralists such as RUSKIN and MORRIS. Revealingly, Sorel opposed many of the workers’ demands, such as the demand for the 8-hour day, which he thought was a symptom of decadence.

But it was the relationship with Marxism that was crucial to Sorel’s work. He engaged with Marx much more seriously than other French thinkers of his generation: significantly, whereas his contemporary, DURKHEIM, mentions Marx only once in The Division of Labour in Society, Sorel mentions him more than any other writer. Influenced by Bernstein, he remained in an important sense a revisionist, although he came to see that revisionism must take a different direction from that sketched by Bernstein. Sorel accepted most of Bernstein’s empirical critique of Marxism, but argued that the idea of the class struggle could still be salvaged. Like Bernstein, he believed that it was the movement that mattered, not the end; he did not believe in historical absolutes. The class struggle should therefore not be seen as an objective necessity, a law of history, but should instead be reinterpreted in subjective terms, as a sort of social poetry. In other words, the idea of the class war is a myth.

The concept of the myth is of pivotal importance in Sorel’s thought. He defined a myth as any idea capable of moving people to action. The Pragmatism of WILLIAM JAMES was an important influence here. But we can also detect a Darwinian influence in the notion—which goes back before Darwin to Schopenhauer—that ideas survive not because of their truth but because they are useful, in other words adapted to the environment.

For Sorel the idea of the general strike was a myth: indeed, it was the central myth of the syndicalist movement. It conjured up the image of a heroic working class defying the capitalist order, for the general strike would precipitate the overthrow of the capitalist system and inaugurate a new socialist era. The idea that heroic myths could generate new morality was central to Sorel’s thinking. He saw myths as ‘systems of images’ that enable

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participants in social movements to see their next action as a decisive part of the battle leading to the triumph of their cause. But for Sorel it was not the cause itself that mattered, but the struggle, for the struggle itself would prove invigorating.

Sorel was sceptical of the concept of ‘progress’ and denounced those who believed in harmony. He denounced ‘peacemakers’ who advocated, for instance, compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes. It was not that he thought peacemaking futile; rather, he disapproved of peace as an ideal, because it would sap any remaining virtues. In Reflections on Violence

he argued that the process of degeneration could be stopped only by one of two ‘accidents’: either by a great European war or by a great extension of proletarian violence. The two were, so to speak, functional equivalents. Significantly, Sorel recognized that the point of proletarian violence might be the reinvigoration of the bourgeoisie rather than its overthrow: it might restore to capitalism the warlike qualities it had once possessed. He despised the French bourgeoisie not so much because they were bourgeois as because they were weak-kneed compromisers who were obsessed with the feeble and chimerical notion of social duty. American capitalists, by contrast, still displayed warrior-like qualities and therefore retained Sorel’s admiration.