Georges Eugène Sorel (; French: [ʒɔʁʒ øʒɛn sɔʁɛl]; 2 November 1847 – 29 August 1922) was a French social thinker, political theorist, historian, and later journalist. He has inspired theories and movements grouped under the name of Sorelianism. His social and political philosophy owed much to his reading of Proudhon, Fernand Pelloutier, Karl Marx, Giambattista Vico, Henri Bergson (whose lectures at the Collège de France he attended), and later William James. His notion of the power of myth in collective agency inspired socialists, anarchists, Marxists, and fascists. Together with his defense of violence, the power 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 Édouard 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 many former syndicalists welcomed the emerging fascism. According to historian Zeev Sternhell, Sorel's revision of Marxism broke the necessity of the link between revolution and working class, opening up the possibility of replacing the proletariat with the national community.
Born in Cherbourg as the son of a businessman, he moved to Paris in 1864 to attend the Collège Rollin, before entering the École Polytechnique a year later. In 1869 he became chief engineer with the Department of Public Works. Stationed in Corsica until June 1871, he was subsequently posted to various places in southern France – Albi, Gap, and Draguignan. Between 1876 and 1879 he was in Mostaganem, in colonial Algeria, before moving to Perpignan, where he spent the last years of his career until his retirement in 1892. In 1891, he was awarded the Légion d'honneur. Immediately after retiring, he moved with his partner Marie David to Boulogne-sur-Seine, near Paris, where he stayed until his death in 1922.
Beginning in the second half of the 1880s, he published articles in various fields (hydrology, architecture, philosophy of science, psychophysics, political history, and philosophy) displaying the influence of Aristotle, as well as those of Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan. In 1893, he publicly announced his position as a Marxist and a socialist. He moved to working on some of France's first Marxist journals (L’Ère nouvelle and Le Devenir Social) and to participating, on the revisionist side, in the debate launched by Eduard Bernstein. A supporter of Alfred Dreyfus during the affaire, Sorel later was disappointed, much like his friend Charles Péguy, by the political consequences of the trial.
In the beginning of the 20th century, he began arguing for the incompatibility between socialism and parliamentary democracy, moving towards syndicalist positions. Through his writings in Enrico Leone's Il Divenire sociale and Hubert Lagardelle's Mouvement socialiste, he contributed around 1905 to the theoretical elaboration of revolutionary syndicalism. In 1905, his most famous text, Reflections on Violence, began appearing in the Divenire Sociale. It was published in book form in 1908 by Pages Libres, and was followed the same year by The Illusions of Progress.
In the years before the First World War, Sorel increasingly explored the possibility of a synthesis between revolutionary syndicalism and certain forms of nationalism. As early as 1906 he was in contact with Italian syndicalists who, alongside nationalist thinkers such as Enrico Corradini, sought to unite proletarian militancy with a project of national regeneration. Sorel acknowledged that Corradini had drawn upon his ideas in developing a doctrine of “national syndicalism,” writing to Benedetto Croce in 1909 that Corradini “understands exceedingly well the value of my ideas.”
By 1910 Sorel also expressed admiration for aspects of the nationalist thought of Charles Maurras and Charles Péguy, interpreting the national idea as a potential “myth” capable of mobilizing collective energies toward moral and social renewal. This led him to a brief and ambivalent involvement with circles around Action Française and publications such as the Cité Française, though he did not adopt Maurras’s monarchism or integral nationalism.
Ferociously opposed to the 1914 Union sacrée political truce, Sorel denounced the war and in 1917 praised the Russian Revolution. He wrote for an official Soviet Union publication, Russian Soviet Government Bureau, calling Lenin "the greatest theoretician of socialism since Marx and a statesman whose genius recalls that of Peter the Great." He wrote numerous small pieces for Italian newspapers defending the Bolsheviks. Sorel also spoke of Mussolini in strikingly heroic terms, describing him as a "leader of a consecrated battalion, saluting the flags of Italy with his sword. He is an Italian of the fifteenth century, a condottiere. He is the only man with the strength to correct the weakness of the government."
Though Sorel engaged with Marxism for almost his entire time 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 (for example, Hannah Arendt, 'On Violence') 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 a 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 work remained relatively unknown and obscure, Sorel sought to develop the theory in order to prove that, as he wrote to Benedetto Croce in 1895, "socialism is worthy of belonging to the modern scientific movement". This involved rejecting the standard 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 understanding of Marxism as a theory of class agency embedded in institutions. Given the essential 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 not be entirely deduced by the material conditions in which it took place, but had to take into account legal, ideological, and cultural factors. As he wrote in 1898:Nor do I believe that it is in conformity with a Marxist spirit to decompose facts into various elements: economic ones first, subsequently juridical and political ones. ... It is 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 order to carry on a scientific study, it is necessary 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 development 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 line with its way of life; it is, in one word, to deny to the proletariat the possibility of becoming a class 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 working class. He thus elaborated a change of strategy, linked to the new circumstances. Since class is not produced by the evolution of capitalist economy, then a sustained practice of highly ideologically-charged social conflict—the grève prolétarienne—can maybe restore the conditions ideal for a revolutionary working 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 very moment when the conception of social peace claims to moderate disputes; proletarian violence confines employers to their role as producers and tends to restore the class structure just when they seemed on the point of intermingling in the democratic morass.