Of his writings (*L'avenir socialiste des syndicats* [1900]; *Les illusions du progrès* [1908]; *La décomposition du marxisme* [1908]; *Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat* [1919]), the most significant remains *Réflexions sur la violence* (1908; Italian trans. from the 6th ed. of 1923, Bari 1926). He is one of the masters of modern syndicalism (v.) and one of the most acute critics of Marxism (v.). His political and social Bergson (v.) and Bergsonism, action (v.) and of life, among which must be numbered his own. This explains his contempt for democracy, an expression of bourgeois mediocrity, and his severe criticism of the “chattering dogmas of the 18th century.” In this condemnation of mediocre egoism, of which democracy is the expression, and in the opposition to it of heroic struggle, of the exceptional and of the vital, Sorel coincides with other representatives of *Lebensphilosophie*, Nietzsche (v.), Ortega, etc.
The essential point Marx (v.) is the class struggle as the radical elimination of capitalist society; for the rest, Sorel’s “philosophy” moves along lines different from those of Marx and unfolds on the basis of an absolute voluntarism (v.): history is becoming, action, freedom, which is conquered through violent struggle. Hence the central theme of Sorel’s doctrine, the opposition between the “mythical world” and the “historical world”; the former, a negation of the latter, depends on our activity, is created by our will and thus makes freedom possible. To act and to be free is to create a myth, which, felt and willed by the masses, becomes social. The myth is opposed to “utopia,” a product of “intellect” and not of will, a model or exemplar (in the Platonic sense) of a perfect society, to which existing (historical) societies are compared in order to reform or correct them. On the contrary, the myth does not modify the historical world; it destroys it; it does not adapt itself, it revolutionizes; it is not demonstrated or refuted, it is realized through class struggle and violence. In this way Sorel’s voluntarism shifts socialism from the intellectualist and reformist plane of utopia (even Marxism, in his view, is burdened with utopian elements) to that of myth or passionate will and free action, which, exalted by the myth, bursts forth and destroys the historical situation through total and violent class struggle. This is “syndicalism,” which Sorel sees as the highest expression of socialism, the affirmation of the heroic virtues of the proletariat, of the élan vital, which alone violent and open war can save from the inevitable mortifications into which reformism and partial concessions would seek to confine II. To violence socialism must owe “the high moral values with which it offers the modern world its salvation” (*Réflexions*, p. 333). Besides being an expression of vital energy and power of action, violence is also, in fact, an assertion of moral values, inasmuch as it destroys the “force” which is proper to bourgeois society and the State: force belongs to the weak and is oppressive of freedom, violence belongs to heroes who, by denying force, make possible a society of free men; force, one might say with Bergson, belongs to “static” morality, violence to “dynamic” morality, which is élan and heroism. The myth capable, according to Sorel, of nourishing class struggle and maintaining it in a state of continuous incandescence is the general strike (v.), the only thing that can keep the combativeness of the proletariat at a high pitch and mark the transition from capitalist to social society; which is much more and different than a transition: it is a “catastrophe,” something grave, formidable, and sublime” (*ibid.*, p. 168), the result of a powerful spiritual energy. Nor does it matter whether the myth is realized or not, since its value lies in its power to arouse action. Thus Sorel gives to class struggle and to socialism a significance no longer economic but spiritual; yet his “myth,” which disregards every factual situation and claims to be the expression of anti-intellectualism, is itself an intellectualist construction and hence a utopia in the worst sense of the term.
Sorel exercised great influence on the French labour movement and also on Russian communism, as well as, in Italy, on Fascism (v.), which saw in him, besides a voluntarist sociologist of Nietzschean and even “D’Annunzian” spirit, Wilson (v.) and of Versailles and the supporter of Italian claims.