SOREL, GEORGES. — French sociologist, born in
Cherbourg on 2 November 1847, died in Boulogne-sur-Seine
on 30 August 1922. For several years he practised the
profession of engineer.
Of his writings (L'avenir socialiste des syndicats [1900];
Les illusions du progrès [1908]; La décomposition du marxis-
me [1908]; Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat [1919],
etc.), the most significant remains Réflexions sur la violence
(1908; Italian translation 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 his own must be included. This explains his
contempt for democracy, the expression of bourgeois
mediocrity, and his severe criticism of the “charlatan
dogmas of the eighteenth century.” In this condemnation
of mediocre egoism, of which democracy is the expression,
and in opposing to it heroic struggle, the exceptional and
the vital, S. encounters other representatives of the Lebensphilo-
sophie, Nietzsche (v.), Ortega, etc.
The essential point of contact between S. and Marx (v.) is
the class struggle as the radical elimination of capitalist
society; otherwise, S.’s “philosophy” moves along
directions different from those of Marx and specifically
develops on voluntarism (v.): history
is becoming, action, freedom, acquired through violent
struggle. Hence the central theme of S.’s doctrine, the
opposition between the “fantastic world” and the
“historical world”; the former, a negation of the latter, de-
pends on our activity, is created by our will, and therefore
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,” the product of the
“intellect” and not of the will, a model or exemplar (in the
Platonic sense) of a perfect society, against which existing
(historical) societies are measured in order to reform or
correct them. On the contrary, the myth does not modify the
historical world but destroys it; it does not adapt itself but
revolutionizes; it is neither demonstrated nor refuted, but
realized through class struggle and violence. In this way
S.’s voluntarism shifts socialism from the intellectualist and
reformist plane of utopia (Marxism too, in his view, is
burdened by utopian elements) to that of myth, or passionate
will and free action, which, exalted by myth, bursts in and
destroys the historical situation through total and violent
class struggle. This is “syndicalism,” in which S. sees
the highest expression of socialism, the affirmation
of the proletariat’s heroic virtues and of the vital
impetus, which only open and violent warfare can
save from the inevitable humiliations in which
reformism and partial concessions would seek to
fetter II. Socialism owes to violence “the lofty mo-
ral 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 in fact also an upholder of
moral values, insofar as it destroys “force,”
which is proper to bourgeois society and the
bourgeois state: force belongs to the weak and is
oppressive of freedom, while 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 impetus and heroism. The myth
capable, according to S., of nourishing the class
struggle and maintaining it in a state of strike (v.); it alone
can keep the proletariat’s militancy awake and mark
the transition from capitalist society to socialist so-
ciety, which is much more and something different than
a transition: it is a “catastrophe,” something “grave, fearful,
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 being a stimulus
to action. Thus S. gives class struggle and socialism a
scope that is no longer economic but spiritual; yet his
“myth,” which disregards every factual situation and seeks
to be the expression of anti-intellectualism, is itself also an
intellectualist construction and therefore a utopia in the
less favorable sense of the term.
S. exerted great influence on the French social movement
and also on Russian communism, as well as, in Italy, fascism (v.), which saw in him, besides a voluntarist
sociologist of Nietzschean and also “D’Annunzian” spirit,
Wilson (v.) and of Versailles and the supporter
of Italian claims.
Michele Federico Sciacca