Georges Sorel - Biography

Biography

Sorel was born in Cherbourg, son of a bankrupted wine merchant. In 1865, he entered the École Polytechnique in Paris. He became chief engineer with the Department of Public Works. He was stationed briefly in Corsica, and for a longer period in Perpignan. In 1891, he was awarded the Légion d'honneur. He retired in 1892 and moved to Boulogne-sur-Seine, near Paris, where he stayed until his death.

Beginning in the second half of the 1880s, he published articles in various fields (hydrology, architecture, physics, political history, and philosophy) displaying the influence of Aristotle, as well as Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan. In 1893, he publicly affirmed his position as a Marxist and a socialist. His social and political philosophy owed much to his reading of Proudhon, Karl Marx, Giambattista Vico, Henri Bergson (whose lectures at the Collège de France he attended), and later William James. Sorel's engagement in the political world was accompanied by a correspondence with Benedetto Croce, and later with Vilfredo Pareto. Sorel worked on the first French Marxist journals, L’Ère nouvelle and Le Devenir social, and then participated at the turn of the century in the revisionist debate and crisis within Marxism. He took the side of Eduard Bernstein against Karl Kautsky. Sorel supported acquittal during the Dreyfus affair, although, like his friend Charles Péguy, he later felt betrayed by what he took to be the opportunism of the Dreyfusards. Through his contributions to Enrico Leone's Il Divenire sociale and Hubert Lagardelle's Mouvement socialiste, he contributed around 1905 to the theoretical elaboration of revolutionary syndicalism. In 1906, his most famous text, Reflections on Violence, appeared in this last journal. It was published in book form in 1908, and was followed the same year by Illusions du progrès.

Disappointed by the CGT, Sorel associated himself for a period in 1909-1910 with Charles Maurras’ Action française, while sharing neither its nationalism nor its political program. This collaboration inspired the founders of the Cercle Proudhon, which brought together revolutionary syndicalists and monarchists. Sorel himself, with Jean Variot, founded a journal in 1911 called L’Indépendance, although disagreements, in part over nationalism, soon ended the project.

Ferociously opposed to the 1914 Union sacrée, Sorel denounced the war and in 1917 praised the Russian Revolution, calling Lenin "the greatest theoretician of socialism since Marx." He wrote numerous small pieces for Italian newspapers defending the Bolsheviks. Sorel was extremely hostile to Gabriele D’Annunzio, the poet who attempted to re-conquer Fiume for Italy, and did not show sympathy for the rise of fascism in Italy, despite Jean Variot's later claims that he placed all his hopes in Benito Mussolini. After the war, Sorel published a collection of his writings entitled Matériaux d’une théorie du prolétariat. At the time of his death, in Boulogne sur Seine, he had an ambivalent attitude both towards Fascism and Bolshevism.

Although his writing touched on many subjects, Sorel's work is best characterized by his original interpretation of Marxism, which was deeply anti-determinist, politically anti-elitist, anti-Jacobin, and built on the direct action of unions, the mobilizing role of myth—especially that of the general strike—and on the disruptive and regenerative role of violence. Whether Sorel is better seen as a left-wing or right-wing thinker is disputed: the Italian Fascists praised him as a forefather, but the dictatorial government they established ran contrary to his beliefs, while he was also an important touchstone for Italy's first Communists, who saw Sorel as a theorist of the proletariat. Such widely divergent interpretations arise from the theory that a moral revival of the country must take place to re-establish itself; yet whether this revival must occur by means of the middle and upper classes or the proletariat is a point in question. His ideas, most notably the concept of a spontaneous general strike, have contributed significantly to anarcho-syndicalism.