Sorel, Georges

(1847-1922)

After a long career as an engineer in France, Sorel resigned to become an independent scholar, and in the thirty-five years before his death published a stream of books and articles on social theory, Marxism, and the philosophy of the social sciences (most notably Reflections on Violence, 1908, and The Illusions of Progress, 1908). As editor of Le Devenir social, he introduced theoretical Marxism into France, and sided with Eduard Bernstein in rejecting Marxism's pretensions to be scientific. However, rather than abandon revolutionary activity for reformism, he argued for an extreme form of anarcho- syndicalism . His significance for sociology lies in his writings on myth and violence. His analysis of the functions of myth in society complements Karl Mannheim's later writings on utopia. There is, in fact, a developed (though largely unacknowledged) theory of ideology in his writings. According to Sorel, many of the central tenets of Marxism were themselves myths, aimed at, and capable of, mobilizing working-class mass action against capitalism (most notably in the case of the ‘myth of the general strike’). His arguments that violent confrontation can be noble and civilizing, that the future is unknowable, and that there is nothing to suggest civilized men and women will ever wholly renounce violence to advance estimable causes, punctured the Edwardian belief that progress would necessarily lead to peaceful settlement of all disputes, and more generally are still a powerful counter to the tendency among some social theorists towards an optimistic historicism.