Georges Sorel

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Georges Eugène Sorel (1847-1922)
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Georges Eugène Sorel (2 November, 1847 in Cherbourg – 29 August, 1922 in Boulogne-sur-Seine) was a French philosopher and theorist of revolutionary syndicalism. His notion of the power of myth in people's lives was inspiration for Marxists, for Fascists, and for the people who created the science of advertising. Orson J. Hale writes:

"Anyone assessing the significance of Georges Sorel will reflect long on whether to classify him with the abstract thinkers or the social philosophers and reformers. He was, in fact, a mixture of both, but since he was a spectator in the workers' movement and not in any way a direct participant, he is best placed with the thinkers. He is remembered for one book -- Reflections on Violence -- and for his later intellectual linkage with Communism and Fascism. Sorel, like Gabriel Tarde, had two distinct careers. Bourgeois in origin, and an engineer by training and profession, he resigned from state employment after twenty-five years to devote his time to study and writing. His education in philosophy, the humanities, and social science was acquired almost entirely from critical readings and isolated reflection. He did not absorb and systematize the ideas of others but analyzed and reacted to all that he read. Original in his thought, he was an intellectual eccentric and very nearly a crank." [1]

Contents

[edit] 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. He retired in 1892 and moved to Boulogne-sur-Seine, near Paris, where he stayed until his death. After he settled at Boulogne-sur-Seine in 1892 "he became familiar figure in the Bibliotheque national, the public lecture halls of the College de France, and the editorial offices of the various reviews to which he regularly contributed. His literary and mental endowments were such as to gain him the acquaintance and respect of Bergson, Croce, and Pareto, and among the younger French intellectuals, the friendship of Charles Peguy, Edouard Berth, and Robert Michels. Among his contemporaries he sought affinity with William James and Bergson; he seemed uninterested in German philosophy and sociology and he reacted to Durkheim and Poincare with skeptical irony." [2] He was active on the side of Dreyfusards during the Dreyfus Affair. In addition he had ties of friendship to Antonio Labriola and wrote a preface to the French translation of Labriola's Essays on the Materialist Conception of History. Although Labriola attacked Sorel's work, his books were praised by other Italian thinkers such as Vilfredo Pareto and Benedetto Croce, and he had links to the Italian nationalist-syndicalist movement from which Fascism branched.

[edit] Political writings

"Sorel began his writing as a marginal Marxist, a critical analyst of marx's economics and philosophy, and not a pious commentator. He then embraced revisionism, became for several years the "metaphysician of syndicalism," and as Jaures called him, flirted ardently with royalist circles, and then reverted to his commitment to the proletariat. When the Bolsheviks came to power, he completed his cycle of illusions by saluting Vladimir Lenin as the leader who had realized his syndicalist myth."[3]

"The syndicalist or militant trade union movement, which burst into prominence in France around 1900, inspired Sorel to write the "Reflections on Violence. The turmoil engendered by strikes was universally condemned even by parliamentary socialists, who favored negotiation and concilation. To justify the militancy and to give syndicalism an ideology, Sorel published the series of articles that became, as one of his biographers calls it, "a famous and infamous book."[4] Indeed, it was Sorels only successful book of about a dozen published.[5]" This book was published in Italian, English, Spanish, German Japanese and ultimately in English.

Two of its themes have become a part of social science literature: the concept of the social myth and the virtue of violence. To Sorel the Syndicalist's general strike, the marxist's catastrophic revolution, the Christian's church militant, the legends of the French Revolution, and the remembrance of June Days are all myths that move men, quite independent of their historical reality. As one of Sorel's disciples (Benito Mussolini) said, men do not move mountains; it is only necessary to create the illusion that mountains move. Social myths, says Sorel, are not descriptions of things, but "expressions of a determination to act."[6]

Myths enclose all the strongest inclinations of a people, of a party, or of a class, and the general strike is "the myth in which Socialism is wholly comprised."[7]. For Sorel the general strike was a catastrophic conception of socialism, the essence of the class struggle, and the ony true Marxist means of effecting the revolution. Nowhere does Sorel endorse indiscriminate, brutal violence; only violence "enlightened by the idea of the general strike" [8]is unconditionally defended; only violence in the Marxist class war, as Sorel conceived it, is fine and heroic and in the service of the "immemorial interest of civilization." In fact, Sorel makes no justification of violence by philosophical argument, but uses long excursions into past history and current events to demonstrate that ethical codes are relative to their time and place. In essence demonstrating that all moral codes demonstrate moral relativism. Consistent with his position he could describe the Declaration of the Rights of Man as "only a colorless collection of abstract and confused formulas, without any practical bearing." [9].

[edit] Political thought

Sorel had been politically monarchist and traditionalist before embracing orthodox Marxism in the 1890s, but throughout his career continued to espouse values more commonly associated with conservatism. In his earliest writings he attempted to fill in what he believed were gaps in Marxist theory, but ultimately created an extremely heterodox variation of the ideology. He criticised what he saw as Marx's rationalist and utopian tendencies, believing them to be out of keeping with the pessimistic and irrationalist core of Marxism - a philosophy he considered closer in spirit to early Christianity than to the French Revolution. He rejected Marxist theories of historical materialism, dialectical materialism, and proletarian internationalism. He did not see Marxism as 'true' in a scientific sense, as orthodox Marxists did; rather, it was 'true' in that it promised a redemptive role for the proletariat within a terminally decadent society.

Sorel came to favour the anarcho-collectivism of Bakunin. Like Proudhon, he saw socialism as primarily a moral question. He was also heavily influenced by Henri Bergson who developed the importance of myth and criticized scientific materialism, by the cult of greatness and hatred of mediocrity found in Nietzsche, and by the ability to recognise the potential corruption of democracy found in liberal conservatives such as Tocqueville, Taine and Renan. Despite his disdain for social democracy, Sorel also held great respect for Eduard Bernstein, and agreed with many of his criticisms of orthodox Marxism.

Sorel's was a voluntarist Marxism: he rejected those Marxists who believed in inevitable and evolutionary change, emphasising instead the importance of will and preferring direct action. These approaches included general strikes, boycotts, and constant disruption of capitalism with the goal being to achieve worker control over the means of production. Sorel's belief in the need for a deliberately-conceived "myth" to sway crowds into concerted action was put into practice by mass fascist movements in the 1920s. The epistemic status of the idea of "myth" is of some importance, and is essentially that of a working hypothesis, with one fundamental peculiarity: it is an hypothesis which we do not judge by its closeness to a "Truth", but by the practical consequences which stem from it. Thus, whether a political myth is of some importance or not must be decided, in Sorel's view, on the basis of its capacity to mobilize human beings into political action; the only possible way for men to ascend to an ethical life filled by the character of the sublime and to achieve deliverance. Sorel believed the "energizing myth" of the general strike would serve to enforce solidarity, class consciousness and revolutionary élan amongst the working-class. The "myth" that the Fascists would appeal to, however, was that of the state.

He echoed the Jacobin tradition in French society that held that the only way for change to occur was through the application of force. Sorel praised Charles Maurras, Action Française, Vladimir Lenin and Benito Mussolini for attacking bourgeois democracy. At the time of his death, in Boulogne sur Seine, he had an ambivalent attitude both towards Fascism and Bolshevism. 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 anarchosyndicalism.

[edit] Anti-nationalism, and anti anti-capitalism

In his most famous work Reflections On Violence (1908), Sorel warned about the political trend that conservatives and parliamentary socialism could become allies in a common struggle against capitalism. Sorel's view is that the conservatives and parliamentary socialism had common goals, because they both want the nation to be a centrally controlled, organic unit where all the parts are working together as a whole. Also, the parliamentarian socialism of the left wants economic nationalism, and huge tariff-barriers in order to protect their interior capitalists (a policy now referred to as anti-globalisation as opposed to alter-globalisation) and this works well together with the cultural nationalism of the conservatives. Sorel warned about the creation of corporatism, where the workers movements and the employers organizations would be forced to merge with each other, thus ending the class-struggle, and because he felt that parliamentary democracy was moving in that direction at the beginning of the last century, Sorel said that the workers had to stay away from the socialist parties, and use strikes and violence as their primary weapon against the middle and upper classes in parliament. That way, the workers would not only fight harder for their share of the values produced by capitalism, but also help to protect capitalism against the semi-feudal, corporative dystopia and oligarchy that the socialists and the conservatives are working towards.

[edit] Why protect capitalism?

Sorel agreed with Lenin's views that the mixing of peoples and cultures is a good thing that must be continued under socialism. Lenin was impressed by the successful multiculturalism of some Russian and American cities before the revolution, but ended up closing the borders and forming the organic-state nationalism that Sorel warned about. However, Sorel was not present to criticise this movement towards economic and cultural nationalism since he died in 1922.

Sorel also agreed with orthodox Marxism in its view that the state would be absent under socialism, and for this reason it was natural to see rightwing liberalism as better than social democracy because it involved a lesser state. Capitalism could only turn into socialism if it was allowed to function freely and unrestricted without any forms of economic and cultural nationalism, statism, or corporatism. In "Reflections on Violence" Sorel compares this view with the image of a lightbulb shining more brightly before it passes out. Capitalism must shine brightly because socialism develops from capitalism, and the strong workers movements that must create socialism can only exist under free capitalism. Mixed economies, nationalism and conservativism will weaken them, weaken capitalism, and delay both economic growth and the true, anti-statist and socialist revolution.[citation needed]

[edit] Thoughts on economics & parliamentary democracy

In his "Reflections on Violence", Sorel says that parliamentary socialism, and its middle-class of bureaucrats and newspaper-intellectuals does not understand social science, economics, or any other matter important for good rule as well as the traditional liberalist and capitalist elite that ruled before the mediocre middle-class became a powerful force in parliament. "How did these mediocre and silly people become so powerful?" Sorel asks. His theory on this is that the mediocre middle-class became powerful when the working-classes, people without property, were given the right to vote at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. Thus, the working classes now created a problem for themselves by creating a political elite that is more stupid and less competent than the people who had a monopoly of power before them. He proposed that this problem could only be fixed by a collective withdrawal and boycott of the parliamentary system by the workers. Thus, the workers must return to strikes and violence as their main political tool, so Sorel says. This gives the workers a sense of unity, a return to dignity, and weakens the dangerous and mediocre middle-class in their struggle for power, and their attack on capitalism.[citation needed]

[edit] Anti-elitism

Sorel rejected political elitism (and therefore the dictatorship of the proletariat) because the middle-classes tend to coup all organisational hierarchies, and turn them into gentlemen's clubs for people who like to talk theory and write long newspaper articles. This point was first made by Sorel in "Reflections on Violence", and was later developed further by Robert Michels and his "Iron Law of Oligarchy".

Sorel is an important component of the history of European politics in that his thought reflects the cross-fertilization (and even confusion) of ideas among anarchists, socialists, syndicalists, communists, Marxists and nationalists in the time period of about 1830-1930.[citation needed]

[edit] Sorel's antirealism

Isaiah Berlin identifies three scientific anti-realist currents in Sorel's work.

[edit] Science is not reality

He dismissed science as "a system of idealised entities: atoms, electric charges, mass, energy and the like – fictions compounded out of observed uniformities…deliberately adapted to mathematical treatment that enable men to identify some of the furniture of the universe, and to predict and…control parts of it." [1; 301] He regarded science more as "an achievement of the creative imagination, not an accurate reproduction of the structure of reality, not a map, still less a picture, of what there was. Outside of this set of formulas, of imaginary entities and mathematical relationships in terms of which the system was constructed, there was ‘natural’ nature – the real thing…" [1; 302] He regarded such a view as "an odious insult to human dignity, a mockery of the proper ends of men", [1; 300] and ultimately constructed by "fanatical pedants", [1; 303] out of "abstractions into which men escape to avoid facing the chaos of reality." [1; 302]

[edit] Science is not nature

As far as Sorel was concerned, "nature is not a perfect machine, nor an exquisite organism, nor a rational system." [1; 302] He rejected the view that "the methods of natural science can explain and explain away ideas and values…or explain human conduct in mechanistic or biological terms, as the…blinkered adherents of la petite science believe." [1; 310] He also maintained that the categories we impose upon the world, "alter what we call reality…they do not establish timeless truths as the positivists maintained", [1; 302] and to "confuse our own constructions with eternal laws or divine decrees is one of the most fatal delusions of men." [1; 303] It is "ideological patter…bureaucracy, la petite science…the Tree of Knowledge has killed the Tree of Life…human life [has been reduced] to rules that seem to be based on objective truths." [1; 303] Such to Sorel, is the appalling arrogance of science, a vast deceit of the imagination, a view that conspires to "stifle the sense of common humanity and destroy human dignity." [1; 304]

[edit] Science is not a recipe

Science, he maintained, "is not a ‘mill’ into which you can drop any problem facing you, and which yields solutions", [1; 311] that are automatically true and authentic. Yet, this is precisely how too many people seem to regard it.

To Sorel, that is way "too much of a conceptual, ideological construction", [1; 312] smothering our perception of truth through the "stifling oppression of remorselessly tidy rational organisation." [1; 321] For Sorel, the inevitable "consequence of the modern scientific movement and the application of scientific categories and methods to the behaviour of men", [1; 323] is an outburst of interest in irrational forces, religions, social unrest, criminality and deviance - resulting directly from an overzealous and monistic obsession with scientific rationalism.

And what science confers, "a moral grandeur, bureaucratic organisation of human lives in the light of…la petite science, positivist application of quasi-scientific rules to society – all this Sorel despised and hated", [1; 328] as so much self-delusion and nonsense that generates no good and nothing of lasting value. In essence, something of a Romantic like Blake, Sorel would say, "the artist creates as the bird sings on the bough, as the lily bursts into flower, to all appearance for no ulterior purpose." [2; 196]

Above quotations from:

  • [1] Sir Isaiah Berlin, Against The Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, London: Pimlico, 1997
  • [2] Sir Isaiah Berlin, The Sense of Reality - Studies in Ideas and Their History, London: Pimlico, 1996

[edit] Works

[edit] References

  1. ^ page 108-110 The Rise of Modern Europe "The Great Illusion 1900-1914" by Oron J. Hale, Harper Torchbooks copyright 1971, Standard Book Number 06-131578-8
  2. ^ Ibid page 108
  3. ^ Ibid page 109
  4. ^ James H. Meisel, The Genesis of Georges Sorel (Ann Arbor, 1951), p 125
  5. ^ Ibid page 109
  6. ^ Ibid page 109
  7. ^ refers to page 50 of Reflections of Violence (Georges Sorel, New York, 1961)
  8. ^ Reflections of Violence page 127
  9. ^ Reflections on Violence page 210

[edit] See also

[edit] External links


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