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Georges Sorel Georges Sorel GEORGES SOREL GEORGES SOREL The Character and Development of his Thought ]. R.JENNINGS Lecturer in French Political Thought and Government University College, Swansea Foreword by THEODORE ZELDIN Fellow ofSt Antony's College, Oxford Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-07460-0 ISBN 978-1-349-07458-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-07458-7 © J. R. Jennings 1985 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1985 All rights reserved. For information, write: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Published in the United Kingdom by The Macmillan Press Ltd. First published in the United States of America in 1985 ISBN 978-0-312-32458-2 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Jennings, J. R. Georges Sorel: the character and development of his thought. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Sorel, Georges, 184 7-1922. 2. Communism. 3. Socialism. I. Title. HX264.7.S67J46 1985 335'.0092'4 84-24894 ISBN 978-0-312-32458-2 Contents Acknowledgements Vl Foreword by Theodore Zeldin Vll List ofAbbreviations X Introduction: the Character of Sorel's Thought 2 Perpignan Writings 16 3 Sorel's Early Marxism 37 4 The Crisis of Marxism 62 5 The Dreyfus Affair and After 83 6 Syndicalism 116 7 Last Writings 143 8 Conclusion 176 Notes 182 Suggestions for Further Reading 203 Index 206 v Acknowledgements I wish especially to thankjohn Torrance for his careful supervi­ sion of my work during my period in Oxford. Bruce Haddock and Neil Harding have provided academic support and inspira­ tion over a period of many years and it is a pleasure to express my gratitude to them. Thanks are also due to Rosamund Camp­ bell, the librarian of St Antony's College, for her many en­ deavours on my behalf; to Mrs Phyllis Hancock (the perfect secretary) for typing the manuscript; to Richard Taylor for generously offering to check the proofs; and, finally to Theodore Zeldin for contributing the Foreword to this volume. During 1982-3 I was fortunate to receive generous financial assistance from the British Academy's Sir Ernest Cassel Educa­ tional Trust Fund and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. This greatly aided the completion of this project. Vl Foreword How high does Sorel stand in the table of the world's great political philosophers? Is he indeed in that table at all? There are already at least twenty books about him; a journal devoted entirely to the discussion of his ideas has just been started; does that mean that a minor industry is in the process of establishing itself to work for his academic canonisation? But the age of great philosophies is over. The fashion for global explanations of human behaviour and grand theories of reform is past. That is why Sorel is interesting. He does not offer a panacea. He is worth exhuming precisely because he is not a superman. If there were such a thing as an average man, he could plausibly be put forward as an example of him. He is certainly one of the precursors of the Floating Voter. Though he may have fooled his neighbours by always wearing the same old-fashioned bourgeois clothes, he moved with the times. Marx­ ism, syndicalism, royalism, fascism, bolshevism excited him one after the other. He was in turn enthusiastic, critical, contemp­ tuous. He married cynicism with gullibility, pessimism with optimism. He was much more of a reader than a writer; his books were essentially commentaries on other books. More a conversationalist than a theorist, he had unusually wide experi­ ence, but whole aspects of the world were unknown to him; both learned and ill-informed, both intelligent and na"ive, both so­ ciable and a recluse, he was above all disconcerting. He could not and cannot be categorised. He has been labelled an 'anom­ aly'. That makes him a very modern person. The characteristic of the modern person is that he is different from every other one, in some respect or other, and he is becom­ ing more different all the time. One of the false assumptions historians have inherited from the nineteenth century is the belief that people are growing more like each other, under the influence of democracy, the media, education, and the tempta­ tions of the consumer society. That, once upon a time, seemed to Vll Vlll Foreword be the direction in which history was moving, or at least it was the direction in which it was feared it might be moving. The writer who more than any other popularised this view was Tocqueville, and he was certainly worried about it. But for all his undoubted genius, Tocqueville was mistaken. He went wrong for four reasons. First, his prediction was inspired by his own inheri­ ted prejudices. His father was a legitimist nobleman, whose ideas (enshrined in a book which no one reads today) contain the basic arguments which the famous son was subsequently to develop with such skill, ideas reflecting the panic of beleaguered aristocracy. Secondly, Tocqueville considered the individual en masse, as an abstraction; he did not observe him in sufficiently minute detail. In reality, the atoms of society had more irregular­ ities and idiosyncrasies than he realised; he spoke about the masses at a time when very little was known about them as individuals. Thirdly, history has not followed the course the aristocrats expected it to. The individual has resisted the pressures exerted on him. He does not drink Coca-Cola all the time. The pressures have turned out to be less powerful and less uniform than predicted. The choices opened up to the individual by technol­ ogy have made the life of each, almost inevitably, a unique amalgam of bits and pieces, of ideas, prejudices and worries, borrowed from diverse sources, of precepts misinterpreted and possessions misapplied. The rules of behaviour inculcated by teachers have not been swallowed whole, and in any case teachers have never all said the same thing: education has multiplied di­ versity. Fourthly, Tocqueville did not foresee that the individual would develop such a disturbing capacity for introspection, and such a wayward taste for an independent identity: each constructs his own personality in an original way, willy nilly, even ifhe is told his parents, or his environment, have condemned him to be what he is. So the modern person is no longer the same kind of individual that existed when the great philosophies were invented. It can­ not be taken for granted that human nature - whatever that might mean - has always been the same. Even physically, the modern person, living longer, protected from old diseases and subject to hitherto unknown ones, is a new kind of creature; emotionally, the constant need to make decisions (where once tradition saved the trouble of thought or doubt) has created new Foreword IX terrors to occupy the imagination. That is not to say a clear break has occurred, for there have always been dissidents, geniuses and misfits; but dissidence is increasingly becoming a regular feature of the ordinary lives of ordinary people. This calls for a new emphasis in the social sciences, which are only just in process of liberating themselves from the model of knowledge of nineteenth-century natural science, which they inherited from their founders. If the individual is an infinitely varied, varying combination of nuances, a perpetually rotating kaleidoscope, it is no longer appropriate to be content to classify him in dichotomies. In the age of the computer, our minds are learning to be more capacious, to cope with more permutations. We can see now that everybody is an anomaly. Sorel groped, though confusedly, with the problems of being an anomaly. He did not mean by violence what is normally understood, and the title of his most famous book has aroused the wrong kind of curiosity about him. He argued not for physi­ cal violence but for moral courage, for heroism; he longed for humans to be less ordinary. His heroes were the ancient Greeks or the early Christians, who broke from traditions of barbarism. When he met a real live hero, he was horrified. That is why he was so attracted by every new movement, and then repelled. Nonconformity is not a static condition, but constant rebellion and self-renewal. One of the merits of Dr Jennings's book is that he makes no effort to play down the contradictions in Sorel, who emerges, indeed, more complex than ever, an avant-garde writer obsessed by antique nostalgia and religious yearnings. Sorel was not a wise, detached old man writing about how to get silly people organised more sensibly: he shared the muddleheadedness, ir­ rationality and unpredictable temperament of those he wrote about. That does not make for great philosophy. But it does throw light on what people are like. To me, Sorel is not a hero, but a warning; not a guide, but a challenge. It is salutary to become better acquainted with a man who, however unwillingly, proved to himself that he did not know all the answers. THEODORE ZELDIN List of Abbreviations For the most-frequently cited works by Sorel, references are as far as possible given in the text, using the following abbrevi­ ations: AM D'Aristote a Marx (Paris, 1935) CEP Contribution a !'etude profane de la Bible (Paris, 1889) DM La Decomposition du marxisme (Paris, 191 0). (Originally published 1908) !EM Introduction a l'economie moderne (Paris, 1910). (Originally published 1903) IP Les Illusions du progres (Paris and Geneva, 1981) MTP Materiaux d'une thtforie du proletariat (Paris and Geneva, 1981) PS Le Proces de Socrate (Paris, 1889) RV Rijlexions sur la violence (Paris and Geneva, 1981) SHR Le Systeme historique de Renan (Geneva, 1971).
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