Violence and Resistance to the State: Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence

Abstract

This paper explains the meaning and significance of violence in Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1908) through an examination of three distinctions that structure the book. First between the proletarian strike and the merely political strike; second between myth and utopia; third between violence and force. The paper looks to Sorel’s earlier and later writings, and to the strike actions unfolding around him, to argue that violence was a relatively novel topic for Sorel, and in the Reflections it is connected to an understanding of the State that comes to define it.

Acknowledgements

Parts of this paper were initially drafted for the Workshop for Critical Inquiry at Missouri State University, and I thank Andrew Baird and Ralph Shain for the invitation and their hospitality. My thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for comments that have significantly improved this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Robert G. Neville, “The Courrières Colliery Disaster, 1906,” Journal of Contemporary History 13, no. 1 (1978): 33–52.

2 On the deployment in the Pas-de-Calais from the perspective of the forces of order, see Odile Roynette-Gland, “L’armée dans la bataille sociale: Maintien de l’ordre et grèves ouvrières dans le Nord de la France (1871–1906),” Le Mouvement Social, no. 179 (1997): 58.

3 All parenthetical references refer to Georges Sorel and Jeremy Jennings, Reflections on Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

4 Much of this generation of French scholarship is represented in the Cahiers Georges Sorel, subsequently renamed Mil neuf cent. However, see especially Shlomo Sand, L’illusion du politique: Georges Sorel et le débat intellectuel 1900 (Paris: Découverte, 1985). And the more recent, Willy Gianinazzi, Naissance du mythe moderne: Georges Sorel et la crise de la pensée savante, 1889–1914 (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2006). In English from that earlier period, see especially Jeremy Jennings, Georges Sorel: The Character and Development of His Thought (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985); John Stanley, The Sociology of Virtue: The Political & Social Theories of Georges Sorel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). For one recent evaluation of that scholarship, see the introduction to Georges Sorel, Eric Brandom, and Tommaso Giordani, Georges Sorel’s Study on Vico: Translation, Edition, and Introduction (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

5 George Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Tommaso Giordani, “The Uncertainties of Action: Agency, Capitalism, and Class in the Thought of Georges Sorel” (European University Institute, 2015); Kevin Duong, The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

6 Alex Gourevitch, “Labor Republicanism and the Transformation of Work,” Political Theory 41, no. 4 (2013); Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

7 H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Knopf, 1958), 161.

8 See Eric Brandom, “Violence in Translation: Georges Sorel, Liberalism and Totalitarianism from Weimar to Woodstock,” History of Political Thought 38, no. 4 (2017): 733–763.

9 Sorel, Georges. “Science et Socialisme,” Revue Philosophique 35 (May 1893): 561.

10 On the earlier phases of this reception, see Julia Nicholls, Revolutionary Thought After the Paris Commune, 1871–1885 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). On a case relevant to Sorel, Christophe Prochasson, “Sur La Reception Du Marxisme En France; Le Cas Andler (1890–1920),” Revue de Synthèse 110, no. 1 (1989): 85–108.

11 On Lafargue, see Leslie Derfler, Paul Lafargue and the Flowering of French Socialism, 1882–1911 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

12 The outstanding introductory treatment of this period of socialist political development remains Madeleine Réberioux, “Le socialisme français de 1871–1914.” In Jacques Droz, Histoire générale du socialisme (2): De 1875 à 1918 (Paris : Presses universitaires de France, 1983), 133–237.

13 Georges Sorel, Introduction à l’économie moderne (Paris: Jacques, 1903), 301.

14 On this moment in Sorel’s trajectory, see Christophe Prochasson, “Sur l’environment intellectuel de Georges Sorel: L’École des Hautes Études Sociales (1899–1911),” Cahiers Georges Sorel 3 (1985): 16–38.

15 Georges Sorel, “Tavernier – La religion nouvelle,” Revue générale de bibliographie française 3, no. 22 (1905), 168.

16 On socialists and the 1905 separation of church and state, see Rémi Fabre, “Une Séparation Révolutionnaire? Allard et Vaillant… Les Ultras de La Commission Briand,” Cahiers Jaurès 175–176 (2005): 33–83.

17 Jacques Julliard, “La charte d’Amiens, cent ans après,” Mil neuf cent. Revue d’histoire intellectuelle 24, no. 1 (2006) : 5–40.

18 An invaluable tool for tracking Sorel’s writings at different moments is Shlomo Sand’s bibliography in the important collection Jacques Julliard and Shlomo Sand, eds., Georges Sorel en son temps, (Paris: Seuil, 1985). Like most of Sorel’s writings, the Reflections appeared first in a periodical. The chapters that would ultimately be the Reflections were published first in the biweekly Italian syndicalist journal, Divenire sociale, starting in October 1905, appearing regularly until April 1906; similar but not identical texts were published in French in Mouvement socialiste from January to June 1906. Only the next year did Daniel Halévy convince Sorel to bring the articles together into a book – to which Sorel added the “Letter to Halévy” as an introduction for its appearance in early 1908. New editions appeared across Sorel’s lifetime, including in 1920 with a new appendix in defense of Lenin.

19 Jacques Julliard, Fernand Pelloutier et les origines du syndicalisme d’action directe (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971), 67.

20 Émile Pataud and Émile Pouget, Comment nous ferons la révolution (Paris : Tallandier 1909).

21 Georges Sorel, Matériaux d’une théorie du prolétariat (Paris: M. Rivière, 1929), 59–60. Text originally published as Georges Sorel, “Le Syndicalisme Révolutionnaire,” Le Mouvement Socialiste 17, no. 166–167 (1905): 17.

22 Georges Sorel, “La science dans l’éducation,” Le devenir social 2 (March 1896): 233.

23 An example of utopia as anamorphosis is nicely provided by Daniel Halévy’s Histoire de quatres ans, 1997–2001, published in Péguy’s Cahiers de la quainzaine in 1903. It is the story of a future in which a technological invention has allowed the cost of production of food to fall to zero. No one needs to work in order to eat. Material feast is spiritual famine. Europe is nearly wiped out by invading Asiatic hordes, and is saved only by a self-isolating aristocratic minority who retain their capacity for self-discipline. Here a story about the future is used very plainly to think, or at least express opinions about, the present.

24 There are two issues here. One is the temporal working-out of the consequences of violence. Duong reads this, as does Ciccariello-Maher, in Hegelian fashion as a dialectical cunning of violence. It seems to me that Sorel rejects this as really utopian rather than mythic. The goal here is not for the philosopher to know better. Rather, myth is creative, and the process of a creative subject is being described, rather than its outcome prescribed. The aesthetic and creative elements of myth are essential to it. For an interesting comparison between Sorel and Hegel from a scholar of the latter, see the final chapter of David James, Art, Myth and Society in Hegel’s Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2009).

25 Georges Sorel, D’Aristote à Marx : L’ancienne et la nouvelle métaphysique, (Paris: M. Rivière, 1935), 205, 208.

26 On these passages, see Eric Brandom, “L’institution et l’esthétique: Sorel, Vico et Croce,” Mil neuf cent: Revue d’histoire intellectuelle 32 (2014): 17.

27 For an argument connecting the Sorelian rhetoric of energy to larger movements in European thought, see Luke Collison, “Georges Sorel’s Political Energy,” History of European Ideas 47, no. 8 (2021): 17–18.

28 The above presentation of myth leaves out an obvious reference—Henri Bergson. While there can be no denying the importance Sorel ascribed to Bergson in general—attending his lectures and praising him as one of the major thinkers of the era—in fact the meaning of the Bergsonian references in the Reflections is not so clear as it might at first appear.

29 Without better information about, for instance, whether or not Sorel reviewed the Italian proofs before publication, it is difficult to draw strong conclusions from small differences between the Italian and later French editions of the text. Still, it is noteworthy that in the Italian version of this passage, the distinction is not yet made so clearly: “i prefetti paventano di dover ricorrere alla violenza legale contro la violenza insurrezionale, e fanno pressione sui padroni per forzarli a cedere…” Divenire sociale, 16 October 1905, 314. When the text appeared in French a few months later, “la force legal” has replaced “violenza legale.” Mouvement socialiste 18, no 170 (1906): 29.

30 See Walter Benjamin, Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition, ed. Peter Fenves and Julia Ng (Stanford, 2021).

31 Jean Jaurès, Discours parlementaires (Paris: Cornély, 1904), 96.

32 Georges Sorel, “Léon XIII,” Études socialistes 1, no. 5 (1903): 272.

33 Simone Weil, Rachel Bespaloff, and Christopher Benfey. War and the Iliad. Translated by Mary McCarthy (New York: NYRB Classics, 2005).

34 Danny Hoffman, The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 7. For a reading of Sorel through Deleuze, with a somewhat different angle on the question of the war-machine, see, Piotr Laskowski, “Georges Sorel, l’intempestif,” Mil Neuf Cent: Revue d’histoire Intellectuelle 32 (2014): 147–80.

35 For Clastres and Scott—and we can add David Graeber—revolution is really the extension of the egalitarian, communitarian, ambiguous, and plural spaces that typify, they believe, interpersonal interaction at its best. The State rationalizes. It makes visible and controllable, in so doing it creates usually pernicious hierarchies. Pierre Clastres, Archeology of Violence, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010); James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale, 1998); The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale, 2009). Graeber writes about this at many places, but see especially “The Phenomenology of Giant Puppets.”

36 Georges Sorel, “Le caractère religieux du socialisme,” Le mouvement socialiste 20, no. 180 (November 1906): 287–288.

37 Ibid., 287.

38 Ibid., 288.

39 Georges Clemenceau Journal Officiel, May 5, 1906, 3137.

40 Jacques Julliard, Clemenceau, briseur de grèves: L’affaire de Draveil-Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, (Paris: Julliard, 1965), 24.

41 The phrase is from Roynette-Gland, “L’armée dans la bataille sociale.”

42 Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

43 Quoted in David Baguley, “Germinal: The Gathering Storm,” in Brian Nelson ed, The Cambridge Companion to Zola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 142.

44 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (Oxford: Oxford, 2003), 30.