Sorelianism refers to the advocacy or support of the ideology and thinking of French revolutionary syndicalist

Syndicalism

Syndicalism is a type of economic system proposed as a replacement for capitalism and an alternative to state socialism, which uses federations of collectivised trade unions or industrial unions...

 Georges Sorel

Georges Sorel

Georges Eugène Sorel was a French philosopher and theorist of revolutionary syndicalism. His notion of the power of myth in people's lives inspired Marxists and Fascists. It is, together with his defense of violence, the contribution for which he is most often remembered. Oron J...

. It typically refers to the anti-individualist, anti-liberal, anti-materialist, anti-positivist

Antipositivism

Antipositivism is the view in social science that the social realm may not be subject to the same methods of investigation as the natural world; that academics must reject empiricism and the scientific method in the conduct of research...

, anti-rationalist, spiritualist

Spiritualism

Spiritualism is a belief system or religion, postulating the belief that spirits of the dead residing in the spirit world have both the ability and the inclination to communicate with the living...

 syndicalism that Sorel promoted. Sorelians oppose bourgeois

Bourgeoisie

In sociology and political science, bourgeoisie describes a range of groups across history. In the Western world, between the late 18th century and the present day, the bourgeoisie is a social class "characterized by their ownership of capital and their related culture." A member of the...

 democracy

Democracy

Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...

, the developments of the 18th century, the secular spirit, and the French Revolution

French Revolution

The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...

, while supporting classical

Classicism

Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...

 tradition. Sorel believed that the victory of the proletariat

Proletariat

The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...

 in class struggle

Class conflict

Class conflict is the tension or antagonism which exists in society due to competing socioeconomic interests between people of different classes....

 could only be achieved through the power of myth and a general strike

General strike

A general strike is a strike action by a critical mass of the labour force in a city, region, or country. While a general strike can be for political goals, economic goals, or both, it tends to gain its momentum from the ideological or class sympathies of the participants...

. To Sorel, the aftermath of class conflict would involve rejuvenation of both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Initially Sorel was a revisionist

Revisionism (Marxism)

Within the Marxist movement, the word revisionism is used to refer to various ideas, principles and theories that are based on a significant revision of fundamental Marxist premises. The term is most often used by those Marxists who believe that such revisions are unwarranted and represent a...

 of Marxism

Marxism

Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

, but in 1910 announced his abandonment of socialist

Socialism

Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...

 literature and claimed in 1914, using an aphorism of Benedetto Croce

Benedetto Croce

Benedetto Croce was an Italian idealist philosopher, and occasionally also politician. He wrote on numerous topics, including philosophy, history, methodology of history writing and aesthetics, and was a prominent liberal, although he opposed laissez-faire free trade...

 that "socialism is dead" due to the "decomposition of Marxism". Sorel became a supporter of Maurrassian

Maurrassisme

Maurrassisme is a political doctrine originated by Charles Maurras , most closely associated with the Action française movement...

 integral nationalism

Integral Nationalism

Integral nationalism is one of five types of nationalism defined by Carlton Hayes in his 1928 book The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism....

 beginning in 1909 that influenced his works. Sorelianism is considered to be a precursor to fascism

Fascism

Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...

.

General strike

Sorel believed that class war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie would result from a general strike. Sorel believed that the victory of the proletariat would end democracy, individualism, liberalism, and compromise between workers and the democratic capitalist society.

Syndicalist society

The ideal Sorelian syndicalist society would consist of workers' syndicate

Syndicate

A syndicate is a self-organizing group of individuals, companies or entities formed to transact some specific business, or to promote a common interest or in the case of criminals, to engage in organized crime...

s that would serve as the only social authority, all other authorities would be destroyed.

Moral regeneration

Sorelianism focused on the moral regeneration of society and the rescue of civilization rather than only the working-class. Sorelianism was more focused on support of socialism as a means for revolutionary transformation of society rather than a movement of the proletariat or a movement with a specific social structure.

Class conflict and class rejuvenation

Sorel advocated the separation of groups in society, including support of the syndicalist model of a society where the proletariat workers would be autonomous and separate from bourgeois industrialists. Sorel refused the idea of negotiation between the classes. However, Sorel believed that it was the proletariat's task to awaken the bourgeoisie from intellectual stupor to recover its morality, "productive energy", and "feeling of its own dignity" that Sorel claimed had been lost because of democratic ideals.

Hence, Sorel believed that both the end result of class conflict would in the end result in the rejuvenation of both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Revisionism of Marxism

Sorel focused on the ethical dimension of Marxism, claiming its utility for historical analysis and a means for transforming society. However, Sorel criticized the deterministic, materialist, and mechanist components of Marxism. Sorel criticized vulgar interpretations of Marxism for being unfaithful to Marx's real intentions. Sorel claimed that Marx was not materialist at all, noting that Marx did not regard psychological developments of people as part of the economic process. Sorel noted that Marx described the necessary ideological superstructure of societies: law, the organization of the state, religion, art, and philosophy. As a result, Sorel claimed that "no great philosophy can be established without being based on art and on religion".

Sorelianism and French integral nationalism

Interest in Sorelian thought arose in the French political right

Right-wing politics

In politics, Right, right-wing and rightist generally refer to support for a hierarchical society justified on the basis of an appeal to natural law or tradition. To varying degrees, the Right rejects the egalitarian objectives of left-wing politics, claiming that the imposition of equality is...

, particularly by French nationalist

Nationalism

Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...

 Charles Maurras

Charles Maurras

Charles-Marie-Photius Maurras was a French author, poet, and critic. He was a leader and principal thinker of Action Française, a political movement that was monarchist, anti-parliamentarist, and counter-revolutionary. Maurras' ideas greatly influenced National Catholicism and "nationalisme...

 of Action Française

Action Française

The Action Française , founded in 1898, is a French Monarchist counter-revolutionary movement and periodical founded by Maurice Pujo and Henri Vaugeois and whose principal ideologist was Charles Maurras...

and his supporters. While Maurras was a staunch opponent of Marxism, he was supportive of Sorelianism for its opposition to liberal democracy

Liberal democracy

Liberal democracy, also known as constitutional democracy, is a common form of representative democracy. According to the principles of liberal democracy, elections should be free and fair, and the political process should be competitive...

. Maurras famously stated "a socialism liberated from the democratic and cosmopolitan element fits nationalism well as a well made glove fits a beautiful hand". In the summer of 1909, Sorel endorsed French integral nationalism and praised Maurras. Sorel was impressed by the significant numbers of "ardent youth" that enrolled in Action Française. Sorel's turn to nationalism resulted in his disregarding of Marx and adopting support of the views of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French politician, mutualist philosopher and socialist. He was a member of the French Parliament, and he was the first person to call himself an "anarchist". He is considered among the most influential theorists and organisers of anarchism...

. In 1910, Sorel along with Action Française nationalists Édouard Berth

Édouard Berth

Édouard Berth was a major theorist of French syndicalism. Berth tried to unify the metaphysics of Marx and Bergson through his articulation of revolutionary self-organization of the proletariat....

 and Georges Valois

Georges Valois

Georges Valois was a French journalist and politician.-Life and career:Born in a working-class and peasant family, Georges Valois went to Singapore at the age of 17, returning to Paris in 1898. In his early years he was an Anarcho-syndicalist...

 agreed to form a journal titled La Cité française that would promote a form of national-socialism, however this was abandoned. Afterwards, Sorel supported another nationalist newspaper, L'Indépendence and began writing anti-Semitic content claiming that France was under attack from "Jewish invaders". In 1911, on the issue of Sorelian syndicalism, Valois announced to the Fourth Congress of Action Française that "It was not a mere accident that our friends encountered the militants of syndicalism. The nationalist movement and the syndicalist movement, alien to another though they may seem, because of their present positions and orientations, have more than one common objective."

During his association with French nationalism, Sorel joined Valois in the Cercle Proudhon

Cercle Proudhon

The Cercle Proudhon was a political group founded in France on December 16, 1911 by George Valois and Édouard Berth. It was to include such people as French writer Pierre Drieu La Rochelle.-History:...

, an organization that Valois declared to provide "a common platform for nationalists and leftist antidemocrats". The organization recognized both Proudhon and Sorel as two great thinkers who had "prepared the meeting of the two French traditions that had opposed each other throughout the nineteenth century: nationalism and authentic socialism uncorrupted by democracy, represented by syndicalism". Cercle Proudhon announced that it supported the replacement of bourgeois ideology and democratic socialism with a new ethic of an alliance of nationalism with syndicalism, as those "two synthesizing and convergent movements, one at the extreme right and the other at the extreme left, that have begun the siege and assault on democracy". Cercle Proudhon supported the replacement of the liberal order with a new world that was "virile, heroic, pessimistic, and puritanical—based on the sense of duty and sacrifice: a world where the mentality of warriors and monks would prevail". The society would be dominated by a powerful avant-garde proletarian elite that would serve as an aristocracy of producers, and allied with intellectual youth dedicated to action against the decadent bourgeoisie.

Sorelianism and Fascism

Upon Sorel's death, an article in the Italian Fascist

Italian Fascism

Italian Fascism also known as Fascism with a capital "F" refers to the original fascist ideology in Italy. This ideology is associated with the National Fascist Party which under Benito Mussolini ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943, the Republican Fascist Party which ruled the Italian...

 doctrinal review Gerarchia edited by Benito Mussolini

Benito Mussolini

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....

 and Agostino Lanzillo

Agostino Lanzillo

Agostino Lanzillo was an Italian anarcho-syndicalist leader who became a member of Benito Mussolini's Fascist movement.A follower of George Sorel, he joined Benito Mussolini at the paper Il popolo d'Italia...

, a known Sorelian, declared "Perhaps fascism may have the good fortune to fulfill a mission that is the implicit aspiration of the whole oeuvre of the master of syndicalism: to tear away the proletariat from the domination of the Socialist party, to reconstitute it on the basis of spiritual liberty, and to animate it with the breath of creative violence. This would be the true revolution that would mold the forms of the Italy of tommorrow."

Notable adherents

Aside from Sorel himself, there were a number of adherents of Sorelianism in the early 20th century. Sorel was a mentor to Hubert Lagardelle

Hubert Lagardelle

Hubert Lagardelle was a French syndicalist thinker, influenced by Proudhon and Georges Sorel. He gradually moved to the right and served as Minister of Labour in the Vichy regime under Pierre Laval from 1942 to 1943....

 who, like Sorel, supported the segregation of social classes and who despised the bourgeoisie, democracy, democratic socialism, parliamentarism, social democracy, and universal suffrage

Universal suffrage

Universal suffrage consists of the extension of the right to vote to adult citizens as a whole, though it may also mean extending said right to minors and non-citizens...

. Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian writer, politician, political philosopher, and linguist. He was a founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime...

 was influenced by the Sorelian views of social myth. Based on influence from Sorel, Gramsci asserted that Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 and the West

Western world

The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...

 have suffered from crises of culture and authority due to the "wave of materialism" and the inability of liberalism to achieve consensus and hegemony over society. Sorel influenced Greek philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis

Nikos Kazantzakis

Nikos Kazantzakis was a Greek writer and philosopher, celebrated for his novel Zorba the Greek, considered his magnum opus...

 in Kazantzakis' belief of strife as being creative while viewing peace as decadent. José Carlos Mariátegui

José Carlos Mariátegui

José Carlos Mariátegui La Chira was a Peruvian journalist, political philosopher, and activist. A prolific writer before his early death at age 35, he is considered one of the most influential Latin American socialists of the 20th century...

 was a Sorelian who claimed that Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...

 was a Sorelian and Nietzschean hero.

Benito Mussolini

Benito Mussolini

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....

when he was a Marxist held various positions towards Sorelianism at times. Mussolini stated that he became a syndicalist during the 1904 Italian general strike; his close contact with syndicalists dates to 1902. Mussolini reviewed Sorel's Reflections on Violence in 1909 and supported Sorel's view of consciousness as being a part of protracted struggle, where people display uplifting and self-sacrificing virtues akin to the heroes of antiquity. Mussolini also supported the Sorelian view of the necessity of violence in revolution. He followed Sorel in denouncing humanitarianism and compromise between revolutionary socialists and reformists socialists and bourgeois democrats. By 1909, Mussolini supported elitism and anti-parliamentarism, and became a propagandist for the use of "regenerative violence". When Sorelians initially began to come close to identifying themselves with nationalism and monarchism in 1911, Mussolini believed that such association would destroy their credibility as socialists.

Works cited

• Peter Bien. Kazantzakis: politics of the spirit, Volume 2. Princeton, New Jersey, USA: Princeton University Press, 2007.
• Hans Dam Christensen, Øystein Hjort, Niels Marup Jensen. Rethinking art between the wars: new perspectives in art history. Aarhus, Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2001.
• Jean L. Cohen, Andrew Arato. Civil society and political theory. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1994.
• Stephen Gill. Power and resistance in the new world order. New York, New York, USA: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2003.
• Anthony James Gregor, University of California, Berkeley. Young Mussolini and the intellectual origins of fascism. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, USA: University of California Press, 1979.
• John Hellman. The communitarian third way: Alexandre Marc's ordre nouveau, 1930-2000. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002.
• Douglas R. Holmes. Integral Europe: fast-capitalism, multiculturalism, neofascism. Princeton, New Jersey, USA: Princeton University Press, 2000.
• Manus I. Midlarsky. Origins of Political Extremism: Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century and Beyond. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Ofelia Schutte. Cultural identity and social liberation in Latin American thought. Albany, New York, USA: State University of New York Press, 1993.
• John Stanley. Mainlining Marx. New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA: Transaction Publishers, 2002.
• Zeev Sternhell. Neither right nor left: fascist ideology in France. 2nd edition. Princeton, New Jersey, USA: Princeton University Press, 1986.
• Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder, Maia Ashéri. The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution. Princeton, New Jersey, USA: Princeton University Press, 1994.
• Robert Stuart. Marxism and National Identity: Socialism, Nationalism, and National Socialism during the French fin de siècle. Albany, New York, USA: State University of New York Press, 2006.