Georges Sorel
French social philosopher and revolutionary theorist (1847–1922), trained as a civil engineer, he practised that profession for almost twenty-five years before retiring in 1892 to devote himself entirely to philosophical and political study, a heterodox intellectual trajectory that led him to pass successively through positions close to orthodox Marxism, revolutionary syndicalism, a brief flirtation with the monarchist Action Française, and finally an ambiguous sympathy for both Bolshevism and nascent fascism, which has made Sorel one of the most difficult figures to classify ideologically in early twentieth-century European thought. His most influential work, Reflections on Violence (1908), constitutes a frontal attack on the reformist, parliamentary Marxism of the Second International, which Sorel accused of having betrayed the original revolutionary spirit of socialism by turning it into mere administrative management of existing capitalism. In response to this drift, Sorel proposed the central concept of 'social myth': the revolutionary general strike was not to be understood as a literal historical prediction of how revolution would actually come about, but as a mobilising image, non-rational yet psychologically effective, capable of generating in workers the will, heroism and readiness to fight needed to confront established power, regardless of its future factual accuracy. Sorel also defended a 'proletarian violence' sharply distinguished from repressive state 'force', regarding the former as an ethical and regenerative manifestation capable of restoring the moral vitality of a civilisation he perceived as decadent, commercialised and lacking in greatness. This theory of the mobilising myth, applicable in principle to any revolutionary cause regardless of its specific ideological content, exerted a direct and documented influence on both French and Italian revolutionary syndicalism and, more controversially, on the rhetoric and political aesthetics of Mussolini's fascism, making Sorel the object of a persistent historiographical debate over his intellectual responsibility in the genesis of twentieth-century totalitarian ideologies.