ONE OF THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL BOOKS OF THE 20TH CENTURY

SOREL, GEORGES.

Réflexions sur la violence.

Paris, 1908.

8vo. Uncut and unopened in the original printed wrappers. Minor wear to extremities. An excellent copy. (2), XLIII, (1), 257, (3) pp.

First edition - uncut, unopened and in original wrappers - of one of the most controversial books of the twentieth century.

"J. B. Priestley argued that if one could grasp why a retired civil servant had written such a book then the modern age could be understood. It heralded the political turmoil of the decades that were to follow its publication and provided inspiration for Marxists and Fascists alike. Developing the ideas of violence, myth and the general strike, Sorel celebrates the heroic action of the proletariat as a means of saving the modern world from decadence and of reinvigorating the capitalist spirit of a timid bourgeoisie." (Jeremy Jennings, Introduction to the 1999 Cambridge-edition).

Sorel's work is written at the cusp of the seismic changes that would transform the twentieth century, putting an end to the ancien Régime in Europe, and to European global hegemony. An unorthodox Marxist, Sorel focused almost obsessively on the question of the agency required to spark revolutionary change, in contrast to Marxist/socialist contemporaries like Jean Jaurès who saw parliamentary politics as the way to leverage the growing power of the workers' unions into political concessions. In choosing of violence as the theme of his work, Sorel wanted to strike a death blow at reform-minded socialism which was, according to him, guilty of extinguishing the revolutionary fervour of the working class. By suffusing Marx's materialism with Bergson's intuitionism, he argued that violence would, in and of itself, create the revolutionary subject (the working class) and the conditions of revolutionary social change. His work departs from Marxism, and points towards twentieth century Fascism (towards which Sorel himself was ambivalent), inasmuch as it strips the idea of political will of the intellectualist trappings that Marxism inherited from German idealism. Instead, Sorel would tie political will to myth as a motivational force, singling out the myth of the nation as the most potent one of all. His synthesis of nationalism, violence, and faceless political agency was instrumental in laying the groundworks for the radical political movements that became the different strains of twentieth century Fascism.

"Sorel's conclusion was unambiguous: the workers must maintain divisions within society, distancing themselves from the corrupting processes of bourgeois democracy and forsaking social peace in favour of class struggle and confrontation: 'everything may be saved if the proletariat, by their use of violence, manage to re-establish the division into classes and so restore to the bourgeoisie something of its energy'. This followed from Sorel's account of Marxism as a version of 'Manchesterianism': violence, 'carried on as a pure and simple manifestation of the sentiment of class struggle', would disabuse philanthropic employers of their paternal concern for their employees, teaching them to devote themselves to securing the progress of production and nothing more. This, in turn, would restore the fatalite ´ of capitalist development, thereby allowing capitalism to attain its' historicalP erfection and to establish the material foundations of a future socialist society. On this account, proletarian violence appears 'a very fine and heroic thing', serving 'the immemorial interests of civilization'. (Jennings).

Order-nr.: 56378