Contenu du sommaire : Sorel méconnu

Thinking through conflicts
This article draws on recently uncovered archives documenting the years when Sorel worked as an engineer, namely as head of the Hydraulic Service for the East-Pyrenees (1880-1892). Occupying that position enabled him to witness conflicts between the domains of administration and justice, which led him to articulate a series of crucial law-oriented questions: how does law relate to other forms of social regulation, what were the types of sources one could draw from, and what were the political implications of resorting to private law? Criticizing French hydraulics policy allowed him to analyze the new forms of state intervention – administrative and regulatory. He denounced ideologies which supported that type of policing – scientism and the “fraternity” born of the idealism of 1848. According to him, the mission of private law was to work against “arbitrary administrative action”, an idea he defended using an economics-based outlook. Sorel was a primary stakeholder in some of the major economic and political conflicts of his time. It is only after considering his life experience that one can really appreciate his written work.

Georges Sorel, critical observer of the French railway system
Freed from his professional duty to maintain confidentiality from 1892 onwards, Sorel gave us, through various reading reports and personal notes, his more or less elaborate analysis of and critical point of view on the institutional side of the French railway system. Instead of picking a side in the major political debate of his time regarding the state purchase of railway lines, he raged against the customary transgressions of the law by an almighty bureaucratic administration; he hoped that the intervention of a new player in the system, in the form of the “expert”, would guaranty a more democratic way of functioning within institutions.

Will, effort and worth
At the end of the 19th century, psychophysiology served to apply the laws of energy to the study of the body. It stated that effort – by orienting energy towards a given goal – determined the efficiency of human work. Volition therefore appeared as an economic variable through which to manage activity, according to the ratio between the worth of a goal and the effort required to achieve it. At the same period, Sorel, a fervent reader of the scientific literature of his time, spoke of the worth producing potential of effort as evidence of the proletariat's revolutionary destiny. By identifying the references to psychophysiology in Sorel's work, this article aims at showing that the central value that he gives to the concept of effort in his philosophy of work does not equate to his reducing economics to a moral voluntarism, but rather that it speaks of his pragmatic conception of action.

Introduction of Sorel's pragmatism
The article tries to shed light on Sorel's engagement with pragmatism. I begin by highlighting the profound conceptual affinity between Sorel's early epistemology and the pragmatist theory of truth, in order to then examine the evolution of Sorel's opinion on pragmatism during the crucial years between 1906 and 1914, in which a widespread interest in pragmatism, going beyond the usual academic circles, gripped the French intellectual world. I underline the importance of Sorel's Italian sources in order to explain his initial dislike for the American philosophy. I end by underlining the philosophical fertility of his engagement with pragmatism through an examination of the historicist development of pragmatist epistemology that Sorel articulates in his 1921 De l'utilité du pragmatisme.

Of the demonstrative value of the word “science” in Sorel's work
The word “science” is used very often in Georges Sorel's work. He was trained in hard sciences and kept a peculiar relationship with them throughout his life. Our hypothesis is that this relentless referencing to “science” served a demonstrative purpose in Sorel's political philosophy. He gave a negative account of “science” by qualifying it with various adjectives: “serious”, “practical”, “bourgeois”. His goal was to discredit the moderate socialist philosophers he opposed. He tried to trace the history of a worn-out science movement through the ages, and reread the history of sciences in the light of the contemporary demonstration he intended to make – a thread he wove throughout his entire work.

Institutions and aesthetics
This paper argues that artistic production bears much more weight in Georges Sorel's social thought, as the category of the aesthetic does in his philosophy, than has previously been understood. Giambattista Vico is the central figure on whom Sorel draws to bring aesthetics into analysis of social reality. The interest in Vico that Sorel shared with Benedetto Croce allows us to see that the decisive referential frame for the famous presentation of myth in Reflections on violence is Croce's aesthetics of expression. Myth, as it appears in Reflections, transposes Croce's aesthetic definition of spirit onto the institution. In adopting Croce's aesthetic as a way of understanding creative activity as such, Sorel cut his own social theory from its materialist basis, making it all the easier to draft myth into the service of national renewal.

Sorel as untimely thinker
The aim of this paper is to present Sorel as untimely thinker who explored philosophical territories rediscovered by the current radical theories. Pluralist ontology of Simondon and Deleuze, derived from writings of Bergson and James (who influenced Sorel and Deleuze alike), serves as a context for the analysis of Sorelian philosophy of science and two key concepts of his political thought: diremption and cité. Mouffe and Laclau's antagonistic outlook on politics inspired by Gramsci provides the background for re-reading of Sorel's concept of violence. Badiouan universalism is invoked in reference to Sorelian myth, and finally the analysis of Sorel's concept of general strike is informed by the idea of suspension or stoppage found in the writings of Benjamin and Agamben.

Georges Sorel and the history of religions
This hitherto unpublished correspondence with religious historian Salomon Reinach testifies to Sorel's erudite interest for religious history. In his presentation, Hervé Duchêne shows how, despite the formal politeness of this seemingly neutral scientific correspondence, the authors had two radically different approaches to the history of religions.

Orpheus and the critic of religions (1910)This text, with an introduction by Hervé Duchêne, is a transcript of the original manuscript of an article published in Italian in Giornale d'Italia, in December 1910. Commenting on the weakness of the arguments of catholic critics against Orpheus: A general history of religions, Sorel gave his own analysis of the importance and the significance of S. Reinach's work.

Georges Sorel today
We have asked several philosophers, political scientists and historians of political thought to tell us how they would qualify Sorel's work and how they related to him in their own work. In doing so, we are launching an inquiry that will run for several issues. First of all, Alain Benoist agreed to answer our questionnaire.