11 Facts About Georges Sorel

Georges Eugene Sorel was a French social thinker, political theorist, historian, and later journalist.

Georges Sorel has inspired theories and movements grouped under the name of Sorelianism.

Georges Sorel moved to working on some of France's first Marxist journals and to participating, on the revisionist side, in the debate launched by Eduard Bernstein.

Ferociously opposed to the 1914 Union sacree political truce, Georges Sorel denounced the war and in 1917 praised the Russian Revolution.

Whereas Georges Sorel's support for Bolshevism is a matter of abundant public record, his much-talked-about interest in the newborn fascist movement is only confirmed by nationalist sources from the interwar period.

Georges Sorel insisted, instead, on the institutional development of the proletariat, on the capacity of unions to become not only sites of resistance to capital, but more importantly spaces in which new, post-capitalist social relations could emerge.

Georges Sorel thus elaborated a change of strategy, linked to the new circumstances.

Experiments for Georges Sorel do not correspond to natural conditions of observation: they are highly constructed observational settings which, nonetheless, allow a contact with nature and thus are suitable for the construction of predictive laws.

That, he could do thanks to the reading of the work of Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, whose epistemology of verum ipsum factum allowed Georges Sorel to develop an alternative account of what a scientific explanation consists in.

Georges Sorel started calling himself a pragmatist and tried to remedy some of the relativistic consequences of James' theory of truth.

Georges Sorel asks himself how man can have such nonsensical ambitions to believe that artificial nature would not suffice to fully occupy his genius.