Georges Sorel, Benedetto Croce, and the Liberal Subject

Georges Sorel (1847-1922), best known for the defense of violent class struggle and the “irrefutable myth” of the general strike, articulated in his 1908 Reflections on Violence, is often seen as a prophet of radicalism beyond left and right, his voluntarist revision of Marxism paving the way for the fascist or totalitarian moment of the interwar. Carl Schmitt, writing in the years just after Sorel’s death, was perhaps the first to see Sorel as symptomatic of a larger crisis of liberal political culture. That Sorel, eccentric though he perhaps was in French intellectual life, nevertheless worked through many of the key ideas of the period has long been understood. Indeed Benedetto Croce—the international face of liberal opposition to Mussolini—published Sorel’s half of their long correspondence in the late 1920s. 

This paper begins by arguing that the relationship between Sorel and Croce cannot be reduced to simple friendship. We should, rather, take seriously Sorel’s reading of Croce and even Croce’s reading of Sorel. Doing so has significant explanatory power regarding Sorel’s famously checkered trajectory. Croce’s formulation of liberal subjectivity turns out to be important for how Sorel moved from a certain understanding of historiography and its political significance, through his account of institutions and subjectivity, to his formulation of myth. Connecting Sorel to Croce also allows us to move beyond H. Stuart Hughes’ “windy crossroads” image of Sorel’s place in fin-de-siècle European intellectual life. The encounter of the arch anti-liberal Sorel with Croce, perhaps the most famous liberal of the first half of the twentieth century, speaks to the broader condition of “crisis” that liberalism was thought to have fallen into in the years before the First World War.