A good article about the thought of Georges Sorel.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Georges Sorel was a somewhat important but controversial figure within anarcho-syndicalism, due to his anti-Semitism and later transition towards being sympathetic to proto-fascist movements and figures, but I've always found him to be kind of an interesting historical figure. This article is quite long and I've only read about half of it, but it's been quite interesting so far, so I thought I'd post it.

Here's the abstract:




This article considers the varied impact of the notion of revolutionary consciousness first developed by the French political theorist Georges Sorel (1847–1922) on proponents of anarchism and Marxism, including Walter Benjamin, Bart de Light, Frantz Fanon, Antonio Gramsci and, most recently, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. I question the strategy amongst these thinkers to draw selectively from Sorel’s writings in an attempt to create a cordon sanitaire around those aspects of his thought that are problematic by virtue of their impact on proto-fascist and fascist ideologues throughout Europe. In addressing this issue I examine how Sorel’s anarchist theory of anti-Statism, constructed around the power of myths, led him to endorse anti-capitalist anti-Semitism as an extension of class struggle; and I critique his Janusfaced concept of aestheticized violence as it relates to his quest for moral regeneration through revolution.




Bad Anarchism: Aestheticized Mythmaking and the Legacy of Georges Sorel (http://www.anarchist-developments.org/index.php/adcs/article/view/53/74)

[Die Neue Zeit]

The core of his work, on strike action, is rather unoriginal. He never gave credit to the true original thinker, Bakunin.

[Mr. Natural]

Sorel referred to dialectics in his Reflections on Violence as "the art of reconciling opposites through hocus pocus." Quoted by Bertell Ollman in his Dance of the Dialectic (2003).

This is as amusing as it is wrong.