Sorel: Sovereign Critique

Abstract

This chapter analyzes Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence from 1908. It explains how Sorel presents himself not just as a thinker of violence but as a violent thinker. In his work, Sorel does not produce an apology for violence, for war, or for the proletarian general strike that is undifferentiated within a single revolutionary conatus and destroy the relations of property and expropriation of the historical scene. The chapter mentions Sorel's evangelization of the violent strike that is upheld as the illegitimate means of pursuing just ends or his intention to confront legitimate but unjust regulation. Sorel is a violent thinker not because he adheres to the different kinds of de facto violence that the workers' strike poses against de jure violence but because of the technology through which Reflections of Violence feeds the violence that it aspires to interrupt.