Introduction: Georges Sorel’s Study on Vico in French and European Context

Somewhere between late nineteenth century critics of bourgeois modernity, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, and exalted twentieth century militarists, such as Ernst Jünger and Benito Mussolini, is to be found Georges Sorel (1847–1922)— at least according to the usual narratives of the period’s intellectual history. The commonly accepted image of Sorel is that of a theorist of violence, a philosophical irrationalist, and a precursor of fascism.1 Sorel’s work is taken as the paradigmatic representation of that late nineteenth century “crisis of reason” which anticipated and prepared theway for the tragedies of the first half of the twentieth century.2 It is, however, sufficient to scratch but the surface of this widely accepted image to see how it is disproportionately based on the reading of only one of Sorel’s works, the 1908 Reflections on Violence.