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Sorel, Georges (1847–1922)
An oft-maligned figure in French political thought, George Sorel would find himself dismissed as a “notorious muddle-head” by Vladimir Lenin and a “fascist” by Jean-Paul Sartre. Nevertheless, his theories of class warfare and the creative effects of violence have come to have a lasting, if subtle, impact on later thinkers.
Origins
Born in Normandy, trained in Paris, and dispatched to the provinces, Sorel was not a traditional philosopher by any means. While well-educated in a technical sense—Sorel was trained as a civil engineer—as a philosopher he was for the most part an autodidact and actively sought to erase all traces of his prior education. Sorel's early conservatism would mark his later development of a nonorthodox, Proudhonian Marxism, and this was especially true of his anti-Jacobinism. From Sorel's ...
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