As his editor John L. Stanley points out, Georges Sorel was "that fascinating polymath." This volume, the third in his selected works in the English language published by Transaction, emphasizes Sorel's extraordinary writings in the philosophy of science, religion, culture, and art. For those who know Sorel only as author of Reflections on Violence, the present volume will come as a forceful reminder of the range and depth of Sorelian efforts to construct a world view. Sorel is throughout concerned with (...) the moral development of human beings. In this sense, his writings on politics are of a piece with his writings on religion, "facticity" of human history and society. Sorel's earliest writings were on religion, and key portions of that period are reflected in selections here. And he went on from there to study the sociology of science, the ways in which science fits into the cultural history of civilization and present day social relationships of industrial society. Stanley provides a profound framework based on two decades of close study and translation of Sorel's texts. He helps to explain how the partial theories of Sorel lead to holistic intellectual consequences, how the psychological method does not foreclose political activism, and how historical limits can be transformed against a background of aesthetics or considerations of taste. He shows that Sorel comes as a close as Manheim and Simmel and Durkheim to the creation of a modern social science--albeit he lacks the overall philosophical theorems of people like Marx and Weber. In Sorel we have a first-class mind at work. And in Stanley, we have a first-class analyst at work. Together, the volume adds up to something special for the political scientist, sociologist, art historian, theologian--in short for those to whom the ideal of a human science endures. John L. Stanley is professor of political science at the University of California at Riverside. He is the author of The Sociology of Virtue: The Political and Social Theories of Georges Sorel. He has written many articles and reviews on the history of European political theory. With his wife, Charlotte Stanley, he has been long engaged in the translation of the works of Georges Sorel. (shrink)

Georges Sorel's reputation as a proponent of violence has helped to link his ideas to fascist and totalitarian thought. Much of the literature on Sorel as developed this theme, at the expense of what Sorel himself stated as his primary purpose, "the discovery of the historical genesis of morals." How, Sorel asked, in the light of the development of modern industry and the vast powers of the modern state the individual can possess a sense of self-worth and at the same (...) time help to sustain a cultural vitality similar to the great societies of antiquity? How is it possible to avoid the utter resignation and nihilistic relativism of modern existence? In his writings Sorel outlined a sociology of virtue that combined the importance of family love as the basis of community feelings with acceptance of the basis of individual vitality as constant industrial struggle against nature. Sorel's solution is different from Marx's: in place of the ida of transcended alienation, Sorel envisions an agonal striving against nature's unceasing resistance to our efforts. The Feuerbachian unity of nature that, for Marx, had been alienated under capitalism, Sorel regarded as being inherently fragmented by scientific procedures themselves, as well as by the industrial processes that correspond to those scientific procedures. For Sorel, the struggle against nature is the struggle that enables man to overcome himself, to strive against his own inclination to passivity, sloth, and licentiousness. The Marxist concept of totality so necessary to the vision of a communist society is rejected, in favor of a pragmatic, pluralist view of nature that parallels the social pluralism of a regime of workers' syndicates. The primary function of Sorel's famous "myth of the general strike" is to link the workers' constant struggles against capitalist employers to the never-ending struggle against nature. The feelings engendered by such a strubble constitute the true core of socialism; without such feelings, socialism is doomed to the same decay that Sorel and Marx foresaw for capitalist civilization. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981. (shrink)

Despite the general acceptance of Hegel's importance for Marx, virtually no one has paid sufficient attention to Marx's youthful critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature. Even Alfred Schmidt, whose work refers to the Naturphilosophie most frequently, underestimates its importance in the formulation of Marx's own materialist philosophy of nature and comes close to replicating the very Hegelian views that Marx is attacking. Yet the critique of the Naturphilosophie in Marx's Dissertation and the 1844 Manuscripts foreshadows Marx's later stated intention in (...) Capital to turn Hegel right-side up. It affirms not only a theory of the ontological reality of the material world, but a dialectics of nature whose importance for Marx extends from the Paris Manuscripts to Capital. Marx' s Naturphilosophie criticizes Hegel's replacement of natural history with a Philosophy of Nature derived from logical categories. It affirms Engels' later view that natural history should be restored by discovering dialectics in nature rather than imposing dialectics on it. (shrink)