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Georges Sorel and the Rise of Political Myth
Volume II of The Nihilist Order

David Ohana
David Ohana teaches Modern European history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He was a visiting fellow at the Centre for European Studies at Harvard University and the first academic director of the Forum for Mediterranean Cultures at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. His books include: A Humanist in the Sun: Camus and the Mediterranean Inspiration (2000), The Promethean Passion (2000), and The Anger of the Intellectuals (2003).

In the turbulent period between 1870 and 1930, the contours on modernity were taking shape, especially the connections between technology, politics and aesthetics. The trilogy The Nihilist Order traces the genealogy of the nihilist-totalitarian syndrome.

Georges Sorel (1847–1922) was the first political philosopher to develop a systematic theory of political myth, one that had profound impact on radical leaders and totalitarian movements of the twentieth century. While he was a highly respected early political sociologist, his writings transcended disciplinary boundaries in their creation of a modern political mythology. Believing that ideology was too abstract, general and ineffective to be instrumental in the political mobilization of the masses, he formulated the myth of the general strike. According to his theory of social psychology, people are socialized not by means of ideology, but through a common experience of action. This idea was adopted to great effect in the following years by revolutionary syndicalism, fascism and bolshevism.

Sorel’s problem was one that is well understood by the social thinkers of today: that of revitalizing a political arena and a social structure which he felt to be dominated by an inauthentic, degenerate search for a tranquil bourgeois existence. The myth of violence, he believed, would reinvigorate the militancy of both socialism and nationalism and spur these on to a new and dynamic course of action. Sorelian myth should be understood in a new way, not as a means to some ideological purpose, but to a mobilization of heroic action, seen as an end in itself.

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