<p>How did Georges Sorel's philosophy of violence emerge from the moderate, reformist, and liberal philosophy of the French Third Republic? This dissertation answers the question through a contextual intellectual history of Sorel's writings from the 1880s until 1908. Drawing on a variety of archives and printed sources, this dissertation situates Sorel in terms of the intellectual field of the early Third Republic. I locate the roots of Sorel's problematic at once in a broadly European late 19th century philosophy of science and in the liberal values and the political culture of the French 1870s. Sorel's engagement with Karl Marx, but also Émile Durkheim, Giambattista Vico, and other social theorists, is traced in order to explain why, despite his Marxism, Sorel confronted the twin fin-de-siècle crises of the Dreyfus Affair and Revisionism as a political liberal. I show how his syndicalism became radical, scissionistic, and anti-Statist in the post-Dreyfus context of anticlericalism leading up to the separation of Church and State in 1905. Sorel drew on figures such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Benedetto Croce to elaborate his Reflections on Violence in 1906-1908, finally transforming his political theory of institutions into an ethics of myth and individual engagement. </p><p>Sorel has been best known as an icon of radicalism as such--in shorthand, an inspiration for both Lenin and Mussolini. This political polarization has occluded Sorel's profound engagement with the foundational thinkers of the Third Republic. Against the backdrop of a systematic misunderstanding of the philosophical issues at stake, Sorel's political ideas and interventions have also been misunderstood. Not only his insights about the limits and potentials of the intellectual framework of the French Third Republic, but also their most significant contemporary resonances, have been lost. I show how and why this has been so by studying the reception of Sorel's work in the Anglophone world from the immediate postwar years until the early 1970s. Finally, I investigate resonances between Sorel's work as I have reconstructed it, and some currents in contemporary post-Marxist political thought. </p><p>Sorel is a revelatory figure in the entangled history of late 19th century liberalism and republicanism. He was profoundly engaged in the intellectual life of the French Third Republic and this, as much as his Marxism although less overtly, has shaped the meaning of his work. To return him to this context gives us a new understanding of the stakes of the philosophy of the period and the limits of its liberalism.</p> / Dissertation

La philosophie politique contemporaine est chargée d’une histoire qu’il reste encore à déblayer, tant la « guerre civile européenne » du siècle dernier a forcé son autodafé. Dans ce mémoire, nous prenons Georges Sorel, figure de proue du syndicalisme révolutionnaire des années 1900, comme figure archétypique de ce qui demeure en reste de cette histoire. Archétype non seulement de la manière dont des théoriciens de premier plan peuvent tomber, par la force de l’histoire, dans l’oubli le plus absolu, mais aussi archétype de ces forces mêmes, alors que Sorel est considéré par l’histoire intellectuelle comme le penseur ayant dressé le pont entre l’extrême-gauche et l’extrême-droite. Ce mémoire ne s’affaire pas directement à lui attribuer la « paternité du fascisme » ni à l’en disculper. Il s’agit bien plutôt de procéder à une déconstruction de ses principales idées à partir d’un angle essentiellement philosophique, procédé connaissant peu d’antécédents. Plus précisément, notre travail consiste à en dégager une définition de l’éthique, alors que le geste théorique principal de Sorel apparaît bien être une réduction du politique à l’éthique. Pour ce faire, nous mobilisons la philosophie contemporaine, notamment Gilles Deleuze et Giorgio Agamben, en raison de la forte affinité théorique qu’ils ont avec Sorel, particulièrement dans la définition de l’éthique. / Contemporary political philosophy is fraught with a history still to be discharged, as much as last century’s “European civil war” forced its concealing. In this masters thesis, we seize Georges Sorel, figurehead of the 1900s revolutionary syndicalism, as an archetypical figure of what is “in remaining” of this history. Archetype not only of the way in which popular theorists can be easily forgotten by the force of history, but also archetype of these forces themselves, as Sorel is considered by intellectual history as the thinker having set up the bridge between extreme left and extreme right. This master does not directly intend to attribute to Sorel the “paternity of fascism”, or to exonerate him. It rather develops a deconstruction of its principal ideas from an essentially philosophical standpoint, method virtually unprecedented. More precisely, our work consists to extricate Sorel’s definition of ethics, whereas his major theoretical gesture appears like a reduction of politics to ethics. To do so, we mobilize contemporary philosophy, especially Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, because of their strong theoretical affinities with Sorel, particularly in their definition of ethics.

La philosophie politique contemporaine est chargée d’une histoire qu’il reste encore à déblayer, tant la « guerre civile européenne » du siècle dernier a forcé son autodafé. Dans ce mémoire, nous prenons Georges Sorel, figure de proue du syndicalisme révolutionnaire des années 1900, comme figure archétypique de ce qui demeure en reste de cette histoire. Archétype non seulement de la manière dont des théoriciens de premier plan peuvent tomber, par la force de l’histoire, dans l’oubli le plus absolu, mais aussi archétype de ces forces mêmes, alors que Sorel est considéré par l’histoire intellectuelle comme le penseur ayant dressé le pont entre l’extrême-gauche et l’extrême-droite. Ce mémoire ne s’affaire pas directement à lui attribuer la « paternité du fascisme » ni à l’en disculper. Il s’agit bien plutôt de procéder à une déconstruction de ses principales idées à partir d’un angle essentiellement philosophique, procédé connaissant peu d’antécédents. Plus précisément, notre travail consiste à en dégager une définition de l’éthique, alors que le geste théorique principal de Sorel apparaît bien être une réduction du politique à l’éthique. Pour ce faire, nous mobilisons la philosophie contemporaine, notamment Gilles Deleuze et Giorgio Agamben, en raison de la forte affinité théorique qu’ils ont avec Sorel, particulièrement dans la définition de l’éthique. / Contemporary political philosophy is fraught with a history still to be discharged, as much as last century’s “European civil war” forced its concealing. In this masters thesis, we seize Georges Sorel, figurehead of the 1900s revolutionary syndicalism, as an archetypical figure of what is “in remaining” of this history. Archetype not only of the way in which popular theorists can be easily forgotten by the force of history, but also archetype of these forces themselves, as Sorel is considered by intellectual history as the thinker having set up the bridge between extreme left and extreme right. This master does not directly intend to attribute to Sorel the “paternity of fascism”, or to exonerate him. It rather develops a deconstruction of its principal ideas from an essentially philosophical standpoint, method virtually unprecedented. More precisely, our work consists to extricate Sorel’s definition of ethics, whereas his major theoretical gesture appears like a reduction of politics to ethics. To do so, we mobilize contemporary philosophy, especially Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, because of their strong theoretical affinities with Sorel, particularly in their definition of ethics.

This thesis analyzes the origins and development of conceptions of the relationship between violence and politics characteristic of twentieth century fascist thought. It critiques existing approaches to fascism and fascist ideology in the interdisciplinary field of fascist studies and proposes and employs an alternate approach which centres and emphasizes the flexibility and mutability of fascist thought and denies that any particular complex of beliefs or concepts can be said to constitute an ‘essence’ or ‘heart’ of fascist ideology. Morphological studies are offered of four discursive traditions in fascist and fascist-adjacent thought with respect to violence and politics: German military theory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the ‘new’ French nationalism of the fin-de-siècle; the genre of ‘future warfare’ around and after the First World War; and the work of Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt. The thesis concludes with some consideration of the continuities and discontinuities made apparent in the morphological studies, an argument that those results vindicate the initial framing, and some avenues for extending them into areas of concrete contemporary relevance. / Graduate