Polis: Revista de Stiinte Politice (Dec 2020)
Georges Sorel and Critical Anti-Utopianism
Abstract
This essay argues for a reevaluation of the topicality Georges Sorel’s thought in political and historical circumstances wherein the degree to which western political thought has remained caught within the “illusions of progress” is becoming more apparent, and wherein the previously hegemonic effort to exile violence from reflection on the political is meeting its own crisis. In this context, I turn attention to the motives and implications of Sorel’s “critical anti-utopianism”, especially as these are outlined in his “Reflections on Violence”: the juxtaposition of utopia with proletarian “myth” as putative emancipatory instruments; their areas of overlap; the association of myth with practical action and of utopia with abstract cerebration; the indivisibility of myth as opposed to the divisibility of utopian projections; the reformist nature of utopias as opposed to the radical potency of myth; the non-refutable nature of myth and its utility as a means of cultivating militant certainty without giving way to pseudo-scientific determinism; and finally, the non-patronizing character of myth, its “grassroots” nature, as opposed to the largely elitist and charisma-centered nature of utopias. Subsequently, I dwell on two significant areas of overlap between the functions of Sorelian myth and utopia: first, their common orientation to a critique of the present social order, and secondly, their common, if differently accented, orientation toward some version of futurity (teleological in the case of utopias, antiteleological in the case of myth). Finally, I turn my attention to the usefulness of Sorelian myth in interrogating some of the more problematical aspects of Marxist theory, particularly its vitiation by vulgar determinism and by the temptations of passivity, on the one hand, and abstract messianism on the other. I focus on Sorel’s critique of the pseudoscientific pretensions regarding the nature of history, his exposure of the grave dangers that attend the mechanically stageist understanding of the historical process, and the compatibility of Sorelian myth with an “ethics of the real” that does not seek to minimize the role of contingency, risk, and anxiety when it comes to the tasks involved in projects of social change.
