Bad Anarchism: Aestheticized Mythmaking and the Legacy of Georges Sorel
This article considers the varied impact of the notion of revolutionary consciousness first developed by the French political theorist Georges Sorel (1847-1922) on proponents of anarchism and Marxism, including Walter Benjamin, Bart de Light, Fantz Fanon, Antonio Gramsci and, most recently, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. I question the strategy amongst these thinkers to draw selectively from Sorel’s writings in an attempt to create a cordon sanitaire around those aspects of his thought that are problematic by virtue of their impact on proto-fascist and fascist ideologues throughout Europe.
Bad Anarchism: Aestheticized Mythmaking and the Legacy of Georges Sorel
Mark Antliff
Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies (ADCS) (2011)
Among those theorists whose ideas served as a catalyst for twentieth- century anarchism, Georges Sorel (1847–1922) (Fig. 1) remains the most controversial, primarily due to his own troubled political 1 George Sorel trajectory and that of his self-proclaimed followers, many of whom were drawn to fascism following Benito Mussolini’s rise of power in 1922, the year of Sorel’s death.1 Despite such associations Sorel’s notion of revolutionary consciousness and the role he ascribed to myth in constituting and fomenting political activism continued to attract theorists among the left in Europe, including the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose conception of an intellectual and moral “bloc” was indebted to Sorel, and the prominent champion of Négritude, Frantz Fanon, whose seminal books Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1962) drew on Sorel’s theory to instill revolutionary consciousness among blacks in Europe and Africa.2 Walter Benjamin in his important essay “On the Critique of Violence” (1921) interpreted Sorel’s concept of the general strike in terms of the abolition not only of the state apparatus through non-violent resistance (the refusal to work) but also the destruction of the legal order maintained by the State to justify its oppressive rule.3 A comparable view was taken up by the anarchist Bart de Light who likewise endorsed Sorel’s theory in the context of his monumental study of “direct non-violent action,” The Conquest of Violence: An essay on War and Revolution (1937).4 More recently the Marxists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have sought to resuscitate Sorel’s concept of myth in the context of their theory of hegemony, and the constitutive role of antagonistic struggle as a catalyst to a theory of revolution no longer premised on the outmoded Marxist concept of historical necessity.5 By breaking with orthodox Marxism, which posited class conflict and revolution as the pre-determined outcome of economic inequality, Laclau and Mouffe follow Sorel’s example in seeking to establish class identity and class antagonism by other means. In endorsing Sorel’s theory of myth as an “anti-essentialist,” anti-determinist tool for political activism Laclau and Mouffe argue that the later appropriation of Sorel’s thought by advocates of fascism was “merely one of the possible derivatives from Sorel’s analysis” and by no means a “necessary outcome” of his ideas. Thus the endorsement of mythmaking by Sorel’s fascist followers, and their celebration of war as a mythic catalyst for ethical renewal and proletarian heroism was not “necessarily determined by the very structure of Sorel’s thought” which reportedly remained “indeterminate.”
