In The Beginning There Was Violence: Epic Emplotment and the Sorelian Myth

Abstract

In his infamous publication, Reflections on Violence, French syndicalist Georges Sorel explores the social ails of his contemporary France at the beginning of the twentieth century. Following the rise of enlightened pacifism and diffusion of class tensions, the socialist revolution promised by Marx appeared to drift ever further from Sorel’s reach. In Reflections, Sorel argues that these challenges may be overcome through the use of the myth to spur the working class into violent action. Despite its centrality to Sorel’s work, the myth itself remains nebulous in its construction and provides a challenge to later scholars’ attempts to understand Sorel. For this reason, the nature of the myth and its capacity to spur the working class into action is examined in this paper against Hayden White’s “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact”. In reading Sorel through the lens of White’s literary emplotment of historical events, this paper offers a new understanding of the Sorelian myth’s method of action as the creation of a future history using culturally-bound literary structures.