PAOLO  FERRARIO

Sorel e il mito della violenza (Per una rilettura delle Réflexions)

N. 1/1986

Summary — The Réflexions sur la violence, the well-know work by Sorel, stirred up since their publication a remarkable discordance of judgments. Gramsci spoke of it as a most interesting and significative work; Lenin and Lukàcs regarded it as a muddled and deviating example of lower middle-class rebelliousness. Such difference of opinions bears evidence of difficulty still not quite worked out: that of correctly identifying the objectives of this work and of fitting it organically in the Sorelian production. After having identified these exigencies, the essay intends to prove how the Réflexions actually constitute the complition of the Sorelian study of Marxian thought and, besides, how, by linking up Marxian elements with others typical of the vitalistic philosophies fin de siècle, they end in irrational positions absolutely devoid of the possibility of historical materialization. Thus, there emerges the centrality of the concept of class struggle - in a particular voluntaristic meaning — in the Sorelian vision of Marxisrn and it is noted how any other conceptual element of the work draws its motives from the individualization of classism as peculiar element to Marxism. It appears also how the prevailing of irrational, mythical elements, condemns the Sorelian reflexion to a mere conceptual abstraction, despite the attempt to identify in the revolutionary syndicalism a positive historical subject to which entrust the realisation of the revolutionary prospectives