The French philosopher and political and social thinker Georges Sorel (1847-1922) has been said to have inspired both Communist and Fascist ideologists.

Georges Sorel, born into a bourgeois family in Normandy, became a civil engineer working for the government. At the age of 45 he retired on a small pension and spent the remainder of his life living in the suburbs of Paris studying, reflecting, and writing.

Sorel belonged to the generations of Frenchmen who were greatly affected by the French defeat of 1870 and the civil war of the Paris Commune in the following year. He meditated on the ways whereby society could be held together. His first published work was on the Bible and on the educational value of the biblical story. Then he wrote about Socrates, the arrogant intellectual who by his questioning undermined the certainties of others, and about the decline of the ancient world. During...