SOURCE: A review of "Reflections on Violence", by Georges Sorel, in The American Political Science Review, Vol. X, No. 1, February, 1916, pp. 193-95.

In the following excerpted review of Sorel's Reflections on Violence, Lovejoy identifies key differentiators between Sorel's socialist concepts and traditional socialist theories.

Whatever the future of revolutionary syndicalism in Europe, the movement will at least continue to have interest for the historian as a type of social agitation, based upon novel and distinctive theories, which had attained somewhat formidable proportions at the moment when "le régime bourgeois" eventuated in an outbreak of "violence" more atrocious and more widespread than any of which the syndicalist had dreamed. An English version of [Reflections on Violence] the principal book of the chief philosopher of the movement is therefore to be welcomed. The translation, it may be said at once, is clear and idiomatic, and for the most part...