SOURCE: "Some Reflections on Sorel and Machiavelli," in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. LXXXIII, No. 1, March, 1968, pp. 76-91.

In the following excerpt originally written in 1965, Wood expands on James Burnham's (excerpted above) thesis that Sorel was a Maciavellian thinker.

The comparison of Georges Sorel and Niccolò Machiavelli is not without precedent. Some twenty years ago James Burnham maintained that Sorel (along with Mosca, Michels, and Pareto) shared in a tradition of thinking called Machiavellism.¹ The principal tenets of the tradition consist of a faith in an empirical science of politics, and a conception of politics as a struggle for power involving force and fraud, in which the role of a ruling elite and non-rational action arising from an ideology are central. Burnham's approach tends to distort rather than illuminate the ideas of Sorel and Machiavelli, although I have no intention of taking issue directly with his position. Instead I...