SOURCE: "Georges Sorel," in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, edited by Henry Hardy, The Hogarth Press, 1979, pp. 296-332.

In the following excerpt, Berlin assesses Sorel's work as incendiary and disorganized, while declaring him one of the century's foremost political thinkers.

Sorel remains an anomalous figure. The other ideologists and prophets of the nineteenth century have been safely docketed and classified. The doctrines, influence, personalities of Mill, Carlyle, Comte, Darwin, Dostoevsky, Wagner, Nietzsche, even Marx, have been safely placed on their respective shelves in the museum of the history of ideas. Sorel remains, as he was in his lifetime, unclassified; claimed and repudiated both by the right and by the left. Was he a bold and brilliant innovator of devastating genius as his handful of disciples declare? Or a mere romantic journalist, as George Lichtheim calls him? A pessimist 'moaning for blood',¹ in G. D...