SOURCE: "Myth and Symbol in Georges Sorel," in Political Symbolism in Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of George L Mosse, edited by Seymour Drescher, David Sabean, and Allan Sharlin, Transaction Books, 1982, pp. 100-17.

In the following excerpt, Gross traces the treatment of myth and symbolic images in Sorel's body of work.

Every student of modern political symbolism must sooner or later confront the work of Georges Sorel (1847-1922). As one of the more engaging minds of his generation, Sorel made a number of original and important observations about the nature of symbolic images and their relationship to political action. These observations are not always easy to uncover, since they are scattered throughout an enormous range of work, some of it dealing with topics as seemingly remote from the subject as the history of Christianity, modern economics, the methodology of the sciences, or the trial of Socrates.¹ Often Sorel's...