SOURCE: "Sorel: Philosopher of Syndicalism," in Studies in Revolution, Grosset & Dunlap, 1964, pp. 152-65.

In the following excerpt, Carr identifies the intellectual sources of Sorel's most important writings.

Born at Cherbourg on November 2, 1847, Georges Sorel was, from the early twenties to the age of forty-five, a blameless ingénieur des ponts-etchaussées. Then in 1892 he abandoned his profession to devote himself to his newly found hobby of writing about socialism. He helped to found two reviews and contributed to many more, wrote several books (of which one, Reflections on Violence—the only one of his works to be translated into English—enjoyed a succès de scandale) and became the recognized philosopher of the French trade-union or "syndicalist" movement. He died in August 1922 at Boulogne-sur-Seine, where he had spent the last twentyfive years of his uneventful life.

Sorel wrote—or at any rate published—nothing till he was in...