SOURCE: "Georges Sorel: Myth and Anarchy," in Politics and Opinion in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 1954, pp. 398-413.

In the following excerpt, Bowie attempts to discredit Sorels by tracing an unflattering connection between Sorel's absorption of the theories of Marx and Nietzsche with the rise of Fascism.

When Pope Leo XIII restated Catholic political principles and Acton developed the idea of commonwealth as the expression of conscience, both were adapting traditional ideas to a new mass society. By the closing decades of the nineteenth century great urban industry and world-wide expansion had altered the scale of Western civilization and brought the mass of the people to the threshold of political and economic power. Only political ideas which took account of these facts remained relevant. Revolutionary theories, insignificant hitherto, now achieved greater influence. Ruling circles had either to come to terms with them or promote counter-revolution on a...