Georges Sorel, the French pragmatist philosopher and social theorist, was born in Cherbourg and was trained at the École Polytechnique. He served as an engineer with the French roads and bridges department for twenty-five years in Corsica, the Alps, Algeria, and Perpignan before retiring at the age of forty-five to devote himself to scholarship. In the following thirty years he produced a series of highly curious books on the philosophy of science, the history of ideas, social theory, and Marxism, of which one, Réflexions sur la violence (1908; Reflections on Violence), immediately became world famous. Before and after his retirement Sorel's life was quite uneventful, for despite his hatred of the bourgeois, his conduct was a model of provincial respectability. Nevertheless, he never married his lifelong companion, Marie David, to whom he dedicated his work after her death in 1897. Sorel's Roman ideas on the...