Violence in Translation: Georges Sorel, Liberalism, and Totalitarianism from Weimar to Woodstock

This paper traces readings of Georges Sorel (1847-1922) from Carl Schmitt to Saul Bellow. The image of Sorel that came out of Weimar-era sociological debate around Schmitt and Karl Mannheim was simplified and hardened by émigré scholars in the war years, put to good use in the anti-totalitarian combat of the 1950s, and finally shattered when applied to the unfamiliar situation of the 1960s in the United States. Scholars taken with the problem of the political intellectual and the closely related problem of the relationship between instrumental and critical reason play the central role in this reception history. Sorel’s commingling of left and right justified attempts to replace this organization of political space with one around totalitarian and free societies