"Reflections on Violence"

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses Georges Sorel's 1908 "Reflections on Violence" and describes the work as a shocking text to read. The paper discusses the concepts that he advocates of society only being able to change from the outside in-- that marginal persons such as anarchists, trade unionists and workers denied political power must act and energize the laboring classes to overthrow their bourgeois oppressors. The paper discusses the impact of his ideas and the ways that he expresses them in his book.

From the Paper:

"The primary reason Sorel uses the radical and mobilizing word of violence in his treatise is because he sees incremental, reformist methods of improving the legal status of the laboring classes, not only as not only minimally effective, but as actually contributing to the authoritarian rule of state that relies upon class inequality to survive. "All the revolutionary disturbances of the nineteenth century ended by strengthening the State," he writes in his introduction. (19) Sorel praises anarchists who taught the workers that they need not be ashamed of acts of violence, and believes violence is not an unfortunate byproduct of oppression but a natural and necessary response on the part of laborers to the inherent inequality of their situation, in a state where factory owners control their destines and lives. (37)"

Sample of Sources Used:

• Sorel, Georges. Reflections on Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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