Sorel the moralist

Thomas Ernest Hulme's preface to his translation of the Reflections provides an extremely clear case of resignifying agency. The text opens with an attempt to drive a wedge between the workers’ movement and the “system of ideas” which it adopts, and which Hulme hesitantly calls democracy—adding, however, that “liberal might have been a better word, were it not that Socialists, while proclaiming their difference from liberalism in policy, at the same time adopt the whole liberal ideology.”Footnote ¹² The peculiarity of Sorel, for Hulme, consists in his attempt to detach the two, unmasking democratic ideology for what it is: “an organic body of middle-class thought dating from the eighteenth century” which has “no necessary connection whatever with the working-class or revolutionary movement.”Footnote ¹³ The overlap between Hulme's preface and Sorel's ideas is, up to this point, conspicuous: the attack on liberal democracy and on the acceptance, on behalf of the workers’ movement, not only of its parliamentary methods but, more radically, of its ideology and culture is a central theme of Sorel's syndicalist writings. The historical genesis of bourgeois ideology sketched by Hulme, moreover, closely follows Sorel's own, articulated in the Reflections and, more elaborately, in the Illusions of Progress, which Hulme mentions in the preface.

Hulme's key move consists, however, in reframing these Sorelian ideas away from the Marxian assumptions in which they were originally developed and into a much less immediately political but still strongly ideologically charged narrative centred on the overcoming of nineteenth-century bourgeois civilization and of its core beliefs. In simpler words, whereas for Sorel the struggle to overcome bourgeois democratic ideology has as its ultimate goal the development of the proletariat as an autonomous historical subject, for Hulme the struggle against this ideology becomes the crux of the matter. A good starting point to examine this subtle but decisive shift consists in noticing the replacement of the language of proletarian autonomy with vaguer expressions concerning the “regeneration” or “transformation” of society. In what direction, however, must society be transformed, and on what terms must it be regenerated? To answer these questions, Hulme employs a dichotomy borrowed from Pierre Lasserre—an important Action française intellectual—distinguishing between a modern, democratic, “romantic” spirit and an older “classical” one. Hulme explains the difference between the two in terms of opposing views on human nature: whereas romantics have an open conception centred on the perfectibility of humankind, adherents to the “classical” spirit endorse a fixed, pessimistic anthropology based on the conviction that “man is by nature bad or limited.”Footnote ¹⁴

Now, what follows from embracing the fixed anthropology of the classical spirit is both a need for and the possibility of absolutes, dependent on the belief that man “can only accomplish anything of value by disciplines, ethical, heroic, or political.”Footnote ¹⁵ From the eternal limitations of human nature, in other words, “comes naturally the view that the transformation of society is an heroic task requiring heroic qualities.”Footnote ¹⁶ What must be underlined is not simply the focus on an ethics of intensity and commitment, but the fact that this ethics becomes a self-standing goal, and is divorced from the role which Sorel assigns to it in the Reflections, namely to “confine employers to their role as producers” and to “restore the class structure” envisaged by Marx.Footnote ¹⁷ This amounts not just to a removal of Sorel's syndicalist perspective but, more radically, to the transformation of a reasoning based on the fundamental openness of the historical process into one grounded in a fixed view of the human subject. The central concern of Hulme's Sorel is not the proletariat but the rebirth of a certain “classical” manner of approaching moral questions: proletarian agency becomes a mere vehicle for moral regeneration. According to Hulme, Sorel

The reasoning on class development in times of social peace and economic concentration, foundational to the argument of the Reflections, is left unaddressed, and the insistence on proletarian agency reduced to a mere illustration of a wider and, for Hulme, more decisive line of reasoning concerned with moral decadence.

This reading of Sorel proved influential. In 1917 T. S. Eliot reviewed Hulme's translation of the Reflections for The Monist, not only fully embracing the latter's interpretive line, but even radicalizing it.Footnote ¹⁹ As in Hulme's preface, the work is divided into two separate parts: on the one hand, “Sorel's own political propaganda” and on the other hand “his philosophy of history formed under the influence of Renan and Bergson.” Readers, argues Eliot, “will be disposed to consider the book under its first aspect only,” but this would be a mistake, given that the political dimension is excessively embedded in the French context, and this does not “make the work of importance to the English or American public.”Footnote ²⁰ It is the latter aspect, the “philosophy of history,” Eliot suggests, which is not only more universal, but also more central to the book itself. What is really relevant, in simpler words, is Sorel's disgust with contemporary bourgeois civilization:

As in Hulme's reading, proletarian agency is reduced to being “merely the instrument” through which something larger and more decisive is to be accomplished. Once again, we witness a process of resignification: anti-bourgeois rhetoric developed within a Marxian perspective is removed from its original context of production and given a new significance. As in Hulme's reading, the book becomes not so much about possible avenues to socialism but, instead, a work that “expresses that violent and bitter reaction against romanticism which is one of the most interesting phenomena of our time.”Footnote ²²

But what does this reaction against romanticism consist in? Is it merely the destruction of liberal institutions and culture, as could be evinced by the previous passage, that is at stake, or is there more? Following the reference to Renan, Eliot suggests a decisive difference between the intellectuals of Renan's generation and those of today, like Sorel: “with Renan and Sainte-Beuve scepticism was still a satisfying point of view, almost an esthetic [sic] pose … But the scepticism of the present, the scepticism of Sorel, is a torturing vacuity which has developed the craving for belief.”Footnote ²³ This passage is fundamental, because it shows clearly what, for Eliot, is the principal problem with contemporary liberal society: not positivism but relativism, the inability to offer solid points of moral and spiritual reference to individuals. Sorel's longing for the “classical view” is, therefore, a “healthy” one for the poet.Footnote ²⁴ Eliot's account goes further than Hulme's in the more explicit appropriation of the concerns that he believes animate Sorel's writings. Overlooking the four decades that separate Sorel from both himself and Hulme, Eliot writes of the Frenchman as a “representative of the present generation, sick with its own knowledge of history.”Footnote ²⁵ This, we believe, is indicative of a wider dynamic concerning the reception of Sorel, namely a process of transgenerational appropriation of some Sorelian tropes in order to articulate the concerns of a younger generation, born between the 1870s and the 1880s.

Another example of this generational appropriation of Sorelian motives is given to us by Wyndham Lewis, who in 1926 would describe Sorel as “the key to all contemporary political thought.”Footnote ²⁶ Echoes of Hulme's Sorel, and of the concern for moral regeneration, appear in Lewis's writing, such as when he proclaims that Sorel, together with Bakunin, Proudhon, and others, are to be appreciated for “their moral teaching” and for the “moral force which makes them interesting.”Footnote ²⁷ Moreover, Hulme's “Translator's Preface” is quoted directly by Lewis.Footnote ²⁸ And yet Lewis's account of Sorel is substantially different from Hulme's and Eliot's, as the ethical dimension is ultimately only one element amongst many. Emphasis is placed much more on Sorel's contradictions, aporias, and confusions, traits which bring Lewis to find some—possibly autobiographical—delight in examining this “fabulous hybrid.”Footnote ²⁹

It is no surprise that there is a tonal proximity between Lewis's and Hulme's portraits of Sorel, given that these writers worked closely in the same networks: both spent time in Paris, were familiar with French literature of the time, and became involved with the New Age circle, in which they met around 1914.Footnote ³⁰ Equally, the differences between the two accounts should not be surprising, considering the historical weight of the ten years separating 1915 from 1925. A striking difference is in evaluation. Whereas both Hulme and Eliot see Sorel as an “emancipator,” as the anticipator of a regeneration to come, Lewis writes about the Frenchman much more detachedly, outlining his merits and his faults.Footnote ³¹ For example, Sorel's insistence on violence, seen after “the blood-bath of the Great War,” appears as a form of “vanity” to Lewis.Footnote ³² “All the emotional and ‘heroic’ section of Sorel” is equally suspicious, being judged “romantic” and “untrue.”Footnote ³³ Conversely, as Hulme had, Lewis makes much of Sorel's “very interesting” analysis of bourgeois ideology from the Illusions of Progress, which he uses to sketch a history of the “Phantom man of the democratic Enlightenment.”Footnote ³⁴ Lewis's reading of Sorel, in simpler words, reflects a quite different set of problems typical of the interwar period: the rise of totalitarian regimes, both finding their origins in Sorel's multiple insights, and a critique of liberal civilisation, different from the one developed by Sorel and Hulme because formulated in a context in which parliamentary democracy was confronted with concrete fascist and Bolshevist alternatives.

As should be clear, the purpose of this article is not to pass judgement on the accuracy, even less the legitimacy, of given historical figures’ readings of Sorel's work. It is, instead, to trace shifts in meaning. Confronting Eliot's and Hulme's interpretations with Sorel's own writings, in other words, yields both substantial overlaps—a language of decadence, anti-parliamentarism, and, above all, the antibourgeois stance—and important discrepancies. To trace processes of resignification, it is on the latter which one must concentrate. Two elements emerge. The first one concerns a political resignification: Sorel's syndicalist perspective is marginalized, and replaced with a more politically vague critique of relativistic liberal morality gesturing towards a politics of order. The resignification of the language of decadence—employed by Sorel, Hulme, and Eliot—is worth underlining. For Sorel, bourgeois decadence is to be understood as the failure of the European bourgeoisie to live up to its Marxian role of productive expansion and technological innovation. For the proletariat to step onto the stage of history, in other words, what is required is a “bourgeoisie which was energetically engaged on the paths of economic progress, which regarded timidity with shame and which was proud of looking after its class interests.”Footnote ³⁵ For both Hulme and Eliot, instead, decadence is above all ethical. Consequently, both reduce syndicalism to a mere illustration of a dynamic centred around the possibility of moral regeneration, despite Sorel's insistence that that the uptake of his book be that “discussions [on socialism] must deal with the conditions which allow the development of specifically proletarian forces [puissances spécifiquement prolétariennes].”Footnote ³⁶

The second resignification occurs at a philosophical level. What is at stake in the moral crisis evoked by the two anglophone writers? What form does this crisis take? For both Hulme and Eliot, it is essentially a question of overcoming the limits of relativism. Eliot laments the “scepticism of the present” precisely because it is unable to offer points of reference capable of orienting action, generating that “craving for belief” which for the American is the dominant drive of his generation. Hulme is even more explicit that this is what is at stake: “regeneration can … only be brought and only be maintained by actions springing from an ethic which from the narrow rationalist standpoint is irrational, being not relative, but absolute.”Footnote ³⁷ On this point, too, the distance from Sorel is substantial. The ethic of commitment articulated in the Reflections leaves little space for the presence of real moral absolutes. The language employed is Bergsonian, or at any rate that of historical subjectivity and never that of fixed metaphysical truth.Footnote ³⁸

Sorel and syndicalism in Britain, 1906–1914

A possible explanation for this recasting of Sorel as a thinker of moral regeneration would appeal to a difference in national contexts. Whereas Sorel's association with syndicalism was well known in France, this may not have been the case in Britain. There would consequently be a space if not to completely reinvent the French theorist ex nihilo, then at least to develop an alternative reading. Despite its apparent plausibility, this argument must be rejected. As we shall show in this section, and partially in the following one, the opposite is true: whereas in France a multiplicity of interpretations of Sorel were available, in England he was consistently and almost exclusively read as a syndicalist. Hulme's reading thus constituted a radical break with virtually the entirety of Sorel's British reception up to that point. The identification of Sorel with syndicalism was so persistent that his fortunes in England follow closely those of that political movement: seen as a French oddity and scarcely discussed between 1906 and 1910, Sorel's writings subsequently found a new relevance, reflecting an increase in social conflict and the concern that French syndicalists might have found British imitators.

We have seen how, in his review of the Reflections, Eliot warned his readers not to focus on Sorel's “political propaganda,” this remark hinting at his awareness of a pre-existing pattern of reception. A stronger indication in this direction comes from an earlier version of Hulme's preface, published in October 1915 in the New Age, where he laments the presence of a misunderstanding of Sorel in Britain, meaning that “the sympathetic accounts have been as wide of the mark and as exasperating to the disciples of Sorel as the others.”Footnote ³⁹ He proceeded to explicitly declare that his intention was that of removing this misunderstanding. But to what is he referring?

If we exclude a brief notice of one of his publications in America, the introduction of Sorel to the British public occurred in spring 1906.Footnote ⁴⁰ Its immediate context was the unrest following the mining catastrophe at Courrières, an event which caused over a thousand deaths and engendered a wave of strikes which, in the words of an unnamed Times correspondent, tended “to assume a dangerous, if not indeed a revolutionary, character.”Footnote ⁴¹ Commenting on the significance of the “labour crises” occurring on the other side of the channel, it was the liberal weekly The Speaker which, in April, first introduced Sorel as “one of the ablest of the younger Socialist writers in Europe.”Footnote ⁴² The text pointed to the Reflections on Violence—at the time an article “in a recent number of Le Mouvement Socialiste”—in order to read “what can be said for the new gospel.”Footnote ⁴³ If the framing of Sorel as a thinker of syndicalism is evident, it is remarkable how presciently the British press had understood that the labor unrests in France signaled the emergence of a “new school” of French socialism, i.e. syndicalism.Footnote ⁴⁴

The fundamental questions animating the British discussion of these “labour crises” were comparative ones. What is the significance for England of these French events? Do they provide useful indications for the evolution of British socialism? Overwhelmingly, syndicalism was seen as irrelevant for Britain, largely in virtue of the antipodal political situation of the two countries at the time. While in France, in 1906, the first serious cracks had begun to appear in the Bloc des gauches—the republican–socialist alliance in power since 1902—Britain had seen the landslide victory of a Liberal Party favorable to social reform. The Labour Representation Committee, moreover, had won twenty-nine parliamentary seats.Footnote ⁴⁵ The situation, described by a commentator as the “see-saw of French and English socialism,” was the following.Footnote ⁴⁶ While on one side of the Channel British socialists hopefully embarked on their first substantial parliamentary experience, on the other side a part of French socialism—which had had not only parliamentary, but also governmental, experience—was moving in the opposite direction, opening up anew a space for socialist politics not merely outside of the Bloc, but beyond parliamentarism tout court.Footnote ⁴⁷

In this context, discussions of syndicalism—and, by extension, of Sorel—were, to start with, limited and, second, embedded in specific frameworks which appealed to precise, specialist publics. One of these frameworks was, naturally, coverage of French political developments. Some saw syndicalism as safely readable through the lenses of British experience, insisting that it should be seen as a repeat of “past episodes of English social history.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The Speaker, on the other hand, was more perceptive of the novelty and specificities of French syndicalism, emphasizing, for example, its anti-parliamentarism, observable in the use of the general strike “not for the instalment of constitutional democracy … but as a sort of substitute for it.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Overall, the dominant element was, across the political spectrum, that of distance, with French developments seen as ultimately of small relevance to British politics. In the liberal press, this distance at times emerged in the view of syndicalist violence as expressive of the turbulent character of Latin peoples.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the socialist press, naturally more sympathetic to the syndicalist cause, we see the same distance. In presenting a review of Sorel's Décomposition du marxisme in 1908, the New Age characterized the work as a “statement of the political theory which lies at the root of revolutionary trade-unionism … opportune at the moment when it is the foremost question in France.”Footnote ⁵¹

Another important framework of reception was the specialist literature dedicated to the evolution of socialism across the Continent and in the world. Books like the English translation of Werner Sombart's Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung and Jane Stoddard's The New Socialism, both appearing in 1909 and both overviews of the various aspects of global socialism, came with chapters dedicated to syndicalism in which Sorel was extensively discussed.Footnote ⁵² It is worth noticing that even though both authors tackled the issues that Hulme would later put at the centre of his interpretation, neither saw them as fundamental aspects of Sorelian thinking, but instead as embedded in a syndicalist project. Thus Stoddard wrote that Sorel “loves to write of the decadence of the well-to-do classes,” but this is because he “seeks … to stir up the spirit of class warfare.”Footnote ⁵³ Sombart, while dismissing Sorel's insistence on “psychological and ethical conditions” as “utopian,” nevertheless refused to present this moral concern as an autonomous, foundational aspect of Sorel's work, detached from the political objective.Footnote ⁵⁴ Both authors opted instead for a view of Sorel as a neo-Marxist, with Sombart labeling him “the Marx of the new doctrines” and Stoddard talking about “the new Marxian revival under Sorel.”Footnote ⁵⁵

We see a pattern emerging: Sorel is read as a renovator of Marxian thought and as the thinker of a French political movement whose relevance for British politics is scarce. Between 1906 and 1910, with the political situation staying roughly the one sketched above, the reception of Sorel thus remained modest and marginal, relegated to specific publics, precisely because embedded in the syndicalist framework. But while the syndicalist reading remained dominant in the following years, what changed after 1910 was the perception of its relevance for Britain, as the country entered the “Great Unrest,” a cycle of mobilizations and strikes recently described as “the biggest since the Chartist movement.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In a context of near full employment and stagnating wages, trade union membership soared from 2.5 million in 1909 to 4.1 in 1914, resulting in a situation of diffused social conflict and “proletarian effervescence” whose high points were arguably the 1911 Liverpool transport strike and the 1912 national coal miners’ strike.Footnote ⁵⁷ Beyond the rise of social conflict, what is relevant to us is the appearance in Britain of what Henry Pelling called “a new philosophy of industrial action,” i.e. the appearance of what can reasonably be called British syndicalism.Footnote ⁵⁸ Publications like Tom Mann's The Industrial Syndicalist attacked parliamentarism, claiming that socialists in Westminster had developed “a degree of studied respect for bourgeois conditions, and a toleration of bourgeois methods, that destroys the probability of their doing any real work of a revolutionary character.”Footnote ⁵⁹ A much-discussed contemporary pamphlet openly embraced class struggle, demanding that “the old policy of identity of interest between employers and ourselves be abolished, and a policy of open hostility installed.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Though there are historiographical disagreements concerning both the scale and the revolutionary nature of the movement, this question is, for our purposes, moot, as an equivalence between the British and the French movements was seen as a matter of fact by the vast majority of the British public.Footnote ⁶¹

This can be appreciated by examining the first substantial change in reception, which is a quantitative increase in references to and discussions of the French thinker (see Fig. 1). Sorel was now seen as the ideologue of a movement which had crossed the Channel: “the movement,” wrote the Fortnightly Review in 1912, “is mainly French in origin, but has spread throughout the Continent … and has been, for at least two years, actively propagated in England.”Footnote ⁶² To the increase in coverage corresponded a widening of the audiences to whom discussions of Sorel were offered, reflecting the newfound relevance of the subject. Thus we find Sorel appearing, always as the philosopher of syndicalism, in magazines such as The Spectator, the Contemporary Review, and the Fortnightly Review. We find him mentioned in parliamentary debates and discussed at a meeting of the Sociological Society by Graham Wallas, future prime minister Ramsay McDonald, and former prime minister Arthur Balfour.Footnote ⁶³ Finally, we find him in a new type of specialist literature, dedicated not to socialism in general, but to syndicalism specifically, in which he figures as a “learned commentator on Syndicalist developments”; as one of the “great theorists of Syndicalism” alongside “Berth and Lagardelle”; and, not without some irony, as “the most considerable ‘intellectual’ on the Syndicalist side,” according to the Webbs.Footnote ⁶⁴

Figure 1. Mentions of Sorel in British and American publications, 1902–22.

Did this sudden relevance amplify the angles of reception? Only partially. Increased coverage did imply a more extensive treatment of various aspects of Sorelian thought, and thus the incorporation of new perspectives, as exemplified by the moniker “philosopher–poet” used by the chairman of the Labour Party to describe him in 1912.Footnote ⁶⁵ Taken philosophically, Sorel was seen as firmly in the Bergsonian camp, so it is easy to find instances of “Bergsonian general strikes” and references to “Sorel's application of Bergsonism to social change.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Beyond Bergson, Sorel was usually associated with American pragmatists like James: the most substantial philosophical treatment of Sorel was written by Florence-based Vernon Lee (real name Violet Paget), first in a lengthy article in the Fortnightly Review in 1911 and a year later in a two-volume work.Footnote ⁶⁷ Lee read Sorel as part of the school of Jamesian “will-to-believe” pragmatism, which she unfavorably contrasted with the Peircian “making our ideas clear” pragmatism.Footnote ⁶⁸

Despite this slight diversification in reception, the vast majority of treatments of Sorel remained anchored in the syndicalist framework. Testifying to the transfers between these two spheres, we see a certain “tendency to present syndicalism as a revolt against reason, a species of anti-intellectualism.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Expressions of this charge of irrationalism ranged from descriptions of syndicalism as “a method for realizing the Millennium by the actions … of Trade Unions” to more ethnic explanations, like Ramsay Macdonald's definition of the movement as “British realism captured by French idealism.”Footnote ⁷⁰ But seen in its entirety, Sorel's reception remained overwhelmingly that of the ideologue of syndicalism. Interestingly, this also included voices on the left critical of the French influence, such as the guild socialist G. D. H. Cole, who in his 1913 World of Labour declared that while “the actual experience of the French syndicats can help us,” British imitators found it “easier to copy M. Sorel's opinions out of one book into another.”Footnote ⁷¹ It was, as should be clear, the topicality of French agitations which determined the dominant perspective on Sorel. As one commentator remarked, “the ideas of Sorel … lie very near the animating source of the labour unrest not only in this country but all over the Continent of Europe.”Footnote ⁷²

Hulme's European Sorel

In the light of this outline of Sorel's British reception, the originality of Hulme's interpretation emerges forcefully. As we have seen, some of the elements on which Hulme would insist in his preface had been noted by other commentators, and yet nobody, with the exception of Vernon Lee, had attempted such a radical resignification.Footnote ⁷³ This severance of Sorel from syndicalism flew in the face of virtually all previous British reception, above all insofar as it insisted, much like Lee did, on approaching Sorel through precise philosophical perspectives which we shall examine in the next section. It was, at any rate, an originality of which Hulme was lucidly aware. As he wrote in November 1911 to C. K. Ogden,

But how was such originality possible? And, more importantly, why did Hulme seek to read Sorel in this way? In the remainder of the article, we deal with these two crucial questions. In this section, we answer the “how” question by examining a series of British and European milieus, networks, and readings which were indispensable to Hulme in the construction of his Sorelianism. We shall contend that without these, it would not have been possible for him to develop a reading as original as the one he produced.

We have already seen that Hulme was dissatisfied with “accounts of Sorel … which have already appeared in English.”Footnote ⁷⁵ We must not forget, moreover, that the intended date of publication of the translation was 1912, at the peak of Sorel's British reception, and that its postponement was due to the bankruptcy of Swift and Co. It is true that, had things gone according to plan, the introductory note would have been penned by Graham Wallas. Given Sorel's fame, the way in which this fame was linked to syndicalism, and Wallas's profile—a founding member of the Fabian Society, then lecturing at the London School of Economics—it is likely that the intended introduction would have been very different from Hulme's, and would have echoed the frameworks of reception examined above. The delay, therefore, worked to Hulme's advantage, and his preface responded to a change in the British public's interests, concerned more by European war than by labor uprisings.

Despite this, in 1912 Hulme was eager to publish the translation as soon as possible. In an undated letter to Sorel, probably written in April 1912, Hulme asked why Marcel Rivière, Sorel's French publisher, had interrupted communications with Swift and Co., fearing that this might have been because of “arrangements with another publishing house.”Footnote ⁷⁶ He asked Sorel whether, were this to be the case, he could retain his role as translator. He reminded him that he had been the first to show interest in 1910, but that at the time “it was difficult for me to find a publisher, since nobody had heard of it. But now the situation has changed, and the book should be translated as soon as possible.”Footnote ⁷⁷ What had changed was, of course, the relevance of Sorel's work in Britain, given that, as Hulme says, “recently many articles have appeared with references to your book, particularly after the latest strikes.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Hulme, as we see, was aware of Sorel's newfound relevance and, consequently, assured of the originality of his own reading of the syndicalist.

But how was such originality possible? An important locus of discussion not only of Sorel and syndicalism, but of wider philosophical and political issues, was the eclectic socialist publication the New Age, for which Hulme wrote from 1909 until his death. Established in 1894 as a Christian, liberal, and progressive publication by Frederick Atkins, it quickly moved towards socialism, hosting the writings of a young Ramsay Macdonald and calling itself, as early as 1895, “A Journal for Thinkers and Workers.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In 1907, with the financial backing of George Bernard Shaw, it came under the control of A. R. Orage and Holbrook Jackson, formerly members of the Leeds Art Club, a provincial avant-garde grouping with close links to the Independent Labour Party. The Leodensian experience goes some way towards explaining the change in the editorial line of the New Age, which turned to philosophical questions, reflecting the manifold cultural influences accumulated by the two editors in Leeds, mixing Continental inputs such as Nietzsche with autochthonous ones such as William Morris and John Ruskin.Footnote ⁸⁰

This interest in a European philosophy of life scarcely practiced in the nation's great universities was attractive to Hulme, who had been expelled from Cambridge in 1904. A former mathematics student, already in his unpublished notebooks from 1906 and 1907 Hulme had articulated what we may call quasi-Bergsonian dualisms between the fluidity of reality and the artificial fixity of language: “there is a kind of gossamer web, woven between the real things … For purposes of communication [animals] invent a symbolic language.”Footnote ⁸¹ In 1909, when he started writing for the New Age, Hulme was twenty-six years old and had begun launching his literary career. Involvement in the New Age did much to help Hulme establish himself, and in return Hulme proved capable, as we shall see, of giving substance to the paper's philosophical ambitions. What is decisive for our purposes is how this collaboration allowed Hulme to develop further a gaze of Continental scope which, by transcending the boundaries of the British discussion, made it possible for him to read Sorel in a different manner.

Looking at Hulme's first writings for the New Age, the focus on philosophical questions is immediately evident. These articles set out a precise philosophical line, telling the story of the “defeat of the old intellectualist philosophy” at the hands of a “new philosophy,” represented by William James's pluralism, Jules de Gaultier's bovarysme, and, above all, by Henri Bergson's insight that “reality has a fulness [sic] of content that no conceptual description can equal.”Footnote ⁸² In this opposition between the old intellectualism and the newer vitalism, Hulme attempts a critique of some of the main streams of British philosophy from the vantage point of the “general movement of European philosophy.”Footnote ⁸³ The opposition between “intellectualism” and the “new philosophy” is, in other words, also an attempt by Hulme to provincialize British philosophy armed with his knowledge of Continental currents. This element emerges most clearly in Hulme's defenses of Bergson against the accusations of Gallic obscurity coming from British commentators, whose work “is calculated to give an entirely wrong idea of Bergson to anyone who hears of him for the first time” and derives “not from a reading of this philosopher's actual books and essays, but … second-hand.”Footnote ⁸⁴

This exhibition of cultural capital and of in-depth knowledge of Bergson and his French context was not a bluff. By 1911, Hulme ranked amongst the most active advocates in Britain of Bergson's philosophy, both in terms of awareness of the intricacies of Bergson's philosophical project and in terms of its promotion in British philosophical debates. His knowledge of French and his precocious experience abroad explain this European dimension of Hulme's intellectual horizon.Footnote ⁸⁵ In 1910, furthermore, he had contributed a bibliography to the first English translation of the Données. This text is important because, beyond offering a list of all of Bergson's writings, it contains a lengthy section dedicated to commentary on Bergson from across the Continent. Even if the lion's share of the works was francophone, it is worth underlining that important sections were dedicated to English, German, and Italian readings.Footnote ⁸⁶ What this document shows, in other words, is the grasp of European Bergsonism that Hulme possessed as early as 1909–10, a vantage point from which he could speak authoritatively on the topic. In 1912, having met Bergson personally and having even secured a letter of reference from him, he produced the first English-language translation of the Introduction à la métaphysique.Footnote ⁸⁷

As Hulme himself revealed, “I came across him [Sorel] through Bergson.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The point we are making is that Hulme's travels and personal acquaintances with French intellectuals allowed him to have a view of Sorel informed by greater knowledge of the French context. To give an important example of this, at a time when in Britain Sorel's association with syndicalism was virtually unquestioned, Hulme was aware of his move to the right, mentioning in a letter to Ogden from November 1911, “an article on Joan of Arc” published in Action française.Footnote ⁸⁹ A few months earlier, in an unsigned review of Sir Arthur Clay's Syndicalism and Labour appearing in the New Age, it was claimed that Sorel “has lately abandoned his belief in the theory [of syndicalism].”Footnote ⁹⁰ Where had this opinion come from? From Hulme, as he admits in the same letter to Ogden:

Hulme, as we can see, did not approach Sorel through the syndicalist lenses dominant in other British accounts, but through the prism of Bergsonian philosophy in its European context. This element is of great importance, for it implies access to aspects of Sorel's work which would have remained obscure if seen exclusively through a syndicalist framework. It is significant that Hulme should write to Ogden, “if you read Italian there is a brilliant little book on him I have of Prezzolini,” adding that he possessed a “very interesting little book on metaphysics he [Sorel] wrote in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine.”Footnote ⁹² Prezzolini's work, despite its title, very much explores the philosophical connection between Bergson and Sorel. The “Préoccupations métaphysiques des physiciens modernes,” on the other hand, is a work which pleads for the uselessness of a deterministic cosmology to the practice of contemporary physics.

Determinism, flux, absolute values

This more philosophical perspective on Sorel is important because it allows us to answer the question of why Hulme chose to read Sorel as he did. What is the connection between an opposition to determinism in physics, an interest in Bergsonian philosophy, and the reading of Sorel as an anti-relativist moral reformer? An important clue to answering this question comes from a passage first published in the New Age in 1915, after Hulme had returned from his first posting on the western front with the Honourable Artillery Company: “Let us assume that reality is divided into three regions separated from one another by absolute divisions, by real discontinuities. (1) The inorganic world, of mathematical and physical science, (2) the organic world, dealt with by biology, psychology and history, and (3) the world of ethical and religious values.”Footnote ⁹³ Though presented as a general division of realms of experience and knowledge, this tripartite scheme constitutes, as we shall show, an implied autobiography. It traces, in other words, Hulme's view of his own intellectual development, beginning with his early enchantment with the image of a fully deterministic universe. Having studied mathematics at Cambridge, it is not, perhaps, surprising that he should have been so inclined in his youth. As he would later reminisce, “at a certain stage of one's mental evolution the delight in finding that one can completely explain the world as one might a puzzle is so exciting that it quite puts in the shade the disadvantages of the conception from other points of view. It is not a nightmare to us—far from it. We delight in it.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Yet this deterministic vision will, for Hulme, become a nightmare. The role of Bergson and of the “new philosophy” will consist in the liberation from such a nightmare. It is a testimony of Hulme's self-awareness that he should insist that Bergsonian liberation presupposes a deterministic past: “You must have been sophisticated and have sinned before you can experience the relief of repentance. You must have been a Hegelian before you can get enthusiastic about the general anti-intellectualist movement in philosophy throughout Europe.”Footnote ⁹⁵

What complicates the picture, and makes it more interesting, however, is a second movement: a movement away from Bergsonism and philosophies of becoming and towards some form of objectivity.Footnote ⁹⁶ It is crucial to underline that this objectivity could not be framed in terms of nineteenth-century scientific determinism: “I have a horror of change and a desire for a fixed and solid system of belief. Unfortunately, materialism—the only belief in the region of philosophy which seems to have any kind of fixity—is one that is repugnant to me.”Footnote ⁹⁷ It is within this second movement that the reading of Sorel as a preacher of “absolute ethics” must be placed. It is a yearning for an objectivity which concerns the political and ethical sphere of human agency which begins to preoccupy Hulme from late 1911—a yearning which cannot be satisfied by Bergsonism.

This move away from Bergsonism, initially, seems to be nothing more than a snobbish displeasure at Bergson's growing popularity. In a 1911 article defending Bergson against his British critics, Hulme devoted some paragraphs to a reflection on the damages of the “flood reputation” that Bergson had accumulated: “articles appear in newspapers about him, the propagandists of the different sects utilize him for their own purposes … and, finally, chatter makes his name stink in the nostrils of everyone who cares seriously for philosophy.”Footnote ⁹⁸ As this dynamic accelerated, Hulme's doubts grew. Anxieties over appropriation by “propagandists of the different sects” increased, and we begin to notice a distinctly political dimension to Hulme's misgivings. The ease with which Bergsonism entered the language of the progressive left irritated him. While still nominally defending the position that “Bergson has in reality no connection with politics,” it is significant that he should not object to Sorel's syndicalist politicization of Bergson but would react indignantly at the suggestion that in Bergson it is possible to find a “complete theory of Democracy.”Footnote ⁹⁹ It is, in fact, to Sorel that he refers to combat this democratic reading.

In April 1911, as we have seen, Hulme had traveled to Bologna, stopping in France on the way. As well as meeting Jules de Gaultier, his French sojourn had involved an encounter with Pierre Lasserre, a key theorist of the Action française, who in 1910 had written in the newspaper of the movement a long anti-Bergsonian polemic.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ It is to this meeting that we must look to explain the movement which will lead Hulme to the view of Sorel as a theorist of absolute ethical values. The conversation is recounted by Hulme some months later, in an article in which quotation marks are used to express Lasserre's positions.Footnote ¹⁰¹ We see the articulation of a determinist position whose principal strength lies in its political application. The anti-Bergsonian objectivity offered by Lasserre is based on “the existence of laws which express what we know of the necessary and permanent characteristics of any social and political order.”Footnote ¹⁰² Those who deny that “there are such things as necessary laws governing societies” are the “sincere partisans of the French Revolution,” democrats and progressives.Footnote ¹⁰³

It is easy to recognize here the categories of “classicism” and “romanticism” which Hulme will deploy in his introduction to the Reflections. At this stage of our argument, it is possible to draw the philosophical underpinnings of these political categories more clearly. In other words, beyond its belief in progress and democracy, “romanticism” implied for Hulme a commitment to an open cosmology of the Bergsonian and Jamesian kind. Conversely, beyond its negative anthropology of original sin and its requirement for a politics of order, “classicism” presupposed the possibility of full knowledge of fixed elements. It thus constitutes an important signifier expressing Hulme's need for ethico-political objectivity. In 1911 Hulme is still undecided on the issue. Clearly impressed by Lasserre's anti-Bergsonian arguments, he wrote that he was “in agreement with both sides,” something which made him wonder about the existence of “inconsistencies” in his thinking.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The solution envisaged at this stage is interesting:

What must be underlined here is that, even in this attempt at compromise, Bergsonism and the indeterminateness so central to this philosophical position are indicated as insufficient “for the race,” i.e. for the collective realm of politics. This is of paramount importance, because it shows what Hulme began to see as the fundamental limit of philosophies of openness and relativism: their inability to deal satisfactorily with the collective, ethical and political, aspects of existence. If we examine Hulme's writings after 1911, we see not only the appearance of more explicitly political texts, but also the increasing centrality of the classical/romantic dichotomy in these works. His most ideologically ambitious work consisted in a series of five articles entitled “A Tory Philosophy,” appearing in April and May 1912 for The Commentator, a short-lived conservative publication heavily invested in the fight against the reform of the House of Lords proposed in 1910.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

At the heart of Hulme's argument, we find, unsurprisingly, the opposition between classicism and romanticism. Romanticism remains a commitment to cosmological indeterminateness implying openness and the constant possibility of novelty: it is an attitude which “betrays itself in the epithet NEW.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ It is impossible not to notice that the terms in which the romantic attitude is here criticized are the same ones through which he had earlier praised the “new philosophy.” Whereas at the time Hulme remarked on the “exhilaration that comes with the sudden change from a cramped and contracted to a free and expanded state” when reading Bergson, now this temperament seeking release from the bonds of structure is relegated to “a certain disordered state of mental health.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Classicism, conversely, stands for the reconquest of some objectivity concerning humanity, for the position that man is “by nature constant.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This constancy is expressed in terms of an eternal imperfection of mankind, the basis on which to construct a politics of order: “the kind of discipline which will get the best out of him … remains much the same in every generation.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

It should be clear to the reader that the categories and perspectives employed in these political writings will be the same ones used to make sense of Sorel in 1914. There will be slight alterations in the targets of Hulme's scorn, dictated by the onset of the war, as the appearance of the expression “pacifist democracy” signals.Footnote ¹¹¹ Another alteration consists in the increasing presence of references to Proudhon. The Proudhonian influence on Hulme has been discussed by scholars.Footnote ¹¹² What can be said here is that this interest in the anarchist thinker postdates Hulme's discovery of Sorel.Footnote ¹¹³ Moreover, evidence suggests that Hulme's Proudhon is mediated by national syndicalists in France: the Proudhonian citation on war which opens Hulme's preface of the Reflections on Violence had appeared in 1912 in an article by Georges Valois in the Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In Proudhon, Hulme celebrates a martial spirit that will feed his elaborations on the desirability of “a different conception of democracy.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ But the deeper dynamic is identical. What Hulme is looking for in Sorel, and to a lesser extent in Proudhon, is the possibility of articulating ethical and political absolutes, an operation which he couldn't perform through Bergson's philosophy of openness. It is important at this point to assess both the shifts in meaning operated by Hulme in presenting Sorel's work to the English public and the intersections between Hulme's and Sorel's perspectives.

On the first issue, it must be underlined that there is no space in Sorel for a metaphysics of ethics and politics such as the one Hulme is looking for. It is true that Sorel insists on pessimism, on an ethics of heroic commitment, and that he ends the Reflections by proclaiming that “it is to violence that socialism owes those high ethical ideals by means of which it brings salvation to the modern world.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Sorel, however, remains a Marxist who rejects historical teleology, and this condemns him to never be able to theorize anything standing above or beyond the historical flux.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The commitment to socialism is the belief in the historical agency of the proletariat, an agency which does not require, and in fact results from the exclusion of, any theorization of a metaphysical kind, whether essentialist or teleological. It is not coincidental that the Bergsonian language of the Données is employed by Sorel whenever discussing the status of myths: these are plunges into the deep self of a historical subject intent on constructing itself, not ways through which we penetrate into an absolute knowledge of fixed things. Myths are “identical to the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ The voluntarism which characterizes Sorel's political and epistemological reflection, in simpler words, requires a cosmology of openness and creativity, which in turn prevents him from a substantial theorization of the absolutes that Hulme seeks.

On the second issue, it must be stressed that this theorization of absolutes is also incomplete in Hulme. What we mean to say is that, despite the impression that Lasserre's arguments made on him, he never developed a conceptual apparatus allowing him to properly theorize absolutes of a moral or political kind. It is true that he does move in this direction. In 1915, he is reading Pascal as a “remedy for unbelief.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ The commentary he offers on Pascalian techniques of faith are illustrative of the distance traveled from Bergsonian openness to some type of fixed metaphysics:

In 1916, we find him extremely interested in the works of Husserl, Russell, and G. E. Moore. What these thinkers, significantly labeled by Hulme “neo-Realists,” offer him is the possibility of ethical objectivity. What Moore promises, in particular, is that “ethics can be exhibited as an objective science, and is also purified from anthropomorphism.”Footnote ¹²¹

And yet, despite this, Hulme never made the jump to a theoretically justified metaphysical outlook. What is present in Hulme is the desire for these absolutes, but not the philosophy that would be required for their formulation. At the time of writing the preface to Sorel's Reflections, and for the whole of Hulme's life, the philosophical resources to construct a metaphysics of absolutes will remain absent. What is there is the desire for it, the need for it, the “craving for belief” of which Eliot had spoken. To be sure, the distance from Sorel, who dedicated his last major work to a philosophical defense of pragmatism, remains large. In this last book, the French thinker affirmed that “the pragmatist remarks that artificial nature is important to our life at least as much as natural nature” and explicitly condemned metaphysical cravings of any kind, wondering “how man can have such senseless ambitions as to believe that artificial nature is not enough to occupy his genius.”Footnote ¹²² The escape from human subjectivity and the relativism implied in it, in other words, is a burning concern for Hulme, much less so for Sorel. At the same time, this is exactly the reason for Hulme's fascination with Sorel. To Hulme, the Frenchman appeared as a thinker who offered an ethics of intense commitment in mythical form. To someone engaged in a movement from Bergsonian relativism to a philosophy of objectivity and absolutes, this represented a convenient stepping stone.