ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the interpretation of Marxism developed by Georges Sorel, neglected Marxist thinker rightly described by Croce as the most original and important Marxist theorist after Marx himself. It is a common belief, shared both by Marxists and by critics of Marxism, that differences in the interpretation of this statement have important implications for the assessment of Marx's system of ideas. In Sorel's writings, the mythopoeic character of Marxism as the ideology of proletarian class struggle is explicitly acknowledged and its source in definite moral tradition identified. Shorn of the Marxian theory of transition, in which the proletariat is acknowledged to be the class in which mankind's universal interests are embodied, Marcuse's Marxism resembles nothing so much as a Left Hegelian radical humanism. For, whether metaphysical, scientific or mythopoeic in character, the central notions and theses of Marxism have always been supposed by its exponents to be capable not merely of illuminating conduct but of guiding and inspiring it.
