ABSTRACT
Every student of modern political symbolism must sooner or later confront the work of Georges Sorel (1847–1922). As one of the more engaging minds of his generation, Sorel made a number of original and important observations about the nature of symbolic images and their relationship to political action. These observations are not always easy to uncover, since they are scattered throughout an enormous range of work, some of it dealing with topics as seemingly remote from the subject as the history of Christianity, modern economics, the methodology of the sciences, or the trial of Socrates. 1 Often Sorel’s most interesting ideas are mentioned only in passing, or else developed in a fragmentary and unsatisfactory manner. At other times he disdains to follow step-by-step the logic of his own thought, saying that what he writes is entirely “personal and individual,” and consequently there is no need to be concerned with the transitions between things “because they nearly always come under the heading of commonplaces.” 2
