ABSTRACT
Our conventional wisdom about 'Sorel and Weber' normally consists, I suspect, in presenting them as two thinkers with altogether different social, professional and intellectual backgrounds who, although largely contemporary, wrote in ignorance of one another but were both outstanding figures in that general revolt against positivism 1 so typical of Belle Epoque social theory. Sorel and Weber were, of course, worlds apart in their main concerns and most of their approaches to social and political phenomena; yet the quasiNietzschean sociology of Weber and the Bergsonian radicalism of the elder man do evince in many regards a certain family resemblance. Then there is a modicum of biographical connection par personne interposee in the Michels bridge between them, Robert Michels being the man who theorized on the iron cage of bureaucracy within the very object of Sorel's sharpest strictures: the socialist political party.
