Violence and Resistance to the State: Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence Free

This paper explains the meaning and significance of violence in Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1908) through an examination of three distinctions that structure the book. First between the proletarian strike and the merely political strike; second between myth and utopia; third between violence and force. The paper looks to Sorel’s earlier and later writings, and to the strike actions unfolding around him, to argue that violence was a relatively novel topic for Sorel, and in the Reflections it is connected to an understanding of the State that comes to define it.