Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
It may seem unusual to preface an essay with a justification not for the essay itself but for the founding of a magazine. The reason I am looking forward to this project, and consider this moment of founding exactly right, has to do with a significant blind spot of liberalism that seems largely unaddressed by friends and enemies alike.
In the much-cited blanket attacks of Samuel Moyn and Patrick Deneen on liberalism, alongside the substantive critique (from a lack of utopia to inherent symptoms of decay), the main reproach to be heard was a one-sided liberal canonisation. What may once have been a legitimate affront against the liberals of the early Cold War is today at best a euphemism. The history of ideas, once indeed a strength of the liberal intelligentsia, has turned into a lack of ideas, so that self-assurance and further development have both fallen into a liberal gap that needs to be filled.
Looking at the anti-canon, Deneen and Moyn do have a point, things look somewhat better; from Rousseau to Schmitt and Evola to Huntington, liberals have always marked enemies and worked out the destructive power of the „Enemies of Human Liberty” (Berlin) for the liberal society. What seems often to be missing, though, is a productive engagement with the liberal anti-canon. Sure, a left-wing reading of Schmitt seems more obvious than driving into a liberal dead-end with Heidegger. But that liberalism could not also learn something from the cleverest, most controversial, or most illiberal minds is, in its turn, an assumption dripping with arrogance.
Georges Sorel was such a mind. Born in 1847 in Cherbourg, of modest origins, he committed himself after his studies to the French civil service and remained until his 45th year a simple official. Almost as in a Flaubert novel, only the inheritance from his mother enabled him to quit his profession and move from the provinces to the capital, to become an intellectual there.
In Paris, Sorel first converted from traditionalism to orthodox Marxism, and then at the start of the 20th century switched his ideologies yearly between Dreyfusianism, syndicalism, and royalism. At the end of his life it was Mussolini and Lenin who fascinated the writer. For the liberal anti-canon, this much is already clear: scarcely any better representative could be found.
It should not surprise that Isaiah Berlin of all people, in one of his less-noticed essays, discovered in Georges Sorel the archetype of counter-culture. „Ein halbes Jahrhundert später”, Berlin wrote, the spirit of Sorel was „keineswegs erloschen”, and added that „die Welt über und gegen die er anschrieb, womöglich die unsere sei”. At that time Isaiah Berlin could not yet suspect that „this world” would, fifty years later, still be criticised from exactly the same perspective.
What characterises „this world” can only be guessed ex negativo in Sorel. For what Enlightenment and industrialisation had above all produced according to Sorel was a disfigured human being, degraded by the dictate of rationalism from subject to object of himself. Whether worn down by factory work or eaten up by civil service life, of the actual purpose of the human being little had remained. In its purest form, man appeared to Sorel finally as a creator, an inexhaustible spirit who, feeding on his creative destruction, would submit to no power. Influenced by Nietzsche and Marx and following the Romantic pathos against the Enlightenment, Sorel’s philosophy of life reflected a deep loathing of the workings of modern society.
Sorel had, like a good character of Balzac’s, moved to the big city in order to despise everything that happened there even more. In particular the hedonism of the bourgeoisie, who as a small cog in modern society sacrificed their freedom for a little consumption. But also the modern masses streaming into the cities and losing their individuality in the shop windows. And the sciences, which pretended to people that their lives took place in a rational cage with no escape. The politicians and intellectuals who urged people to replace daily heroic self-assertion with a balanced, more skeptical, and more peaceful life. Decadence, individualism, and materialism, everywhere Sorel could see signs of the decay of society.
The connection to the present is easily drawn. The liberal destruction of the creative spirit is today the argument par excellence with which the „reactionary futurists” (Ezra Klein) in the US go to battle against the political establishment. In Germany too a screaming feuilleton-style philosophy of life is forming, decrying the cornered individual in mass society. In its core, however, it turns against the liberal society, against the „große Langeweile” at the end of history, against the entrenchment of a technocratic politics and the Sisyphus of the last man.
Decadent capital elites, materialist masses — all of these are only side effects of an affirmation of life by the simple (mostly male) human being that no longer exists. Not only Musk, but Georges Sorel too referred to the Roman Empire, to diagnose in individualisation and bureaucratism the decline of the once so heroic empire. And just as J. D. Vance declared the professors to be the enemy, Sorel asked whether one could imagine anything worse than a „Regierung von Professoren”.
One could almost think that 100 years before the End of History, the French intellectual already foresaw the danger of such a state. Isaiah Berlin had pointed out in his study that the dilemma of creative man in Sorel could be characterised as one between Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla was the condition of materialism, decadence, an expanding bureaucracy and technocratic politics, and the end of human creative power. In short, the last man from Fukuyama’s End of History. Charybdis, in turn, was the despotism of metaphysical philosophies of history, the bloodthirsty indifference of those who, for the hope of a better future, wanted to destroy the present, no matter what the cost. A creative man would have to give up Jacobinism or false Hegelian influence, as Sorel noted in regard to Marx, to stress „die Illusion des Fortschritts” and to guarantee everyday self-assertion.
With good reason, Michael Freund speaks of a „Revolutionärer Konservatismus” in Sorel, which showed in his fanatical support of Mussolini or in Carl Schmitt’s reception of him. Sorel had recognised a way out of the dilemma between Scylla and Charybdis in morality, in the creation of a new human being who resisted modern society. Like Zarathustra he preached to people to know themselves and to take up the fight against the chains of modern everyday life. The early Greeks and Romans, who had not yet entirely shed their barbarian roots, fascinated him. As did those parts of the workers’ movement that had not yet been perverted by modern society. Not compromise but conflict strengthened the human being. Not in parliamentarism but in struggle could the human being reinvent himself and grow beyond himself.
It is such a revolutionary, life-philosophical conservatism that is at present the greatest danger to liberal democracy. „Fight, Fight, Fight” is what Donald Trump says, while Elon Musk fires off ketamine-driven tweet tirades in the style of Heidegger’s rectoral address. As Sorel had recognised, a successful counter-culture needs strong opponents. The establishment on the West Coast, constitutional courts, the European Union, Jewish billionaires. The everyday struggle is the essential trait of the anti-liberal fight. Isaiah Berlin had pointed out in the 1950s that such a counter-culture could in part be found in the post-colonial resistance of a Frantz Fanon or the communist pop culture of Che Guevara.
Right-wing resistance, in turn, is today many times more successful, because it has left the academic class hated by Sorel behind and seeks larger alliances that, as a loose bond, are held together only by a rigid cult of the leader. Beyond the old enemy images, distant elites, foreign refugees, or unlegitimated judges, revolutionary conservatism plays on a creative element, conjures the end of the last man, and calls in particular on young men to make something of their lives. The liberal Judith Shklar once called the mix of doomsaying and the over-emphasis on a life-philosophy of freedom a „Romantik der Niederlage”, in which late-Romantic symptoms of loss ended in a diffuse mix of cultural criticism and a mood of new beginnings. A posture easily absorbed in a reactionary direction.
Georges Sorel is a thought leader of anti-rationalist critique. His fight against a harmonious world, against politics as the „endlose Lösung technischer Probleme” (Fukuyama), and against the end of the „Kampf um Anerkennung” (Hegel), today unites the postliberal backlash. The success of his line of argument also shows, however, how liberalism has been off balance since at least the 1990s.
Liberalism too, after all, is caught in the dilemma between Scylla and Charybdis. To find a balance between the free act of self-creation and the fear of the Jacobin threat, between utopia and the lack of utopia, has always been a fine line. For the protection of freedom, early liberalism entered an alliance with the state. It built sophisticated bureaucracies, protected and expanded parliamentarism, and tried to enable plural coexistence in society through rules as abstract as possible.
For some liberals, the nation state was the shell that prevented anarchy; for others, an emerging world government. Later and to this day, liberalism split on the question how far the cooperation of liberalism with the state should go.
With the end of the Second World War, at least, the liberal programme seemed to have won in the West. The century of liberalism was followed by the century of social democracy, whose synthesis flowed into an often paternalist but socially carried welfare state, which could expand in times of growth. The institutions worked and liberals became their guardians, in the World Bank, in constitutional courts, or in politics. The balance between philosophy of life and institutional anchoring tipped by the 1990s at the latest. Liberalism was no longer a philosophy of life; it was a philosophy of the ordered society.
In times when discomfort grows through multiple crises, other forces can now fill this gap. To the discomfort with the felt narrowing of modern society, the over-emphasis on expert knowledge and abstract narratives of trade balances and service sectors, liberalism has nothing to set against. The feuilletonistic yelling about the supposed end of freedom, the return of little barbarians via social media, the missing trust in governments and scientists, the Sorelian philosophy of life lives. To be both state-supporting and life-philosophical at once, this is a challenge liberalism can no longer escape in this century. Only with real opponents, says Sorel, can a life-affirming movement gain real strength. In the search for a new philosophy of life, this insight would be a good beginning.
