Glorious Instants, Perpetual Recurrences: Georges Sorel, Vilfredo Pareto, and the Dismissal of Progress as a Political Category

In the generation preceding the First World War, European countries were confronted with momentous political and social transformations, as mass parties and ever-broadening suffrage laws ushered in a recognizably new paradigm for political contestation and the administration of power. The crisis of classical 19th-century liberalism, as both a concrete form of government and a normative account of politics, provoked a new wave of theorizing to grapple with the “social question” and the rise of the masses. In searching for alternative conceptualizations, participants in intellectual and political debate were obliged to confront the key liberal notion of progress, especially with regard to the claim that the revolutions of the 19th century had brought about a qualitatively different historical phase, a unique age of modernity. The present contribution seeks to explore such themes in the writings of Georges Sorel and Vilfredo Pareto, two key voices in the discussion over the emerging social order in the age of the masses. Sorel and Pareto were separated by political allegiances, methodological commitments, and stylistic preferences, and in many ways occupy opposite extremes in the theoretic continuum of the conceptualization of politics: on the one side, an aestheticized and almost mystical appeal to the cleansing virtues of the instant of mobilization, understood as the essence of politics, on the other, a detached, somewhat ironic ‘view from nowhere’ of politics as the perennial restaging of the spectacle by which the few charm or dupe the many into obedience. Beyond the differences, there is nonetheless an underlying solidarity between the two positions, to be found in the downgrading of the importance of historical change in general, and of the advent of modern society in particular. Such an attitude is explored with relation to parallel debates on decadence and on the role of the intellectual in political life, and contrasted with the centrality of historical change in the Marxist tradition and for such coeval social thinkers as Max Weber. The implications of these reflections on the European crisis of the fin-de-siècle for current ideological appeals in favor of an elision of the 20th century from political memory and culture, and a return to the socio-political conditions of the first (Victorian) globalization, will be discussed in closing.