In place of objective science and theories about society, Sorel proposes that great myths could be used to change reality. Indeed, by believing in heroic myths about themselves and about the new world to come, the masses could overthrow existing society. Parliamentary democracy had failed, since it merely provided the means for the “mediocre” new middle classes to rule over the rest of society—including those socialists now committed to parliamentary politics. Rationality and order had been substituted for freedom and action. Orthodox Marxism, too, contained the seeds of middle-class rule, in that it attempted to offer a “scientific” understanding of society in which economics determines history.

  To break the hold of bourgeois rationality, a myth has to be both believed and put into action. Sorel sees violence as the means through which myths can become real. He details examples of such myths and movements—from the Christian militants of the early Church, through the French Revolution, to the revolutionary syndicalists, or trade unionists, of his own day. Syndicalism was the most militant wing of the trade union movement, rejecting political maneuvering as a corruption of workers’ interests. The general strike—a mass stoppage of all work—was the pinnacle of syndicalist strategy, and Sorel sees it as the modern myth that will found a new society. “Heroic violence” is to be welcomed as the ethical and necessary route to establishing the new world.

  Sorel’s work is ambiguous. He rejects political classifications, and his thought does not sit easily on either the political left or right, though it has been used by both.

The miners’ strikes in the UK during the 1980s were an example of mass protests that came to be imbued with a heroic power, much in the vein of Sorel’s radical thinking.