Many writers have expounded the meaning of Sorel's enormous
work, ¹ while that work itself remained unknown at least in this country.
There seems to be a tacit agreement that the bulk of the Sorelian
oeuvre is unreadable, that it is merely quotable. But even the great-
est amount of quotations will hardly enable us to reconstruct the orig-
inal. That is partly Sorel's own fault, for none of his books represent
a unified whole. He makes a book merely the container for anything
that happened to interest him at the time he wrote, which means prac-
tically everything. As a result, the commentators, attempting to create
at least some semblance of order where there was none, preferred the
functional approach: in studying Sorel, they would pursue one of Sorel's
interests at a time, tracing it through his many books, essays, book
reviews, letters and interviews. Not only were these productions dis-
jointed at their inception, but, as already has been noted, ² the published
editions of Sorel's main works had the tendency to become ever grow-
ing ragbags into which sometimes an author himself, sometimes his
editors would stuff earlier or subsequently written pieces under the
heading of new prefaces or supplements -- additions which more often
than not reflect an opinion very different from that which Sorel held
when he wrote the original book.

The result is violently disconcerting to the uniniated reader. Pe-
rusing, for instance, the third edition of "La Ruine du monde antique",
published in 1933, he will ascertain without any trouble from Sorel's
introduction that the work had first appeared in 1902, but he will not
easily discover the fact that the first chapter as it now stands, was
written ten years later, ³ -- that is, at the time when Sorel had repudi-
ated most of his earlier allegiance to Marxian historical materialism.

The functional approach taken by most commentators seems,
therefore, largely justified. The result of their labors is a much
clearer, neater kind of Sorel, eminently quotable and most impressive,
if still somewhat elusive. But it is no longer Sorel, the actual writer.
That is why he disappoints so many who, made curious by the choice
selections of the Sorelian exegesis, are making bold to penetrate the

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