Maurras and Sorel

In Maurras and Sorel, Jacques de Mahieu delivers a penetrating critique of the intellectual foundations of modern liberalism, unmasking the Enlightenment’s legacy as a bourgeois mythology crafted to serve the interests of an ascendant capitalist oligarchy. In the first half of the work, de Mahieu exposes the ideological machinery behind the Encyclopédie, economic liberalism, the cult of abstract rights, and the myth of the general will. The second part turns to a reconstruction: a ‘Counter-Encyclopaedia’ rooted in the thought of Charles Maurras and Georges Sorel. Through their sharply divergent critiques of modernity—Maurras’s royalist empiricism and Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism—de Mahieu sketches the outlines of a political philosophy beyond both bourgeois liberalism and socialist materialism. Combining historical insight with uncontroversial clarity, this book offers a provocative contribution to the search for a ‘third position’—neither capitalist nor Marxist, but rooted in order, hierarchy, and collective strength.