A Sceptical Liberal? The Australian Georges Sorel

As in Europe, Britain, and America, the Australian Georges Sorel was a figure resignified and invented by local readers. 1 His reception depended on the utility of his thought for local cultural and political conflicts. Before the First World War, Sorel, as in Britain, was evoked by conservatives and labour moderates as an icon of syndicalism (even if actual syndicalists seemed indifferent) and by some intellectuals as junior partner to Nietzsche and Bergson. This interest faded along with Australian syndicalism. In the thirties, interest in Sorel was revived by the Scottish-born John Anderson, professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney from 1927 to 1958. His understanding of Sorel as a theorist of the “producers’ ethics” had a powerful influence on a generation of his students. The “Andersonians”, of which the most notable was the cold war liberal Peter Coleman, played a major role in Australian intellectual life. They experienced Australian society as one of stasis, where conservative values of consumption and security, ironically championed by the political left, dominated “radical” ideas of enterprise and production. The dilemma that the Andersonians faced was how to make allegiance to the producers’ ethics into a viable political project, rather than an individualist and romantic expression of disdain for the affluent normality of 20th-century Australia.