The Misdeeds of the Intellectuals Paperback – December 18, 2025

Edouard Berth is, in Sorelian study, often called the Friedrich Engels to Georges Sorel’s Karl Marx. I recall John L. Stanley using that exact phrase in his From Sorel (1987). The point I am trying to arrive at with this is that Edouard Berth, bar none, is the best representative of the intellectual syndicalist movement Georges Sorel was fostering at the beginning of 20th century; Edouard Berth is seconded only by Georges Valois, but Berth is certainly first.To truly understand this work, one must place it in its historical context. The capitulation of the French CGT, or General Confederation of Labour, to the state and democracy, and the abandonment of its revolutionary prior attitude, left many syndicalists disenchanted with this new movement in socialism. To many French syndicalists, because of this Jacobin democracy, which they thought of as mud that weakened the class struggle by seeking to bring harmony to the classes, the situation made it seem desirable to enter into an alliance with the growing Action Francaise movement, or French anti-Jacobin royalism. The brief alliance between syndicalists and royalists was most exemplified by the Cercle Proudhon, in which federalists and anti-democrats, be they republicans, royalists, or syndicalists, wrote publications together in an endeavour to find common ground for a new movement that could rejuvenate decadent French society. This book, above all, serves not just as Edouard Berth’s apology and justification for Cercle Proudhon but as an elucidation of Sorelian and Proudhonian principles that are still capable of guiding us today. Read more