In reading further on Georges Sorel I had to absolve him of the cynicism I accused him of earlier. He comes across as a surprisingly warm and insightful man as one reads his letters and writings. He lived long enough to see the rise of the man Mussolini to power. And he admitted in private letters that Mussolini had absorbed his ideas. But one doesn't see him as pleased by the ideas. It appears he'd been a supporter of democratic and free institutions and found Mussolini's anti-democratic and totalitarian bent something horrible to him.1
In his conversations with Jean Variot (this is from the Western Political Quarterly: vol 3, No 1, page 24)
"Did Lenin have to be a reader of Sorel in order to become Lenin?"
"Frankly, I don't believe it."
As to Mussolini he is reported to have said:
"...my works have been more read in Italy than in France... It is possible, it is even probable that Binito Mussolini has read me. But attention! Mussolini is a man no less extraordinary than Lenin. He, too, is a political genius, of a greater reach than all the statesmen of the day, with the only exception of Lenin.... He is not a Socialist a la sauce bourgeoise; he has never believed in parliamentary socialism; he has an amazing insight into the nature of the Italian masses, and he has invented something not to be found in my books: the union of the national and the social -- something I have studied..."
But Sorel was aghast at Mussolini and his brutal followers. He was friends with many of the victims of Mussolini's violent rise to power. Mussolini had acted on the premises of his logical dissection of man's predilections towards myth and carried their conclusions into reality; where Sorel had noted the reality with his fine logic. Sorel was a "moralist" and a "syndicalist and disinterested servent of the proletariat," but also a historian. The article says "as a partisan of the defeated working class, he could not help being resentful and dejected; still the old engineer and student of the Industrial revolution was able to do Mussolini justice." But as a Historian he couldn't help but acknowledge reality.
Sometimes we don't get to chose our disciples.