philomath \FIL-uh-math\, noun:
A lover of learning; a scholar.

422
One of my favourite things, when wearing my philomath hat, is reading French and Greek political philosophy. Sorel is one of my favourites
Sorel, G. (1912), Reflections on violence, Trans. T. E. Hulme, London: George Allen and Unwin
The Proletarian Strike
"The myth must be judged as a means of acting on the present; any attempt to discuss how far it can be taken literally as future history is devoid of sense. It is the myth in its entirety which is alone important: its parts are only of interest in so far as they bring out the main idea. No useful purpose is served, therefore, in arguing about the incidents which may occur in the course of a social war, and about the decisive conflicts which may give victory to the proletariat; even supposing the revolutionaries to have been wholly and entirely deluded in setting up the imaginary picture of the general strike, this picture may yet have been, in the course of the preparation for the revolution, a great element of strength, if it has embraced all the aspirations of socialism, and if has given to the whole body of revolutionary thought a precision and a rigidity which no other method of thought could have given. To estimate, then, the significance of the idea of the general strike, all the methods of discussion which are current among politicians, sociologists, or people with pretentions to political science, must be abandoned. Everything which its opponents endeavour to establish may be conceded to them, without reducing in any way the value of the theory which they think they have refuted. The question whether the general strike is a partial reality, or only the product of popular imagination, is of little importance. All that it is necessary to know is, whether the general strike contains everything that the socialist doctrine expects of the revolutionary proletariat... The socialist politicians struggle against the conception of the general strike, because they recognise, in the course of their propagandist rounds, that this conception is so admirably adapted to the working class mind that there is a possibilty of it dominating the latter in the most absolute manner, thus leaving no place for the desires which the parliamentarians are able to satisfy. They perceive that this idea is so effective as a motive force that once it has entered the minds of the people they can no longer be controlled by their leaders, and that thus the power of the deputies would be reduced to nothing. In short, they feel in a vague way that the whole socialist movement might easily be absorbed by the general strike, which would render useless all those compromises between political groups in view of which the parliamentary regime has been built up." (pp.135-9)

Last year the descendents of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle beat the descendents of Voltaire, Proudhoun and Sorel