Sorel's political allegiances were constantly shifting, influencing a variety of people across the political spectrum from Benito Mussolini to Benedetto Croce to Georg Lukács, and both sympathizers and critics of Sorel considered his political thought to be a collection of separate ideas with no coherence and no common thread linking them. In this, Sorelianism is considered to be a precursor to fascism, as fascist thought also drew from disparate sources and did not form a single coherent ideological system. Sorel described himself as "a self-taught man exhibiting to other people the notebooks which have served for my own instruction", and stated that his goal was to be original in all of his writings and that his apparent lack of coherence was due to an unwillingness to write down anything that had already been said elsewhere by someone else. The academic intellectual establishment did not take him seriously, but Mussolini applauded Sorel by declaring: "What I am, I owe to Sorel".