2023-06-09 12:09:24
Alain Touraine is no more. A great figure on the French and international intellectual scene, the sociologist died in Paris this Friday at 3:30 a.m., at the age of 97, his daughter, former minister Marisol Touraine, told AFP.
Intellectual on the left, appreciated on the right, Alain Touraine has written an abundant body of work which has described the dynamics of social change during the Trente Glorieuses and after. The sociologist analyzed post-industrial social movements, remaining attentive to minority groups. Passionate about history and economics, this academic had the constant concern to put his theories into action, not hesitating to get involved in the political field.
His name will remain attached to a field of study, namely the “new social movements” such as students, feminists, ecologists or regionalists, born in the 1970s, and to a working method, sociological interventionism. “We must leave the reassuring calm of utopias and prophecies, even if catastrophic, to descend into the movement, disconcerting but real, of social relations”, he explained.
The study of Renault workers
Widower of the Chilean researcher Adriana Arenas Pizzaro who died in 1990, he was the father of two children, Marisol, a former socialist minister, and Philippe, a professor of medicine. Born in Hermanville-sur-Mer near Caen on August 3, 1925, this son of a doctor joined Normale Sup and obtained an aggregation in history. Researcher at the CNRS from 1950 to 1958, he created in 1956 the Center for Research in the Sociology of Work at the University of Chile. He began his career with a study of Chilean coal miners and throughout his life had close ties with Latin America.
It was in 1955 that he published his thesis (supervised by Georges Friedmann), “The Evolution of Worker Labor in the Renault Factories”, which was very noticed. Two years later, he founded the Laboratory of Industrial Sociology, which in 1970 became the Center for the Study of Social Movements. In 1960, he was appointed director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Doctor of Letters in 1965, he taught from 1966 to 1969 at the University of Nanterre.
A political commitment
In May 1968, he was one of those who demanded the abolition of examinations for social science students. In 1981, he founded the Center for Sociological Analysis and Intervention, which he handed over to Michel Wieviorka in 1993. of the CFDT and of the “second left” and then worked to refound the socialist ideology.
He was part of the Commission for the Reform of Universities and the Commission for Reflection on Nationality (1987). In the European elections of 1994, he appeared, among many intellectuals and political personalities, on the list “Europe begins in Sarajevo”, led by Professor Léon Schwartzenberg.
In 1989, he signed, with Gilles Perrault and Harlem Désir, a manifesto for secularism, published in the weekly “Politis”. In 1996, scandalized by the “morally and politically unacceptable” treatment of the question of undocumented immigrants at the Saint-Bernard church, he slammed the door of the High Council for Integration, of which he had been a member for two years.
Support for the four-day week
Attentive to the demands of minority groups, he studies both the French strikes at the end of 1995 and Zapatism in Mexico, supports the establishment of parity between men and women in public life and even the four-day week.
We owe him essays such as “Working Consciousness”, “Utopian Communism”, “Critique of Modernity”, “Post-Industrial Society”, “Can We Live Together? » or « How to get out of liberalism? which, in 1999, noted the end of the French welfare state. He co-signed with Ségolène Royal “If the left wants ideas” (2008).
Winner of the prestigious Prince of Asturias Prize in 2010, he was also very well known in countries such as Poland. In 2012, he received an important distinction for his work on the Solidarity movement (Solidarnosc), the first independent union in the Soviet bloc, in the 1980s.
Source AFP
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